COPING WITH UNCERTAINTY

When we live with an active alcoholic, we never know what is going to happen next. our life together becomes totally unpredictable, disrupted, uncertain.

All sorts of awful things can happen: I have heard of :

• someone's husband walking around the neighbourhood with no clothes on
• someone's wife falling down drunk at a dance party
• someone's husband falling into a gutter and staying there, in the rain
• someone's wife falling down on the floor at home and staying there, in front of her grandchildren
• someone's wife falling down in the street while on the way to buy more alcohol
• any number of car crashes while someone was drunk and driving

We cannot predict what can happen - so making any plans for outings or to attend functions is almost doomed to failure. I don't know how many invitations I had to refuse or cancel out at the last minute because my wife was drunk.

What can we do?

What I did was to stop making plans for the two of us to go out. I just did things on my own. Often I would leave my wife asleep on the lounge and I'd go out and have a nice coffee and stroll around for a while. I'd come home and she would not even know I had been away.

I accepted that she would rather drink that go out with me.  Hard, but I had to accept the power of alcohol over her brain.

So I slowly began to build a life for myself, and left her to her own devices - drinking usually.

Until SHE reached out for help, I learned to look after myself and do some things that I enjoyed.

And kept hoping that one day she would want to stop drinking and reach out to AA for help.

Which she finally did, after some eight years.  I had to learn to look after myself for all those years- how I did this is explained in the HELP PAGES opposite.