Alcoholic Chat

More alcoholic chat. This is pure therapy for me. It's about 5 am GMT here (London) and there were more arguments yesterday all of which are due to alcohol. I swear she is drinking smallish amounts, by her standards (say a couple of miniatures), secretly as always, and at the same time she is going to AA and taking Antabuse. In other words totally fooling herself.

I had stopped talking about booze with her because she gets all defensive and difficult, until yesterday when I couldn't contain myself. I had had a glass of wine myself, which fortified me and she was showing clear signs of having had a drink so I (gently) suggested she had had a drink.

Bingo, she went off in a huff after muttering, "I don't know where we're going from here......" Meaning I don't know if we can live together. I'll tell you, it is all but impossible to live with an alcoholic but it is worse living alone.

Anyway, this proves once again that you can't talk alcohol with her. I don't know if all alcoholics are like this. She obviously talks about alcohol at her AA meetings (if she actually goes to them as she says - and I think she does go). But if I can't talk about the most important thing in her life it seems very strange to me. I don't feel that I am accusing her of drinking when she is isn't drinking as I just say, "it seems to me as if you have been drinking..." - quite gentle stuff. I always introduce it with words like, "I know you'll hate me for saying it but.....".

She is massively defensive, argumentative and provocative. And when I say she sounds as if she is drunk, if she isn't actually drunk she has something wrong with her brain. May be that's it....

I just think that a lot of her argumentativeness is due to being a little drunk, which is hard to detect even for someone as experienced as me (so sad). When she isn't slightly drunk she is highly strung and fragile, going into a histrionic huff at the first opportunity.

Photo: arguing penguins copyright and by nouQraz