The Diary of a Victim of an Alcoholic

One of the great destroyers of alcoholism is that it breeds lying. Lying to oneself and others. Lying about not drinking, about not feeling like a drink, about buying booze, about planning to drink or anything for that matter because once you lie to hide your alcoholism you lie about other things and the alcoholic becomes an inveterate liar. A dark walk in a forest of lies. Trust is the victim and the fallout is the relationship. I have learned to accept Jane's lying about her drinking. It is pointless because I know with absolute certainty when she is lying. It is like understanding a new language. I translate what she says into the truth. I bugs the hell out of me though. Jane is the only person I have allowed to lie to me and still have a relationship with them. It's because I love her. I beg her to stop lying. I beg her to just tell me the way it is, unvarnished. She can't do it because she is also lying to herself. She can't accept her alcoholism. She is deluded ...

Just a quick update for anyone who is following this blog. I am sure no one is but there you are. I'll update anyway. You may well know who I am by now but I don't really care if you do. Jane is okay. She's had the usual binge but they are further apart than in the past. She's pretty healthy. Binging does not damage health as much as permanent drinking as the body has time to recover.  Except...Jane binges bigtime and has accidents. I won't go into details but there is a distinct possibility that she could harm herself badly on one of her alcoholic binges. Or get into trouble with the police. We still see each other almost daily. I'll be meeting her today in about 30 minutes. We'll have a chat, have a coffee and go for a walk by the river. In the summer we walk in the beautiful Richmond Park. These are good for her and me. She likes them. Nature is a great healer . It pours balm on the troubled brain. Walk in nature, among the trees. Listen to t...

Jane wants to die. She has desired this for many years. She continues to drink. Just to remind you, she is a binge drinker. This means that she does not drink continuously like most alcoholics but pauses between binges of about a week. The pause until the next binge maybe a month or maybe less. The binge itself may be longer than a week or less. She drinks need vodka normally. Out of the bottle. She has written a new will quite recently. She has told me that she is preparing for her death. She has not told me how she will end her life. Today I can't reach her. She may be ill or she may be drunk. The third possibility is that she may be dead. She is suffering from associated illnesses such as nerve damage in her left leg due to an attempted suicide. I won't go into details but that is causing problems and I think you will find on the Internet that sometimes an excess of alcohol in the body can stop the pancreas working (and of course it also causes chronic pancreatitis) which ca...

Internet users ask, "why are alcoholics skinny?". I don't believe all alcoholics are skinny but a lot of dyed in the wool alcoholics are probably malnourished resulting in being skinny. 35 year old alcoholic who drank to excess for a long time and who is dying They are malnourished because they don't care about their health or appearance. They may have low self-esteem (many alcoholics do). This results in the person hating themselves which leads to a desire to self-punishment which in turn leads to neglect including failing to eat properly. The neglect can also lead to health problems which can cause a person to be skinny. Alcoholics can be drunk for long periods when they neglect themselves including failing to eat properly. Alcoholics may be broke which makes buying food a non-priority. Alcoholics may have a personality disorder such as bulimia or anorexia. Both lead to being underweight. Jane used to underweight due to borderline anore...

Alcoholism is a habit not a disease. Obviously it is a very deep-seated habit. It is probably a habit which developed over a long period of time. As a consequence it will take a long period of time to unlearn the habit. What would be a crystallising moment which helps to break the habit is the knowledge that one is going to die through alcoholism provided the alcoholic does not wish to die. That's the key. It is down to the mentality of the alcoholic. If the alcoholic is using alcoholism as a way to kill themselves then the fear of dying through alcoholism will not break the habit. It is possible to chip away at a habit, to break it down. If an alcoholic drinks less and less gradually over a period of many months then there will come a time when he/she will find alcohol objectionable. A lot of what we do are habits. If we have sugar in our tea that becomes a habit. If we then stop having sugar in our tea it tastes unpleasant for a while until it tastes fine at which point putting...

Today was sunny. We had a nice day today. Jane came over and we went for a walk down by the river. Then we had a coffee and a cup of tea at a café. Then she went back to her flat and I went to my flat. That was pleasant. We are seeing each other regularly. We are enjoying each other's company.  Don't be fooled by this. It isn't this good ;) We just live day to day. Jane is still, if one is brutally honest, a practising binge alcoholic but the time between binges has dramatically extended over the 20 years that I've known her. I don't wish to be boastful but she has dramatically improved over the time that I have known her. She still denies that she is an alcoholic. She still denies that she has been drinking when I know she has been drinking and therefore she cannot really say that she is a recovering alcoholic. All recovering alcoholics have admitted that they are alcoholics which is the first stage in a true recovery. However, putting that behind me for ...

I don't think a binge alcoholic and perhaps even a binge alcoholic who is just starting on the road to recovery, should take on new responsibilities because they are quite likely to fail and upset people. They are more likely to hurt more people. Binge alcoholics are unsuited to taking on responsibilities. They are too unreliable. That is my experience in any case. Some constant alcoholics can manage and live relatively normal lives but they are very different to binge alcoholics. Jane is a binge alcoholic and she has informally adopted a cat. The cat is a stray cat who has made her home with Jane. This is partly because Jane has been unemployed for a while and therefore is at home a lot of the time and the cat probably comes from a home where she is not particularly wanted or looked after properly. But, when Jane wants to have a drink, everything flies out of the window. Nothing is in her brain except the desire to have a drink. Not even the health consequences of that drink wi...