[husband82]

My wife is an alcoholic. Her addiction has gotten increasingly worse over the last few years and I am genuinely at a loss of what to do.

We have been together 10 years and have two wonderful boys. My wife is an amazing mum and I love her dearly. When lockdown hit, we, rather brilliantly, became even closer in our relationship as we do really love spending time together. However, all the ‘extra time’ made her drinking a little bit problematic. She doesn’t handle alcohol well anyway and this is exasperated but the fact she started taking tablets for anxiety at that time which she shouldn’t even drink on. She spaces out, slurs and becomes really argumentative- eventually leading to her becoming aggressive towards me. It was after this time that she admitted that she had been filling up wine bottles with water to make it look like she hadn’t had much and was generally hiding her drinking.

Years have passed with incidents getting worse and worse. I won’t go into every detail, but in the last two years she has become extremely abusive when confronted about her alcohol/stopped from getting access to more, she has often been sick and uncontrollable and has passed out on the floor in front of the children. Her abuse has been verbal, physical and even had her threatening to kill me. Much of this has happened in front of our children (though I try my best to move the situation away from them) and her mother (who lives with us) has taken a huge amount of abuse too.

Two weeks ago, after she was supposed to be at work, she came home visibly hammered. She couldn’t stand, barely speak and couldn’t focus. She had driven home. When I asked her if she had been drinking, she launched into a tirade of abuse at me (and then her mum) and called her friend to say she wanted to go to her house. She then threw the phone at me (with friend still on the line) and went upstairs, where she cried and then passed out. Her friend came over and I explained everything. It was at this point that I realised that, not only had she not told any of her friends (this being her longest and closest) about these incidents, but she had also been giving a completely different account of all of those occasions to them to save her embarrassment. The theme of these accounts: that I’m a controlling monster who won’t let her go out or see her friends. It was only when both I and her mum told this friend the truth, that she realised what the situation was.

The next day she did the usual thing of apologising and feeling guilty/ashamed etc and I, trying my hardest to not make her feel even worse, tried to talk supportively about how this, once again, proves that she needs help. She admitted that, instead of going to work, she had got a bottle of wine, poured it into a water battle, and gone to our leisure club to drink it all. I asked her if she thought this was normal and she agreed it wasn’t. I said that she needed to get help for our family- and marriage- to survive this.

Here’s the point to my ever so waffley account:

On the night this happened, in an effort to try to find out where she had been ( we were genuinely terrified at this point) I messaged one of her friends from work to ask if she has been with her and another friend- as the three of them would often meet and go out together. She said that they hadn’t no and I explained how she had come home and that we were really worried. HERE’S THE THING. Not only did she not reply to me at all after that, but both her and the other friend then kept calling and messaging my wife’s phone under the guise of ‘arranging their night out that weekend’. This made me feel AWFUL. It’s clear that the same excuses she has told the first friend were at play here, and since then, they have been constantly trying to get her to go out for a drink even though ‘she’s trying to be good.’ (all she’ll tell them) They clearly don’t know the whole story (or any of it tbh) and I’m worried that their misguided counsel and ‘forget him lets have a glass of wine to cheer ourselves up’ attitude will drive the wedge even further between us.

She has said that she will get help, but keeps dragging her heals on booking something because she’s embarrassed- and I completely understand this and want to support her in getting help step by step, but I am now at a point where I wonder if I contact these friends to explain everything, to see if I can’t get them to help support her too? I know she trusts them, I can always say that if they don’t believe me then they are welcome to speak to her mum, and I really want my wife to understand that this is nothing to be ashamed of and that it can happen to anyone.

I’m honestly at a loss and question everything, any advice would be hugely appreciated.

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