Alcoholic Shades of Gray

After receiving a comment from a reader, I thought a bit of clarification might be in order. Let me see how I can explain this.

I am a senior woman and I own a black dog. Not all black dogs are owned by senior women. Not all seniors own a dog. Not all women own dogs. Not all seniors are women and not all women are seniors. Does that make sense?

I do not believe that all people who drink alcohol are alcoholics. Not all people who get drunk occasionally are alcoholics. If you have a drink after work or wine with dinner, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are an alcoholic.

I asked Riley to tell me what an alcoholic looks like. After all, who would know better than a self-professed alcoholic? He replied that if you
drink excessively every time you drink, you may be an alcoholic. If your drinking gets you in legal or family trouble, then alcohol is probably creating that trouble. If your main objective every time you drink is to get drunk, you probably have a drinking problem. If it is difficult to coordinate your job, family, and other activities, because you don’t want them to get in the way of your drinking, you are probably an alcoholic. Riley says “I’d rather be dead than sober.” He’s definitely an alcoholic.

So if your spouse is an alcoholic and you live in the same house, does that mean you allow and/or tolerate his drunken behavior? In my opinion, it does not. Saying that a person “allows or tolerates” another person’s drunkenness, is like saying that we (spouses, etc) have control over what the alcoholic does. We do not. Just because we may live in the same house, doesn’t mean we are a party to what the alcoholic does. Just because I am Riley’s caretaker doesn’t mean that I approved or accepted his drunken antics now or in the past.

It’s easy for people to say that someone is co-dependent because they haven’t punished the alcoholic in some way.  I don’t buy into the whole “co-dependent” thing that we hear so often. I’m sure there are some people that the title fits, but not everyone who is involved with an alcoholic is co-dependent. I believe that people who really receive some kind of reward from having a loved one drunk is rare.

Tolerating the behavior is possible. If you are in a situation where you can’t leave your home and separate yourself physically from the alcoholic, toleration is learned just for the pure survival factor. I don’t really like that word – I think a better definition is detachment. A person can cohabitate with an alcoholic but put a wall between the alcoholism and the rest of the household. It’s difficult. It goes against the basic concepts of marriage. But it is possible and has been done by many, many people.

The long and short of all this is that people can’t be put into cute little boxes and labeled by an outside observer from a sideline viewpoint. The world is not black or white – there are definitely shades of gray.

I used wine in cooking Duck ala Orange and in the Spinach/Artichoke casserole. I toasted myself on a dinner well cooked by having a couple glasses of wine. Does that mean I’m an alcoholic? I don’t think so.