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The Family Secret
By Susan

Sally is a 48-year-old woman with two teenagers and a nine-year-old. She has been married to Jim for twenty years and believes he is addicted to alcohol. It wasn’t always this bad — before the kids came along they would party pretty heavily on the weekends. A group of them got together most weekends (she was working then) and went to parties, bars and weddings. She would describe their relationship as wild and carefree — not unlike many of their contemporaries at the time.

Looking back now she thinks it might have started to change around the time she got pregnant with their first child. She had stopped drinking then but Jim didn’t slow up on his. She thought it unusual that Jim wasn’t as interested in the baby as she was, but he was always so busy with work and he was a good provider. So the baby came along and then the next one not long after, and they decided she would stay home from work until the kids were in school.

She remembers thinking he maybe drank too much on weekends and seemed to need a drink rather than want a drink after work every day. He was working so much was it really a problem if she ended up driving home from every get-together or getting up with the kids on Sundays when it was her turn to sleep in? He was always able to get up for work during the week. Their relationship seemed to be lacking the closeness they once shared but wasn’t that pretty normal for a busy family?

It wasn’t a sudden awakening for Sally but a slow arousal into consciousness: the night Jim arrived home at 3:00 a.m. slumped over the wheel of the car the lights on and the motor still running. The evening when he arrived home in a cab from the staff holiday party where he had really ‘tied one on’. The afternoon her sister had spoken to her at a family barbecue furious that Jim was once again loud, repetitive and generally obnoxious. How could she stand living like this was her sister’s question? The kids rarely brought friends home and if they were home, they were usually fighting or locked up in their rooms.

She had tried speaking to Jim, nicely at first and then not being able to swallow her anger, screaming and threatening to leave him and take the kids if he didn’t stop. She’d even thought of calling the family doctor the time she’d discovered all the empty bottles under the crawl space. Nothing seemed to make a difference; he might slow down for awhile but would be right back at it with a vengeance in a few weeks.

Money was tight and she had gotten pregnant a few years back. That, coupled with all her stress, caused her to lose her nerve about re-entering the job market. Jim was not making great money; many promotions had passed him by — his ability to get to work faithfully, now gone. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness pre-occupied Sally’s thoughts much of her day and night. She had nowhere to go with this ‘family secret’ — the shame was too great! She was trapped and isolated. This was not the family of her hopes and dreams.

This is a typical scenario for many women living with a substance abuse. Not their own, but that of a loved one. At least the person using the substance gets the benefit of being anesthetized for awhile — whereas the family member goes through it cold sober.

Feelings of powerlessness are all-pervasive, but needn’t be — there is help. There are programs (such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse) that can help women help themselves rather than the person who is using alcohol or other substances. With a new sense of herself and a renewed hope for the future Sally and so many women like her can move forward and eventually lead healthy, enriched lives. The lives of their dreams.

Written by Susan Stephenson, a Toronto-based psychotherapist specialized in working with families and addictions.