Rose, part two
(Click here to read part one.)
Confused about the sources of her anxiety, and incapable of confronting Chris for the alcohol or relationship dysfunction, Rose did what she’d been trained to do her whole life. She signed up for 5k runs and thumbed through grad school degree catalogs. Deflection and gaslighting are traits so often assigned to people experiencing addiction first hand. But second-hand alcoholics can get pretty good at them, too. Rose could have taught a grad school class in denying reality and looking for a solution in external gratification.
Rose ignored the anxiety and her partner’s drinking, and instead focused on the next degree, the next job, or at least the next PR in the next Saturday morning race. It is a good thing she didn’t get the euphoric feeling from booze that many of us alcoholics experience. She had the denial and deflection down so well that it’s kind of amazing that she didn’t develop a debilitating addiction of her own.
She was stuck.
Rose didn’t have kids with Chris. They weren’t even married, and she made enough money to support herself. She was stuck because she had spent years mostly isolating, giving oxygen to only two attachments in her life, and those people couldn’t help her. She didn’t talk to her parents about the relationship drama, or Chris’s drinking, because they would have insisted that she break up with him and move home–move back home…again–further ingraining her legacy of failure. She didn’t talk to Chris about it because she was being conditioned to keep her head down to avoid the shrapnel of his criticism. She was stuck because, like happens to a lot of us as the years of adulthood roll on, her friendships had slowly drifted beyond the comfort zone of serious, real problems and meaningful systems of support. She had Christmas-card-friends and get-an-occasional-coffee friends. She didn’t have I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up friends.
Neither did Chris. He worked from home. When he wasn’t working, he played video games at home. Alcohol became an increasingly important companion, and his relationship with drinking became as dysfunctional as his relationship with Rose.
Despite the lack of intimate connection between them, Rose and Chris did regularly play a game of hide-and-seek together. Fully embracing his hermit status, Chris had Rose buy his hard seltzers for him. He switched to seltzer from vodka in a feeble attempt to control the uncontrollable. But the seltzers were too weak and missed his sweet spot, so he switched to White Claw Surge. At 8% alcohol by volume, Surge is the IPA of seltzers. White Claw’s marketing claims it is the flavor that is surging. Sure. The 60% increase in alcohol is just an unfortunate byproduct of artificial cranberry or peach.
Chris demanded that Rose buy Surge in twelve-packs. On the occasions when she tried to exert some control and bought six-packs, she was admonished and told she would just have to go back out for more later. Chris took four White Claws from the twelve-packs, and gave them to Rose to hide. Vodka was too strong, but 5% seltzer was too weak. Six cans was too few, but twelve was too many. Like any good alcoholic desperately trying to keep the toxin in his life, Chris worked hard to dial in his blood alcohol level. And after he drank his self-allotted eight Surges, he worked hard to find the other four Rose hid. Nothing offered comfort to Rose’s anxiety and nervous system dysregulation like her drunk partner rooting through her stuff at midnight looking for more alcohol.
Chris is now years sober, and Rose still doesn’t like to spend time alone with him. It’s too bad his White Claw hide-and-seek didn’t surge Chris’s curiosity for the impact of his alcoholic rules on Rose.
From the trauma of growing up with an alcoholic father, to telling Rose’s therapist that he drank too much, to the mental gymnastics of moderation, a lack of awareness that he was in trouble was never Chris’s problem. He quite matter-of-factly ordered Rose to get recommendations from her therapist for a place for him to detox when his routine labs resulted in a liver-transplant consultation.
Chris wasn’t the only one who needed rehabilitation. After Rose found herself, quite out of character, yelling at high school students, she took a leave of absence. Her partner was in rehab, and she was living off long-term medical insurance. She thought that might be her partner-of-an-alcoholic rock bottom. She was wrong.
“You know I’m gonna have to test the waters.” Even on prescribed Naltrexone, Chris drank one or two tall boys after work. Again, his mental attention was on finding the sweet spot–the buzz he needed while avoiding the violent nausea associated with the drug intended as an alcohol deterrent. Again, Rose’s nervous system remained activated. Detox, rehab, IOP–they just carried with them a new twist on uncertainty, chaos, and trauma. Little did Rose expect that the attention Chris paid to his mental gymnastics was distracting him from blossoming into the emotional abuse of true sobriety.
When the one or two tall boys stopped appearing in the refrigerator, Chris had more bandwidth for pointing out Rose’s inadequacies. It is hard to describe the mental fuckery of being picked on for dressing too casually by a sloppy alcoholic who is fifteen minutes sober.
He picked at everything. The way she cleaned, the clothes she wore, the books she read, the YouTube channels she watched, and especially the food she ate. Chris gave Rose lists of household chores he expected her to do, then criticized her for not meeting his standards.
She wasn’t the addict. She was the sober partner. She was the one with overwhelming resentments and traumas, and yet, she was on the receiving end of a constant barrage of criticism and critique.
It was the perfect storm of relationship dysfunction. Chris needed a place to put the pain of sobriety while stuffing down the traumas of his childhood, and Rose was expertly conditioned to accept all the blame and give the lack-of-pushback of someone who embraced the label of failure. Abuser and abusee. Not physical. Worse. The hidden, unseeable abuse of words. A match made not in heaven, but in a culture that rewards achievement over diversity of talents, and promotes tolerance for bad behavior over insistence on emotional safety.
Do you know what is truly insidious about sobriety after high-functioning alcoholism? He thinks everything is fine. He’s sober, so he thinks his work is done. He plays video games and ignores Rose. They eat alone in separate rooms. Communication is limited to Chris telling Rose that she did the laundry wrong, or occasionally asking her why they don’t have sex anymore. He thinks his relationship is boring but adequate. He’s settled into the new normal. He is as content as a dry-drunk can be.
She is screaming on the inside.
“If you take a sparkling water from the fridge, replace it,” he said coldly, just the other day. “That’s the hill you want to die on?” Rose thought. She thought those words, but like a good girl, conditioned to absorb criticism, after a lifetime of emotional abuse and neglect, she stuffed those words down into the silent pit of her soul with the witty comebacks of the decades.
The camel’s back will eventually break, and a sparkling water weighs more than a piece of straw. Can you imagine the look on Chris’s face when everything Rose has pushed down comes exploding out? He will stand there, bewildered, thinking they are talking about a can of sparkling water.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. A man with so much awareness about his alcoholism, and the impact of his father’s death from drinking booze, has no idea about the way he has tormented and traumatized his partner. He’s an abuser, and his victim is inside the house, and he is as clueless as a cube of cheese.
But Rose has a clue. She’s getting stronger and more resilient. She’s developing the skills to regulate her nervous system, building the emotional muscles to demand the treatment she deserves. She’s writing a lot, and she has a tribe of recovering victims behind her. Right behind her, pushing and encouraging her. And her growth and resilience is contagious. Like she has been her whole life, she is both the student and the teacher. She’s learning and leading.
It is often said that a person can’t fail unless they stop trying. When it comes to emotional intelligence, authentic vulnerability, and a willingness to help others, Rose is determined and resilient. In fact, in a world that has traditionally drawn a red line at physical abuse, and accepted misogyny and relationship torment as the price of marriage, you might just say Rose is a pioneer in her field. Millions of American women suffer the same injustices as Rose, but here she is, standing tall and authorizing the telling of her story for the benefit of others.
“You don’t really have to know anything,” Rose’s dad once told her. When it comes to understanding how we should all treat each other, I’d say Rose knows a lot.
In fact, I’d say she’s often the smartest person in the room.
If alcohol has had an impact on your relationship or your family, whether you are the drinker or the partner, please take our confidential survey and receive free resources including a free ebook that can help you make sense of it all.