Tag: high-functioning alcoholic

Rose, part two

Alcoholism, Emotional Safety By Matt Salis, MPS No Comments

Rose, part two

Audio version now available.

(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.

It Won’t Matter

Alcoholism, Recovery By Matt Salis, MPS 2 Comments

It Won't Matter

Audio version now available.

 

I wish I could deliver a message to my younger self. Many messages, really, to many earlier versions of me. Like that the penis my college friends drew on my forehead with permanent marker when I passed out would not, in fact, impact the rest of my life. Or that leaving my sales-manager job at a steel company that was for sale upgrading to a steel company that later declared bankruptcy was not, actually, the stupidest move ever. Or even more recently, that the knee injury I suffered playing soccer last summer was not the end, and that I was not yet relegated to the chair workouts Instagram feels are age appropriate.

 

Those tips would have been useful. But in mid-March 2026, I am thinking about the advice I would give a late 20-teens version of me about Saint Patrick’s Day.

The Family Scar

Alcoholism, Family By Matt Salis, MPS 10 Comments

The Family Scar

Audio version now available.

 

Before they served us our farewell dinner, our neighbors of twenty years, while enjoying the evening sun of newly saved daylight on their back deck, asked our youngest two boys what their fondest memories were of the house we are leaving behind.

 

I froze in a mini-panic. “The time Drunk Dad got so mad that he punched a framed picture spreading glass all over our bedroom.” “Listening to Mom and Dad whisper-fight well into the morning through the heating ducts.” Those were the traumatic memories that flooded my brain as I waited for our sons to speak.

Elephant Around the Christmas Tree

Alcoholism, Marriage By Matt Salis, MPS 2 Comments

Elephant Around the Christmas Tree

Audio version now available.

 

The Christmas Tree lights are off and the house is quiet. I’m slumped over on the loveseat, my neck sore from the unnatural angle created by the upholstered arm. This room was full of people, my people, when I nodded off. Christmas music and laughter and footed pajamas. A note was being penned reminding Santa that the carrot is for Rudolph. In the dark, I can make out the shadow of the Santa gifts next to the fireplace. The remnants of a glass of beer–about an inch left in the bottom–is on the coffee table next to the plate of cookie crumbs. Warm and flat, I drink it down before stumbling to my bedroom.

Accumulation

Alcoholism, Recovery By Matt Salis, MPS 10 Comments

Accumulation

Audio version now available.

 

I listened to a podcast interview of Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian who has been, for the past 35 years, studying and writing about how budding aristocracies grab power and, eventually, destroy economies. I learned a lot and found the interview both fascinating and terrifying. But I missed some of what she said because I was distracted. I was distracted pondering the fact that I don’t have 35 years.

 

I study and write about intimacy and addiction. In 35 years I’ll be in my late 80s, and no one wants to read about sex from a person approaching the century mark, although Betty White cracked sex jokes all the way to the end. But I’ll be an old man, not an old woman, so where she sounded spunky and vibrant, I’ll just sound creepy and perverted.

 

The clarity of permanent sobriety is mostly a good thing. But the clarity brings with it a growing sense of lost potential. Like what if I started my half-century quest for knowledge in my 30s instead of my mid 40s?

March without the Madness

Alcoholism, Recovery By Matt Salis, MPS No Comments

March without the Madness

I’m not quite the lunatic I used to be. And nothing used to bring out the crazy like the aptly named March Madness basketball tournament.

 

In four years at Indiana University, I never missed a home game, and knew exactly where to stand above the tunnel to touch Bobby Knight’s shoulder as the team came back out after halftime. Creepy much? Knight received technical fouls for throwing things on the court twice. I don’t know where the chair is, but the program he threw against Boston University on December 13, 1991 is framed in my basement. So when I attended a bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas half-a-dozen years later, confident that I knew more about college basketball than the odds makers, my lunacy kept me placing double-or-nothing bets, just trying to get back to even, until the only thing left on which to wager was a West Coast NBA game. I took the under and felt vindicated until I realized that the sufficiently low score was tied, and the game was going into overtime. Meanwhile, my fiance, Sheri, was perplexed as her debit card was declined when she tried to rent a movie at Blockbuster. I proceeded to get so drunk that I was kicked out of a dance club that night. Twice (I’m not sure how I got back in for round two of drunken belligerence). I woke up the next morning in the hotel room I shared with eight guys, lying in a puddle of my own puke. (Should that be lay or lie? Given the vulgarity of the rest of the sentence, I am not sure it matters.) Later that day, I told Sheri about the $1,200 I lost amidst a crowd at the O’Hare Airport. I thought it less likely that she’d kill me in front of all those people.

Gentlemen Only Wear Suits to Funerals

Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Matt Salis, MPS 4 Comments

Gentlemen Only Wear Suits to Funerals

While watching a movie about college basketball in the 1960s, I noticed most of the men in the crowd were wearing suits and ties. In 2025 can you even imagine dressing up to attend a sporting event? I hate the confined feeling of a suit jacket, and I’ve never understood the purpose of a piece of colorful silk dangling from my neck. If it was there for me to clean the spaghetti sauce from my mouth, at least there would be a plausible purpose. I’m certainly not proposing a return to wearing church clothes to basketball games. I like to say, “Once you find hoodie-town, you’ll never wear a button down.” (I’ve actually never said that, but maybe I’ll start now.) The point is that when the camera scanned the crowd at that cinematic basketball game, I was certain that every man in those stands held the door for someone else entering the arena. I’m equally certain that hands were shaken firmly, people stood graciously to let the people seated in the middle of the rows pass, and pleases and thank yous were abundant.

 

It is hard to argue but that we’ve devolved.

Intimacy Series: Another Mother or a Lover?

Alcoholism, Intimacy By Matt Salis, MPS 6 Comments
Attraction?
Attraction or Contempt?

One of the worst days of our marriage, for both Sheri and me, was July 14, 2021. Since we are a couple who experienced my active alcoholism for 25 years, you might be surprised to learn I was four-and-a-half years sober on that traumatic day. Even without alcohol, Sheri and I make occasional trips back into the pit of hell with emotional relationship relapses.

 

Relationship relapses often spin out of control as both partners revert to deflection, manipulation, overreaction and self-protection – all skills learned during active addiction. But before we pull out the old tools of dysfunction, there has to be a spark. An impetus. A new or refreshed wound around which the spiraling decline can revolve.

 

On July 14, 2021, I was hurt because Sheri no longer found me attractive.