Many of us indulge in a drink now and again but sometimes in response to great stress we hit the alcohol bigtime!  Please read this lady's experience, which is frightening but also a reality check.    

If your drinking is in response to a separation or divorce please have a look at http://isdivorcetheend1.blogspot.co.uk/
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who is killing your spirit?

There are so many reasons why women turn to drinking. For me, and many others, it was a gradual roughening up of my confidence, a wearing down of
my resilience, a slimy fatigue on the face of life’s challenges; a series of
mental and physical batterings that made me feel so low about myself that drinking seemed like a reasonable thing to do, week in, week out, year in,
year out, decades in , decades out. More than three quarters of my life
spent relying on alcohol to make it all better.

When people call you enough names over a period of time, you start to
believe the labels. Using spirits to boost your spirits works quickly to make
you forget the cruel words. Verbal abuse does so much more damage,
often, than physical stuff, and stays with you much longer. The brain is so
good at regurgitating a million little snipes, that in themselves mean little,
but over longer periods of time, make it seem the whole world is on your
case. So the drinking.

The way you feel about yourself deep down is so much harder to
recognise by others than a nasty bruise. How to start explaining to others
what it feels like to be put down, and how it stays with you over time;
becomes encapsulated as ‘me’.

The people who do it get away with murder. They are charming to others,
a laugh a minute, buddies in the pub, such good actors. Who would have
thought they could turn in an instant and cut you right back to size, with only
a few words. Spiteful and intimate. So the drinking.

Why do others choose to treat those closest to them with such contempt?
I know now, from my journey, that I can never change others. But I spent
years trying to do this, trying to make them care and not hurt me. Trying
to win approval and never really knowing the rules; having to guess.
Have a drink and put off thinking about it.

Self-esteem, once gone, is very hard to recover. Talking to women who
both still drink and no longer drink has made me realise that at the core
of alcohol abuse is loss of self-esteem; before, during and after. A long,
slow death of our faith in our inner self over years of addiction, until we
believe pretty much everything negative people tell us about ourselves.
They are better than us so what they say must be fact, and we must be
wrong. More drinking. Ashamed, angry, lonely, bored, hurt. Knowing
there is something wrong with us. I am still working through the list, even
after nearly a year sober. The feelings are still coming out like the great
blobs of lava that bubble out of a volcano, red hot and hard to handle.

We cannot change those people. We can only change ourselves.

Many women think that if they are not being knocked about physically,
then they are not being abused. They don’t see the draining, exhausting, debilitating verbal stuff as abuse. They drink it away and tell themselves
their partner is just ‘like that’. They think their eroded self-esteem and
this constant doubting of themselves is what happens when you live with someone who may be a bit tricky, a bit moody, a bit difficult. It’s just them.
A glass or two will sort it out.

When they stop speaking or withdraw affection, it is my fault. When they
criticise or tell me I am wrong, it is my fault. When they tell me I don’t know
what I am talking about and live on planet me, it’s my fault. When they diss
my opinion, it is my fault. So I keep my opinions to myself. Have a drink.

Then there’s that old chestnut, ‘I just having a laugh – can’t you take a joke?’ . ‘You are too sensitive’. The sarcasm out in force. Killing your spirit so you
kill it a bit more with some spirits of your own.

They change the subject when you start speaking. They overtalk you. They
tell you to stop being so damn serious all the time.

Everything is your fault. Your feelings hurt them. They hate it when you spend
time with others, even girlfriends. At least you can get out and get sloshed
and forget about it…you can go out and talk about all the trivial things they accuse you of talking about, and not worry.

Of course, you never understand the point. Your work is no big deal, and
your achievements go by the by. They are a matter of amusement. There is always something much more interesting to talk about than YOU. Forgetting
your stuff, not remembering your important things, passing you over,
forgetting your arrangements, denying they ever said something…Drink a
bit more, it’s ok. You can never be as good as them.

It happened; it is still happening in certain relationships I have. My OH has
it happening in certain of his family relationships. No punch ups, just the
drip drip of abuse, nonetheless.

They won’t change, these people. But I have. My OH has. Self-esteem has returned through physical and mental changes I never believed possible
when I was drinking. We are all capable of it, if we keep talking.

This is an outstanding article - says it all - but the rest of it is in Binki's Book 

Staying Sober.  She is also on Facebook.  Thank you.