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Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I don't think you can do this alone. If she knows she has a problem and is genuinely committed to working on it, then you have to decide if you want to be at her side for this. How to do this and which practical steps to take - from just resolving to never have an alcoholic drink again to involving specialists in mental health or addiction (can be very hard to do this step, and support here would be crucial but it never can come from outside - she should realize by herself that she needs it, otherwise it will all fail). If you have been together for a while, and you love her, it may be worth it for you. If she is not ready to realize she has a problem, and it looks like just living with it is not tolerable for you, then "one more time and that's it" is just delaying the resolution because you're afraid to face the consequences. There will be next time, and you'll be in the same situation as you are now. You two need to do the hard work - to figure out whether it's going to be you together fixing the problem, or you both going your separate ways. I don't see any other option here.

I believe she is committed enough that I don’t think medical intervention is not necessary at this point. When I was writing this I wasn’t sure how she would react when she properly woke up but I am glad she understands the severity of what happened and was not defensive in any way about it.

We had an informal understanding that she doesn’t drink beyond slightly tipsy for years and she has been keeping it that way herself until last weekend. She can’t explain why she decided to ditch this and get shit faced drunk all of a sudden (it doesn’t help that she doesn’t remember almost anything). So in the future we decided to formalise it so that she only drinks when I am there, or only with a friend that we agreed upon who knows about her problem. Right now I trust her to keep this promise