Happy Hour, … Really? ~ Part 2 of 2

I’d like to conclude this two-part blog post with a vignette from a past client I saw years ago. He was a hard working husband with a great wife. He was a fair husband and she a decent wife and spouse. Both seemed pretty happy with one another but in time had a mountain of marital stress due to his increasing demands at work.

He’d come home and drink a little after a hard day of car sales. Now, he did not get intoxicated or violent and did  not have a history of major marital conflict with his wife. The difficulty was that he felt buried at work and seemed to be unable to communicate it to his wife. They had their common debates and upsets. She was experiencing some low levels of depression due to her fears that he was not completely committed to her. She felt he may not be happy and they didn’t have kids and had always feared that since they didn’t have any kids he could up and leave her more easily.

He arrives home one day from work, has a beer and ends up falling asleep on the couch. She also had a beer and neither as far as I can tell, were intoxicated. While asleep she started going through his phone and felt she found numbers that brought suspicion to her fears about his being committed to her. She ended up throwing his briefcase at him asleep and he then pushed her down on the couch. The local police were called and complexity ensued.

They key here is you have an overworked husband, a fearful wife (who did have some legitimate reason to question his fidelity) and then you mix that with alcohol. It blew up and the fact of the matter is the alcohol didn’t make that happen it was the catalyst to fueling reactivity, less inhibition, and eventually a huge incident and the couple landed in my office for help.

If your struggling with depression and or marriage problems adding alcohol to it usually doesn’t help. I’d say most of the couples I have treated that have had major blowups and incidents, including infidelity happened because they were less socially inhibited and made choices that damaged and caused chaos in their relationship. It was their struggle before and then the alcohol that pushed one or both of them into more conflict, more trouble.

If you do drink, think about what you are doing.

NOTE: thinking after you are drinking does not count as your senses are dulled.