Expert Answers: Our marriage is being ruined by drink

With as many as half of all marriages ending in divorce, it is clear that a lot of marriages could use

some help.

There are a lot of factors contributing to marital problems. Many of them are caused by daily stress, conflicting attitudes and bills. Alcohol and drug abuse can clearly have a negative effect on marriages. And alcoholism can have a drastic effect on a marriage.

If you, or someone in your family, has this problem, then there are various places where one can look to gain assistance.

For family members of a person who is an alcoholic, there is a group that helps support families, and this group is called Al-Anon.

Al-Anon Family Groups hold regular meetings where members share their own experiences of living with alcoholism.

Al-Anon say that living with someone else's uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, drinking can turn love to hate, bring you to the depths of despair, affect you financially, lead to violent outbursts, make you doubt your own sanity and even make you think that you are the problem.

Al-Anon does not offer advice or counselling, but members give each other understanding, strength and hope.

Therapy for couples can also be very good for keeping your marriage together, after and during addictive behaviour. Therapy will hopefully help your marriage to return to a good level of trust and intimacy.

You can find a local therapist via Relate, to see if you can get help with your marriage.

You could also speak to other couples who have been through a similar experience, they may be able to give you some good advice and recommend someone to go to if you want counselling for couples.

If alcohol addictions are left unaddressed or untreated, they can destroy the marriage. There are many issues that may come up when coming to terms with an addiction, which can potentially break up the marriage. But if you know where to turn during this time, it will be a big relief. Help is widely available if

you are willing to look.

Useful contacts: www.al-anonuk.org.uk, www.relate.org.uk

Paul Charlson

GP from Brough

I agree this is a bad situation and your husband is undoubtedly alcoholic. He needs help and the longer the situation persists the worse it is likely to become. I suggest you talk about your concerns with your husband and strongly encourage him to seek help from his GP. He will be defensive about his drinking and will probably deny he has a problem, but he most surely has. Stress often precipitates problem drinking but this does not resolve any of the issues. It may be difficult to persuade your husband to seek help. You may have to enlist friends and family to help to influence him. It may require even more drastic measures from yourself, such as an ultimatum, but hopefully he will realise that there is a problem. You might consider contacting Al-Anon Family Groups, which give helpful advice to families of alcoholics. This is a long-term problem and unlikely to be resolved quickly. It is vital that you maintain a good relationship with your husband as this will be needed to help him with his difficulties

Elaine Douglas

A chartered psychologist who specialises in family and child relationships

It sounds as though your husband's drinking is really spiralling out of control at the moment. From what you are saying the drinking seems to be a consequence of other things that are going on in his life that he is having difficulty in dealing with. So, maybe you need to take a different tack and look at why he is drinking as heavily as he is.

Do you know exactly what kind of pressure he is under at the moment? Is it work or family related? Is it financial – or a combination of some or all of these? Can you sit down with your husband and talk about what's going on? There is an expression "can't see the wood for the trees" – maybe your husband has been worried about something for some time that he no longer has a realistic perspective on things. By voicing his worries to you, you may be able to offer a different angle on things. If you can, try to identify some aspect of the pressure that he is experiencing and with him generate some ideas about how that could be handled or made better.

Cary Cooper

Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University

It is obvious that something is bothering your husband that he needs to drink so much. In my view, he needs some help to come to terms with his excessive drinking, to get at the source of his excessive drinking behaviour. It sounds to me that since this behaviour has only started recently that it is less likely to be an addictive issue but more a stress-related one. If it is a manifestation of some stress in his life, it is important that he gets some help to identify what this is and how he can deal with it. Somehow you need to get him to see a counsellor or clinical psychologist, referred to through your GP. I suspect this will be difficult to achieve but it might be best if you talked to him sometime when he is not under pressure, to get him to realise that something is not right and he may need some help. Only you can decide on what is the right time and place to do this.

Dr Carol Burniston

Consultant Clinical Child Psychologist

I don't need to say that five or six pints daily is too much. Government guidelines for men are a maximum of three to four units a day, which is the equivalent of one-and-a-half to two pints of five per cent strength lager. Many people do "self-medicate" in this way, to "relax" or to try to forget their problems. The long-term health effects, however, are to increase the chance of strokes, cancer, obesity and other problems. Alcohol abuse can result in psychological problems and family breakdown. Rather than discussing your husband's drinking, which appears to cause arguments, explain that you appreciate the pressure he is under. It may mean encouraging him to speak to his employer about his workload or even considering a new job. Help your husband to see that there are alternatives. Try healthier suggestions; going out for a walk or to see a movie can help to break the pattern of behaviour. You can find extra information from www.nhs.uk/alcohol. Drinkline is a helpline available on 0800 917 8282.