Interesting posts
friendofdorothy and
story. This is a subject that I've thought about quite a lot and I really appreciate the space to talk about it, except I can't seem to quite make my thoughts make sense.
I have had three male friends who have been violent to their partners whilst drunk. For two of them it seemed very out of character.
One of the men gave up drinking and coke for a long period afterwards. When he eventually started drinking again he used to take himself away from people he knew when he was on a bender, possibly because he didn't want friends to see him like that and/or didn't trust himself. So I guess he first abstained from drinking then, when he couldn't do that anymore, tried to abstain from seeing people while he was drunk. Because of this, I don't know if he ever assaulted anyone else whilst drunk.
The situation with one of the other men was very troubling. I've known him for a long time and he's always had a bit of a violent edge but drinking lots seems to unlock something extra dark in him. Other mutual friends had already stopped seeing him as they were concerned about his attitude to women. After one particularly unpleasant night out with him where he threatened many other people I decided I would never go out drinking with him again. Several years later we were both having a bad patch with drinking and he phoned me to talk about it. Having been to a few AA meetings, I'm generally primed to be non-judgmental when people talk about things they've done while drinking framed in a certain way but as he explained in more detail I couldn't help judge him because it was awful. He downplayed it as being a row with his partner, then kept saying a little more and a little more of what had happened and eventually admitted he'd assaulted her quite badly while she was holding their baby. And I'm pretty sure he did more than he told me. One thing that made me very uncomfortable was that he kept saying how similar our situations were, as the row had been about his drinking and my partner had just asked me to cut down on my drinking. But there was a big difference. When my partner asked me to cut down my drinking, I did. When his partner asked him, he attacked her. He blamed her for bringing it up whilst he was drunk, effectively for nagging him. He seemed to feel that being drunk and having a drinking problem excused him - she should have taken it into account and acted differently. He had stopped drinking, started counselling and said some things that were clearly supposed to show that he felt guilty and knew he'd done wrong, but the longer we talked the more he started angrily ranting about her and I didn't feel that she was much safer with the angry sober version of him than the drunk one.
With all of them it changed my opinion of them, to know that they were capable of that. Even though it only happened when they were drunk, and as far as I know only happened once (although I may be wrong about that), I felt that there must be something in them that alcohol brought out. And I was uncomfortable with that. Also, I believe all of them downplayed what they had done and that the assaults were worse than they admitted to.
I don't think stopping drinking on its own is enough. If a man assaults people when he's drunk, then stopping drinking is a necessary emergency measure for everyone's immediate safety. But stopping drinking is always the beginning of the work, not the end of it. For everyone's long term safety and happiness he needs to figure out what was going on at a deeper level and make sure that is dealt with.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.wbs.ac.uk
warwick.ac.uk
