Mean Drunk Transcript
Curt (00:00)
Hi, Preeti
Preeti (00:00)
Hi Curt
Curt (00:02)
How you doing today?
Preeti (00:02)
I don't know, got something stuck in your ear.
Curt (00:04)
I do see that little speakers to help us with our sound.
Preeti (00:07)
Does that work?
Curt (00:08)
It's wonderful. sound very clear. Yes. I'd like to ask you a question.
Preeti (00:10)
I do? Okay.
Yes, please.
Curt (00:13)
Many people have said they love their partner or they love some person and then they have a but in that sentence. but when they have a drink or but when they drink that Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, when he has a drink, he's a different person or I love her, but once she starts drinking, look out, it's different. What is, what is that? What does that affect in a human being who sees someone have a drink?
meaning of alcohol and completely change, whether it's personality, demeanor, aggression, what's going on with that?
Preeti (00:41)
Thank you for the question. It's a complicated answer, so I'm going to try to give it in a couple of parts. So if we're talking about a romantic relationship, because this can also happen in a parent -child relationship, but if we're talking about a romantic relationship and one party has an issue with drinking, not going to necessarily say they're alcoholic, but one party has an issue with drinking and the other party has a problem with their drinking, there is a lot of tension and a lot of conflict that arises.
I actually have experience on both sides of this relationship coin. On the one hand, I have been in relationships where the person I was with could be Jekyl and Hyde And on the other hand, I've also been the person who had different personalities after a few or many drinks. And part of this is about the pathology of addiction. Addiction is progressive.
Alcoholism is a progressive disease. That means that, well, everything might start off fun and games and you're this happy drunk, you're the life of the party, you're the person that everybody wants to invite. Eventually that changes and what happens over time is that we build up a tolerance to alcohol, alcohol alters our personalities, the dependency grows, we need it more and more, and there are absolutely changes that happen in personality. But there are two sides in a relationship, right? and every person has a part to play. So the person who is complaining about the person who's imbibing, has these Jekyll and Hyde tendencies, also has a role to play in that. And I say that because I think that that person often feels very disempowered and feels like they have no agency in the relationship except to do one or two things. One, try to control the person who is drinking, which never works or might work for a short period of time but doesn't work in the long term. And two, blame themselves. And it's actually...
It's really nobody's fault. Addiction and alcoholism is a family disease. That's something that's said in recovery communities across the world. And that means that everybody in the family, everybody in the relationship is actually sick, not just the person using. So what happens to the partner of an addict or alcoholic is that they become codependent. They become enabling. They end up
reinforcing patterns of behavior on their part, and they have a part to play. So we're not here to say blame or fault, but we are here to say that even in unhealthy relationships with a person who is an addict, that the well person also has a role to play.
Curt (03:14)
Well, Preeti you mentioned how it's a family disease. And I had a grandmother who's now passed, lived to over 100, who would talk about my grandfather and said he was a great guy, but a mean drunk. Where does that expression come from as far as a mean drunk? Because you had mentioned when you start drinking, you're happy, you're the life of the party. People like having you around, you're funny. How does it progress then? Or how do we get to someone being a mean drunk?
Preeti (03:36)
Well, right. So the progressive part of the disease of alcoholism means that as time goes on, alcohol is going to affect the person differently. But it doesn't actually matter how much you drink and how long you've been drinking and whether or not you have an addiction to be labeled a mean drunk. Because what happens when we ingest the toxin alcohol, what we do is effectively shut down the prefrontal cortex, our frontal lobe.
So that is where all of the higher functioning in the brain happens, the executive functioning, our ability to reason, our ability to navigate and interpret social cues, our ability to understand nuance in people's voices. And what we are left with is the completely primitive part of our brains. So it's almost as if we are toddlers again. And all we have is the ability to fight, flight,
flood or freeze. And so the fight response is why people become aggressive when they drink. And then as time progresses and the alcoholic becomes more and more dependent on alcohol, it becomes fairly unpredictable how alcohol is going to affect us. So one drink or 20 drinks might have the exact same result. So if you're on the receiving end of this, you end up not knowing.
if your partner or boyfriend or girlfriend is going to have a good night or a bad night because it becomes completely unpredictable. there were times when I was drinking where one drink would get me completely drunk and sometimes one drink can even put you into a blackout. There are other times towards the end of my drinking days that 10, 15 drinks did absolutely nothing to me.
And so you don't actually know. And that unpredictability causes a lot of instability in relationships. Partners of alcoholics tend to walk on eggshells. We tend to be really worried. We tend to get a lot of anxiety. Say if you're
partner drinks towards the end of the day, that anxiety creeps up someplace around late afternoon, you know it's going to happen, there's going to be a fight, the night will be ruined. And I think that that heightened state for the person who's also not the problem drinker, it makes a contribution. It sets up an environment where you might be extra sensitive and you might be really triggered by the person just even pouring a drink that you're waiting for it. And now your fight response is also triggered.
It's really sad because I think what ends up happening is that people who generally love each other when there are no toxins involved, when there is no alcohol or drugs involved, become at odds and it causes a lot of problems in relationships. And while we're talking about romantic relationships, let's also remember that this is a family disease. for a child of an alcoholic mom or dad, when a parent comes home from work,
that pit in your stomach, you know something bad is gonna happen. You know that when dad or mom comes home from work, they're gonna be in a bad mood. And you know, even if there isn't physical violence in the household, verbal violence and arguments between parents, sober or drunk, but probably worse drunk, because again, we're talking about people in total fight or flight mode where there is no reasoning, there is no compassion, there is no empathy, there is just anger.
and everyone's really triggered. It's very unhealthy for the couple, but it's also really unhealthy for those kids.
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