Wendy was the mother of five children. Wendy had been feeling quite stressed out lately and started to “medicate” herself by having several shots of whisky each evening after she tucked her children into bed. After nearly six months of this drinking routine, she at last grasped the fact that rather than helping her calm down and ”manage” her difficulties, drinking made her feel less tranquil when she awakened. This, in turn, made her feel more tense throughout the day.
After thinking about her predicament for several weeks, Wendy made up her mind to “open up” about her drinking problem with her best friend. In point of fact, roughly five minutes into their conversation, Wendy’s friend, Jocelyn, told her that she knew about a very skillful and highly qualified psychiatrist at the local drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. After talking to her friend, Wendy immediately got encouraged to call the rehab center and make an appointment.
Twelve days later she finally got to meet the doctor her best friend had been talking about. After their short-and-to-the-point introduction, Wendy told the psychiatrist that ever since her husband and she got divorced, she has been having an extremely difficult time financially, psychologically, and spiritually.
At times, she felt that she was totally over the divorce. Recently, however, she has been feeling very depressed about the fact that her former husband and she couldn’t “make it”. When asked by the psychiatrist how long her ex-husband and she went together before they got married, Wendy told the doctor that she and her former husband, Robert, went out for two years and then lived together for three years before they got married.
As Wendy was talking to the psychiatrist, she underscored the point that she frankly thought that she and her ex-husband waited long enough to know one another well enough before they got married. After the kids started to arrive, to the contrary, their lives seemed to go downhill. To make mattes even worse, both Robert and she began to drink, and their abusive and hazardous drinking negatively affected their finances, their love for one another, and their relationship.
When things became less than pleasant between them, Robert hired a divorce lawyer and filed for a divorce. Although things were apparently not going well and even though she was frequently depressed, Wendy told the physician that she didn’t want their marriage to come to an end. Once she received her divorce papers, however, she knew that their marriage was over.
The psychiatrist told Wendy that the tension, anxiety, and stress that she has been suffering from concerning her abusive and hazardous drinking are some of the more commonplace alcohol abuse effects and that the best solution for this circumstance is treatment for one’s alcohol abuse. In fact, getting alcohol abuse treatment is very important because repeated drinking can get the person into even more severe alcohol and alcoholism difficulties.
After a number of treatment sessions with her doctor, Wendy was slowly but surely able to comprehend the fact that the real source of her anxiety and her depression was that she had not worked through her angry feelings she has for her former husband who had divorced her a year-and-a-half ago. With these insights and with the medications her psychiatrist prescribed, she eventually stopped drinking, she started to feel substantially less depressed, and she started making more time for social events with her family and friends. A few months after receiving therapy from her physician, she even started to date once again.
It was obvious that Wendy had come a long way. In truth, just about nine months after she terminated her counseling, Wendy had finally laid the negative emotions of Robert, her former husband, to rest and was beginning to feel more self respect and more spiritually “sound” and psychologically “together” than she had ever felt in her life.
