Wendy was the mother of five children. Wendy had been feeling quite stressed out lately and started to “medicate” herself by having three or four glasses of wine each night after she tucked her children into bed. After roughly nine months of this drinking routine, she finally realized that instead of helping her ”lighten up” and ”handle” her issues, drinking made her feel more restless when she awakened in the morning. This, in turn, made her feel increasingly more anxious throughout the day.
After thinking about her circumstance for several weeks, Wendy decided to “open up” about her problem drinking with her best friend. Indeed, approximately twenty-five minutes into their chat, Wendy’s friend, Lila, told her about an extremely highly qualified and skillful physician at the local drug and alcohol abuse treatment center. After talking to her friend, Wendy without much ado got encouraged to call the treatment clinic and make an appointment.
Eight days later she finally got to meet the physician her friend had been talking about. After their short introduction, Wendy explained to the doctor that ever since she and her former husband got divorced, she has been having a difficult time financially, spiritually, and emotionally.
At times, she felt that she was totally over the divorce. Recently, on the other hand, she has been feeling quite depressed about the fact that her former husband and she couldn’t stay married and “make it”. When asked by the physician how long she and her former husband dated before they got married, Wendy told the doctor that she and her ex-husband dated for two-and-a-half years and then lived together for three-and-a-half years before they got married.
As Wendy was talking to the psychiatrist, she underscored the point that she frankly thought that her ex-husband and she waited long enough to know one another well enough before they got married. After the children started to arrive, conversely, their lives seemed to go downhill. To make mattes even worse, both she and Robert started to drink, and their hazardous and irresponsible drinking negatively affected their relationship, their love for one another, and their finances.
When things became less than congenial between them, Robert got a divorce attorney and filed for a divorce. Even though things were clearly not going well and even though she was regularly depressed, Wendy told the doctor that she didn’t want their relationship to come to an end. Once she received the divorce papers, however, she knew that their relationship was over.
The doctor told Wendy that the anxiety, tension, and stress that she has been experiencing concerning her abusive and unhealthy drinking are some of the normal alcohol abuse effects and that the best solution for this situation is rehabilitation 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 seven or eight treatment sessions with her doctor, Wendy was gradually able to realize that the real cause of her anxiety and her depression was that she had not worked through her unpleasant feelings she has for her former husband who had divorced her four years ago. With these insights and with the drugs her psychiatrist prescribed, she eventually abstained from drinking, she started to feel substantially less depressed, and she began making more time for social events with her family and friends. A few months after getting counseling from her psychiatrist, she even started to date once again.
It was plain to see that Wendy had come a long way. In truth, just about eight months after she stopped her therapy, Wendy had finally laid the depressing emotions of Robert, her former husband, to rest and was starting to feel better about herself and more spiritually “sound” and emotionally “together” than she had ever felt in her life.