For a long time I thought everyone else was the problem. That was my basic outlook on things. If something went wrong there was always someone to blame for it. I did not see myself as the kind of person who had a drinking problem. I saw myself as a guy who had a lot of people in his life who did not understand him.
My wife used to say I had a temper. I would get loud and things would escalate pretty quickly. In my mind the arguments always started with something she said or did. I told myself that if she would just leave things alone we would not fight so much. Looking back now I can see that alcohol made everything worse. At the time I thought it helped me relax.
The drinking and the arguments went together. I would come home after work, start drinking, and by the end of the evening we would be going in circles about something. I was pretty good at turning things around and making it sound like she was the one causing the problems.
Eventually she left. She took our child with her and moved in with her sister for a while. My first reaction was anger. I told anyone who would listen that she had overreacted and that she was trying to punish me. I did not spend much time thinking about why she might have left.
The legal stuff that followed made things worse. We had to go to court about the house and custody. When the judge ruled in her favor on most of it I blamed the judge. I said the system was stacked against me and that nobody wanted to hear my side of the story.
Around that same time things at work started falling apart too. I was showing up late and missing deadlines. I thought I was doing just enough to stay out of trouble but my boss did not see it that way. When he finally fired me I blamed him too. I told people he had been looking for a reason to get rid of me.
After a while the list of people I was blaming got pretty long. My wife, the judge, my boss. Anyone who had crossed my path during that time. The one person I never blamed was myself.
A friend of mine watched all of this happen over a couple of years. He had known me since high school so he had seen what I was like before the drinking got heavy. One day he asked if I would go to lunch with him. I figured he just wanted to catch up.
During that lunch he told me he thought I needed help and that he knew a place where I could go for treatment. I remember feeling irritated at first. I started to say the same things I always said. That everyone else was the problem and that I had just been dealing with bad luck.
He listened to me for a while and then said something simple. He said that every story I told had a different person in it but the one thing they all had in common was me.
That line stuck with me. It was not a lecture. It was just a statement. For the first time I started to wonder if maybe I had played a bigger role in all of it than I wanted to admit.
A week later I checked into a rehab program. I did not walk in there feeling convinced that I had a problem. I walked in because I had run out of people to blame.