HI Jaguar,
I'm a alcoholic man, so I normally don't post here, but your story posed acouple of questions that peeked my interest.
There are success stories, for I know personally a couple of marriages that survived the insanity of active alcoholism, but I think the number of these success stories are few in comparison to the overall number of marriages affected by alcoholism.
Many alcoholics know what they're doing even while drinking, such as I, but the need to have a drink most often took precedent over the thoughts of consequences. On rare occasion, the remorse, regret, and shame would cause me to reduce my intake, but it rarely caused me to stop drinking. I always thought I could fix whatever went wrong, but that wasn't the case, so I endured much lose directly attributed to my drinking. And the truth be told, yes, I'm still a jerk alot of the time, but I'm working on that, and it will probably always be something I have to work on.
I was never physically abusive, so this particular abuse in your case causes great alarm.
Hopefully others here will help you with these issues. Just wanted to welcome you to SR.