Originally Posted by
Tuffgirl 
I have wondered the same thing. My RAH was very kind and charming when sober, and at first, when drinking! But the more he drank and the more I began to complain, the nastier he got. The anger was out of control. Now I wonder which guy he will morph back into as he pursues sobriety - the same angry guy or the kind, charming one?
I'm remembering my days working with people with dementia and it was common knowledge that the mean ones tended to get more mean as they progressed into the disease while the nice ones stayed nice but delusional. Makes you wonder.....
At first I thought my XABF was two different people - the drunk one and the sober one.
But then I realized that the sober one had been manipulating me from the beginning, too, and trying to change me into someone I wasn't. The only reason I didn't notice sooner was that at first it looked like he was helping me sort out some issues I had with my parents, something I had been trying to do. I just trusted him in the beginning when he said that "working on this won't help you" and "you need to concentrate more on this." He was also trying to get me to exercise a lot, which I did agree was a good thing to do, and he used to tell me I had too much fat on my body, but I used to weigh 105 lbs. back then...
In short, verbal and emotional abuse is abuse no matter what form it takes, but it's
especially hard to recognize when it's got "Codependent No More" in one hand and Godiva chocolates in the other.
I read "Why Does He Do That?" and in the "types of abusers" chapter I would identify with polar opposite forms of abuse - one was when he was sober and the other (more violent/forceful) form when he was drunk.
So the methods were different, but the rest was the same.
