Originally Posted by
lillamy 
If I got a DUI, I would be mortified. I would quit drinking forever the next day. But I'm not an alcoholic.
I know what AXH would have done. He would have blamed someone (the bartender should have cut him off, I should have picked him up, the cop had something against him personally) and then he would have acted like a victim, kept drinking, and kept feeling sorry for himself.
This is so, so true! When I started dating my AH (when he was sober and actively working a recovery program, and had been doing so for almost 2 years), he was very open with me about his DUI history, and expressed very sincere horror at his own behavior. He talked about how grateful he was that he never hurt anyone. He made ZERO excuses for himself, and talked about how hard he had worked to put his life back together.
Once he relapsed, the past DUIs came up once or twice, and his attitude about them had totally changed. He was the victim of "shady police" and "underhanded tactics" on the third one, and the one time he mentioned the second one, it was all about how horrible it was that his girlfriend at the time "abandoned" him at the police station.