WL: I empathize with your situation. I see a lot of myself in your posts. I've also recently discovered that my very serious negative thinking (something I think is hereditary) is the cause of my unhappiness and drinking. I drink to quiet the negative voices. As a child, I was always called "the bad one." My relatives put me down to prop themselves up in a family that constantly played power games. So, I drank. I partied. I did drugs because I was "the bad one" in their eyes even before I took a drink. The negative things they said to me constantly as a child are imprinted in my head. The voices get quiet for a while when I'm drunk but they are even worse when I'm hungover: that miserable state when everything they said about me as "the bad one" and "the crazy one" is confirmed, right? Because look at me: I'm a women pushing fifty who is a miserable alcoholic. I've wasted all my savings on alcohol. I lost my job because of alcohol. I'm obese because of alcohol.