krisjbhm

Why do alcoholics hide the empty bottles instead of throwing them out? They keep magically appearing. I knocked over one of his cowboy boots and out jumped a dozen of the "airplane" sized vodka bottles. It's just insane........

05084

Im not sure why they do that, but i have the same thing happen here. my AH has empty1/2 pints hidden all over...I dont get it..

Learn2Live

No clue why they do that but I've heard many people talk about this.

drunkyjules

Because we are in denial and in an effort to hide how much we are drinking we will put it somewhere (like the closet, the garage, bathroom cabinet etc), by the time we are finally drunk we forget that it is even there.

For myself I would open the bathroom cabinet the next day and find a beer bottle, having forgot I had even had it in there the night before.

The realization sucks. Remebering the night before. This is a progressive disease and hiding drinks is a classic.

onlythetruth

Yes, that's right. And it's also true that the simple volume of bottles can become a logistical nightmare. We have to do something with them, but we can't just toss them in the recycling bin for all to see, you know? So we hide them. In my case I'd put the empties in the regular garbage and then make sure I took out the garbage every week so the clinking would not alert my husband.

But I still missed a few, and even years after I quit drinking empties would show up when I was cleaning out a cabinet or something.

A true nightmare...living a lie and trying to hide the evidence. Never again.

ivehadenoughnow

Yep my wife back in the day would clean out the pantry and find 10 bottles with just a "splash" in the bottom. I guess I thought that if I left a bit in the bottom, "it wasn't me!!!" pahaaaaaa!

onlythetruth

Oh, the crap we think with our booze addled brains, eh?

drunkyjules

Yes, I have been the one taking the recycing to the drop-off for years because of the INSANE amount of beer cans and bottles. My husband would offer but I felt to guilty knowing it was my disease causing the overload.

Thank god I had the clarity to recognize the problem and thank god for a sober day. Not having to live in that insanity anymore is the best gift we can give ourselves.

ichabod

My DH always hid his bottles and although I knew he was drinking I never really knew how much. I never found bottles everywhere but he had a few routine hiding spots. He's in recovery and no longer drinks.

The other morning we were leaving for work and our neighbor's recycling bin was out and it was filled with booze bottles. Just filled. DH looked at me and said, "that's why I hid them. I didn't want anyone seeing our recycling and thinking I was an alcoholic."

The funny thing is that I've suspected drinking problems in that house for a long time. Nothing concrete, just that intuition spouses of alcoholics have.

CeciliaV

Oh, the magic of those bottles popping up. "It's OLD!" "I don't know WHERE that came from!" Like they just *POOF* appeared out of nowhere. AH has just about run out of hiding spots - sock drawer, desk drawer, briefcase, bookcase, under the mattress, pockets of jackets in the closet...

Sometimes, he does remember where he stashed them all & does get them all out in the recycling (we are in a condo and have a large shared recycling dumpster), and other times, I've seen a couple bottles jammed down into the regular garbage. Still other times, I'll come across an empty that, gasp, shocks him and he has no idea when it's from or where it came from. (Hear that alcoholics?! Magical, heaven-sent liquor!) Only once have I found a partially filled bottle. I gave it to him and told him to just go ahead and have some cojones and drink it in front of me. (Not one of my proudest moments.)

I'm trying to just stop looooooking for them in the first place, but traditionally, when I have found empties, I leave them out prominently for him to find the next day. Some small, immature, evil part of me takes pleasure in that look of wide-eyed terror when he sees the empties & starts to wonder if I saw it, if he left it out by accident, etc. Again...not my proudest moments.

onlythetruth

Yeah, I am sure, not your proudest moments but it has to be hell to be running across empties all the time and having your husband profess shock "where did THAT come from?"

I do remember being absolutely deathly, deathly afraid that my husband would run across my empties. It absolutely chilled my soul to the bone to think that he would do that and find out I was a drunk (even though I denied to myself that I was a drunk, but that's another story). Addiction paints us into such horrible, sick corners...I am amazed any one of you sticks around and puts up with it even for a day.

jamaicamecrazy

My A used to leave the beer cans prominently displayed all over the house. In perfect lines next to his chair, on the floor next to the toilet, on the kitchen counter, on the beach where we spent our vacation. I used to get up in the morning to clean them up because I did not want the kids to see them. I stopped when the kids were old enough to have seen him drinking the night before. Who was I fooling? I always wondered why he did that. It almost felt like he was challenging me. Was it an accomplishment of how much he could drink? Was it to shame himself in the morning as to how much he had consumed? There were 32 30-packs in the garage when I moved back into the house after 6 months. The vodka bottles I found in the basement were a complete surprise though and I then realized how bad his drinking had really become.

m1k3

We stick around because we have our own problems. Me, I was raised, if you can call it that, by an alcoholic father an a Codie mother. So, for me it was easy to slip into that behavior, I Just switched an AF for an AW. Thank god I found recovery.

Your friend,

onlythetruth

Yes, of course. There's a lot that goes into this and many reasons why someone would stay with an addicted or abusive spouse. I know this is OT, but I have a close friend who tried for years to hang on with a husband who cheated on her repeatedly and refused to accept help for a mood disorder. He has NPD too I think. At a certain point it became pretty clear that if he was sick, she was just as much so--yet she refused to look at her part and focused on his.

I know that's what happens on "the other side"... and as painful as it is to be addicted, I think it's even more so to be married to an addict.

android1

I just have to share my empty bottle story.

I found an empty 5th of vodka in the closet, this was before I got any help myself, so I called my wife out on it. She got upset and said it was old of course. I had no idea. She always hid the hard liquor from me, and only drank beer and wine in front of me.

She told me that she had a bottle on top of the fridge too. So a few days later I looked and found a half full half gallon of vodka. My intintion was to dump it out. But I hardly ever drink and vodka is my favorite hard liquor. So I thought I would take a sip before I dumped it out.

Boy was that the smoothest vodka I ever drank, and it was the cheap stuff too. So I smelled it and I realized it was just a vodka bottle with water it in. That was an eye opener. I think until then u didn't realize she had been supplementing her drinking with hard alcohol.

Phils69

I had a neighbor that said her AH would hide bottles around the house like a dog buries bones in the yard. She said it jokingly but I had been around him some and known he was drinking but you would never see him do it. He would just go dig up a bottle and chew in private then come back and think no one was the wiser.

Lulu39

Mine lets his empty wineinaboxes stack up and up and up. He doesn't give a fat rat's clacker who sees them or what is done with them. He knows I will get rid of them because I am so embarrassed by them.

His brother was homeless once and I let him stay here. He is also a drunk. After he moved out (and in with an enabler) I had to break down and attempt to recycle some 35 empty 4 liter boxes of wine. He hid them all behind a sofa in the spare room. He would put his cider bottles in the recycling but not his wine boxes.

Perhaps they save them for some kind of drunken craft activity that they never get around to starting

bamboo10

I love the excuse-those are old they are from months ago. Hmm interesting how there is condensation on them after so many months.