dawnrising

I believe who I fell in love with is who my AH desperately wanted to be, but in the end he couldn't maintain that mask so it eventually came off. Not a bad person just flawed like everyone else but not willing to do the work to become who he wanted to be.

honeypig

This.^^ EXACTLY this.

This is an extremely insightful and accurate description of my XAH.

thequest

Yes and no. It's been my experience with the workplace addict or alcoholic is that they are covered for by other employees which is enabling.

On one hand they are getting paid to pay for own their vice. But with most addictions the longer it goes on the worse it gets. I've seen workplace alcoholics who were covered for for years start having major incidents at work including accidents, getting caught lying and/or simply not doing the job the best they could/should. They also expanded their intoxicating use into hard street drugs. If it weren't for a union they would've lost their job the first time instead of the third time they caught intoxicated during an incident. Those people also wound up loosing their family, marriage, house etc.

To me the 'functional' alcoholic is literally an accident or incident waiting to happen. Functional means they haven't gotten caught or suffered the consequences yet frequently from the help of enablers.

Lunchbox1

velma929

My late husband was fired from a really good job for performance issues. Because he was addicted, he spent a phenomenal time away from his desk. (He was also a smoker so I suspect he was chain smoking to get through the withdrawal of booze each afternoon) His supervisor tried really hard to back him up, and help him see that a pervasive experience of colleagues calling Late Husband's desk and having no one answer was an issue. In the end, keeping him on couldn't be justified, but from where I sat, It looked like they really did try.

He had two more jobs, but neither lasted very long, as his addiction was getting worse.