My friend quit drinking again, but things aren't right between us
Part of getting sober is being accountable to people you hurt when you were drinking.
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Hi,
My good friend (we're both women) was a binge drinker in college. She picked arguments with me, then kept me up all night drunkenly apologizing, then started up again when sober in the morning. (I didn't drink at all.) I loved her, and I've never forgotten how painful these episodes were—like being ambushed.
My friend quit drinking a few years later for about 30 years. When we talked or saw each other, now in a long-distance friendship, our dynamic was great. She was nothing like the person she'd been in college.
Then she started drinking again. Immediately, she was subtly different towards me even when she didn't drink. I guessed that she had started up again before she told me. Every bad experience with her drinking from 35 years earlier came back to life in my mind. Eventually, on a Zoom social call, she was drinking, and sure enough, she started to pick on me just a little.
That was five years ago. Now she's quit again, about a year ago.
You assured a recent letter-write that after you stop drinking, "some people are still thinking of you as the person you were before you quit drinking or holding things you did over your head," but if you get sober and stay sober, "Anyone who insists on clinging to it is doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with you."
Despite my friend's recent quitting, I'm still wary. There's an edge that makes me feel I'm about to be, or have just been, subtly bullied. I don’t feel like this with any of my other friends.
I try to maintain nonjudgment and positivity/warmth in our conversations or when we (rarely) see each other. But then I struggle with whether I can trust her to be stable. Do you think I'm clinging to her drinker persona for reasons that have nothing to do with her? I want to do my best for our friendship but also take care of myself. Thank you.
-Wary friend
Hi WF,
Thank you for the question—and the opportunity to clarify what I meant about holding on to things someone did before they got sober. In that case, I was referring to the writer’s general reputation on campus more than their interpersonal relationships, though I still believe that getting and staying sober can often repair damage done to both.
People who only know someone by their reputation as a “problem drinker” and insist on holding that reputation against them well after they’ve quit drinking are doing so for reasons that aren’t entirely about the former “problem drinker.” Maybe they have a history of alcohol addiction in their family and find it hard to trust people who have shown a tendency to drink to excess, maybe they just relish being a little bit of a bully/think it’s fun to belittle someone over a reputation they no longer deserve. The reasons may be understandable or crappy, but there’s something else going on.
It's hard to paint with a similarly broad brush when it comes to relationships like the one you have with your friend from college. When you’ve been hurt by someone, even if it was the result of their drinking, it can be hard to move past that. This is especially true if there is a pattern of such behavior. Regardless of whether that person is sober now, you have every right to decide if and how you want to engage with them.
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At the end of my drinking, I was dating someone I was deeply in love with. Despite that, I lied to and gaslighted him on a near-daily basis. I didn’t think of it as lying and gaslighting—though it couldn’t accurately be described as anything else—I thought of it as a necessary survival tactic. As far as I was concerned, there was one thing necessary for my survival: Alcohol, and one thing necessary for my happiness: My relationship with him.
He was as understanding as any human could be in that situation. He wrote me letters in rehab, and once I was out, we kept talking. Most of our conversations centered around the myriad ways I had deceived him and whether he could ever trust me again. We went over the things I had done in painstaking detail.
Eventually, I realized that I would never be able to meaningfully start living my sober life if I was reliving all the shitty things I’d done. And he realized there was a big difference between wanting to trust someone and being able to do so. Unsurprisingly, the relationship ended.
In the 17 years I’ve been sober, I’ve reached out to him on maybe four or five occasions to say Happy Birthday or congratulate him on a public, professional achievement. (I always want to be friends with my ex-boyfriends, and they typically have zero interest in the idea; I’m sure it says only good things about me.)
His responses are always very polite and very brief. He has no interest in further conversation. I don’t think he’s still stewing over that long-ago relationship; he has moved on and understandably has no desire to engage with someone he associates with hurt and pain. It’s completely fair. Everyone should be able to decide how much contact they have with someone with a history of treating them poorly.
To answer your specific question: No, I don’t think you’re clinging to your friend’s drinker persona for reasons that have nothing to do with her. I think you’re wary because you don’t like the way she treats you when she’s drinking, and—even though she’s been sober for a year— it’s difficult to trust that her bullying isn’t going to reappear. That’s not clinging to an old reputation; it’s a normal, self-protective response to being repeatedly hurt by someone you care about.
I do wonder, though, if you’ve ever talked to your friend about how you feel. Have you told her that you felt bullied by her—both back in college and when she started drinking again more than 30 years later? If you haven’t, and this is a friendship that you’d like to maintain, I think it would be worth doing so.
When you don’t speak up but still feel like you’re being targeted/mocked/bullied, it’s easy to be hypersensitive to any perceived slight. You write, “There's an edge that makes me feel I'm about to be, or have just been, subtly bullied.” That could be because you are being subtly bullied, or it could be fear taking over and making you read into things that aren’t there. If you can clear the air about how your friend acts when she drinks, you might be able to more accurately gauge if she’s still doing it now that she’s sober.
It’s also valuable information for her to know. One of the things that helps keep me sober is knowing what an ass I was when I was drinking. You don’t have to be mean about it; it’s an opportunity to tell her why your friendship flourished after she got sober. In the worst-case scenario, she’s a jerk about it, and you realize that a close friendship might not be right for you two right now. Best case scenario? It helps her reaffirm her commitment to sobriety, and some of the wariness you feel dissipates. I hope it’s the latter.
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I’m not a doctor or mental health professional, so my advice shouldn’t be construed as medical or therapeutic. You are free to take or leave it.
I love what you shared, Katie.
There's so much yummy wisdom in your post!
I would imagine something like this would come up in an amends process, but maybe your friend isn’t doing a 12 step program. I agree that it’s probably best to tell her how you feel. I am always appreciative of people being honest about how my behavior is affecting them, even moreso now that I’m sober. Stopping drinking is just the beginning - true recovery comes from all the other work you do to be the best version of yourself you can be. And it’s easy to slip back into certain behaviors (we call them “character defects”) no matter how much sober time we have. You seem like a thoughtful and caring friend and I hope the convo goes well. If not, I think you’ll just need to figure out what boundaries you need to feel safe in that relationship if you want it to continue.