[acb-hsp] Self-perception of women who live with Alcoholic Partner

[J.Rayl]

The Self-perception of Women Who Live with an Alcoholic Partner: Dialoging with Deviance,
Strength, and Self-fulfillment*
by Einat Peled , Ilana Sacks
Life with an addicted partner is demanding and difficult and often requires professional
support
. For the past 20 years, a dominant approach for intervening with the partners of
alcoholic men has been based on the theory of codependency, which holds that the
women share their partners' illness (Asher, 1992; Babcock & McKay, 1995; Byrne, Edmundson,
& Rankin, 2006). In recent years, there has been a growing, mainly feminist, critique
of the use of the codependency approach. In response to this critique, we sought
to study the self-perception of women who live with alcoholic partners, without labeling
them in advance as codependent, in the hope that this would shed new light on their
lives and on ways of helping them.
The Codependency Perspective
Early works on the partners of alcoholics were guided mainly by the psychodynamic
approach and depicted them as suffering from a disturbed personality or an emotional
disorder that not only caused them to choose problematic partners but also contributed
to the partners' continuing addiction (e.g., Edwards, Harvey, & Whitehead, 1973;
Futterman, 1953; Whalen, 1953). The systems theory approach to the phenomenon of
addiction, which was consolidated during the 1970s, also attributed some of the responsibility
for the man's addiction to his female partner. According to the systemic view of
the "alcoholic family," the addiction is not only a problem of the addicted individual
but a symptom of a "familial illness" arising from dysfunctional family relations
around which the family life becomes organized (Stanton & Todd, 1982; Steinglass,
1987; Usher, Jay, & Glass, 1982). The addict, defined as "the family problem," is
shunted aside and his functions are reduced, whereas his partner plays a complementary
part of a "rescuer," a "problem solver," or a "martyr" (Bepko & Krestan, 1985). Focusing
attention on the contribution of the female partner to the alcoholic's addiction
laid the groundwork for the development of the concept of codependency.
Practitioners and researchers alike view the wives of addicts as "codependents"-women
who are focused on and constantly preoccupied with the alcoholic's behavior and the
affirmation by other people, as means of attaining security, self-esteem, and identity
(Beattie, 1987; Subby & Friel, 1984). According to this viewpoint, although the male
partner may be addicted to alcohol, his spouse becomes addicted to the obsessive
preoccupation with drinking and the attempts to control it. This process may go so
far as to take on the symptoms of a physical or mental illness. The woman's behavior
patterns of addiction persist independently from the alcoholism, and she might be
unable to stop her nonfunctional behavior even when her partner has overcome his
addiction (Cappell-Sowder, 1984; Gorski & Miller, 1984; Schaef, 1986). The concept
of codependency has become so widespread and influential, particularly in the United
States, that some regard it as a social movement sustained by profitable business
(Collins, 1993; Messner, 1996).
The Feminist Critique of the Codependency Perspective
The feminist critique of codependency has centered on four main issues. First, critics
argue that sweeping accounts of the causes, formation, and maintenance of codependency
are primarily hypothetical and lack empirical evidence. There is insufficient evidence
of personality profiles or disorders characteristic of women married to alcoholics,
and no significant differences have been found between them and wives of nonalcoholic
men (Babcock & McKay, 1995; Miller, 1994; Rotunda & Doman, 2001). second, feminists
question the utility of a family systems approach as a theoretical lens for addiction.
Systems theory fails to attend fully to the disparities of power and status of men
and women, the pressure of traditional roles in patriarchal society, and the destructive
impact of a problematic individual upon the family (Goldner, 1993; Jordan, Kaplan,
& Surrey, 1991). Third, feminist scholars take issue with the definition of codependency
as an illness. They argue that such a perspective distorts the positive aspects of
the women's functioning and roles by classifying their normative and appropriate
caring and concern for their significant others as padiological. Although categorizing
alcoholics as sick people has helped to mitigate their sense of guilt, labeling their
partners as "codependent" generates guilt and further distress (Asher, 1992; Banister
& Peavy, 1994; Collins, 1993; Harper & Capdevila, 1990; Hurcom, Copello, & Orford,
2000; Lederer & Brown, 1991). Finally, criticism has been voiced against the assertion
that women remain with alcoholic spouses because they are "sick," thus ignoring a
complex array of social and interpersonal factors such as the social expectations
of the feminine role, women's economic dependence, or the level of material and moral
support
 they receive from their social environment (Bepko, 1986; Burnett, 1984). Thus, women
who remain with partners who cause them to suffer are viewed in a negative light
by the very society that brought them to that situation with its rigid definition
of their roles as wives and mothers and their socioeconomic discrimination through
the centuries (Frank & Golden, 1992). In that sense, the theory of codependency may
be regarded as another means of oppressing women (Bepko).
An alternative feminist model of codependency, advanced by Bepko and Krestan (1985),
conceptualized relationships between alcoholics and their wives as maintained by
"overresponsible" and "underresponsible" behaviors. From this perspective, the more
the wife does, functionally and emotionally, the less does the alcoholic spouse.
Conversely, the less the alcoholic does, the more the nonalcoholic spouse assumes
instrumental and emotional family responsibilities. This dynamic preserves the woman's
normative gender role as a caretaker of her home and family. However, with time,
the power relations between the partners becomes reversed, when the woman grows seemingly
stronger, more independent, and autonomous, whereas the addicted man loses power
and becomes increasingly dependent on her. Yet, the woman's inner being tends to
be characterized by feelings of weakness, pain, loneliness and isolation, and loss
of self and authenticity (Banister & Peavy, 1994; Wiseman, 1991). To some extent,
these distressing feelings are intensified by their contrast to the couple's nonnormative
gender roles and power relations and may lead the woman to feel simultaneously "too
much a woman" and "not woman enough." This dialectic, in turn, may intensify her
overactive functioning, thus exacerbating her entanglement in the destructive web
of the marital dynamic (Bepko, 1986).
A Feminist Framework for the Study of Women Living With an Alcoholic Partner
The review of the literature on the codependency approach and its feminist critic
revealed conflicted views regarding the dynamics that lead to and sustain women's
relationship with an alcoholic partner. These may reflect more about the theoretical
orientation of the study than the spousal dynamics of alcoholism. The traditional
codependency theory, which focuses on the women's personality traits to explain their
failure to function adequately within their marital relationship, seems to resonate
with their experience. For example, Asher and Brisset (1988) in a study of 52 wives
of alcoholics found that the women who learned about codependency as part of an intervention
program tended to agree that the concept reflects their experiences. However, the
self-attribution of a common psychiatric diagnosis may interfere with the women's
understanding of their situation through other, potentially less pathologizing and
more empowering frameworks (Saleebey, 1996). In contrast, feminist theory and research
highlight how various social mechanisms, such as medicalization, served to control
women and thus frame various forms of female resistance as illness, madness, and
deviance (Boyd, 2004; Chester, 1972; Chesney-Lind & Irwin, 2007). Such an approach
suggests that the distress of women who live with alcoholic men may be augmented
by the blame and deviance attributed to them by the socially and professionally popular
codependency perspective, which also serve to conceal other or additional aspects
of their experiences. Feminist research aims to reveal women's subjective experiences,
such as those of marriage and intimate relationship, and critically analyze the ways
in which they are shaped by social structures and traditions (Olesen, 1994).
A few studies of partners of alcoholics conducted from a nonpathological approach
were based on stress and coping models (e.g., Rotunda & Doman, 2001; Rotunda, West,
& O'Farrell, 2004). However, their results focus mainly on women's behavioral responses
that may influence the drinking and not on other dimensions of their complex experiences.
Other studies were based on in-depth interviews with partners of alcoholics using
ethnographic (Banister & Peavy, 1994; Wiseman, 1991) and biographical (Velleman,
Capello, & Maslin, 1998) research methods. These qualitative studies enriched our
understanding of the multidimensionality of the women's experiences of alcohol-dependent
marriage involving a complex web of cultural expectations, life circumstances, psychological
dynamics, and interpersonal processes. However, these studies were not focused on
the women's self-perception as partners of alcoholics, nor did they examine their
findings through a feminist theoretical framework.
In this study, we used a narrative feminist approach, aimed at exploring the self-perceptions
of the partners of alcoholics as they chose to present it in their own words and
through their self-created storyline and meanings. It was hoped that this approach
would shed light on wide and diverse areas of the women's experiences and point to
new directions in understanding their lives and needs. In accordance, an effort was
made to maintain a clear differentiation between the portrayal of the women's perspectives
(the Results section) and the theoretical interpretation of these perspectives (the
Discussion section). In the tradition of feminist methodology, the study further
aimed at improving the life conditions of women partners of alcoholics by expanding
the range of self-authorized, socially recognized, and acceptable narratives of their
life experiences (Reinharz, 1994). Accordingly, our research question was "What are
the self-perceptions of women who live with an alcoholic spouse, as presented through
their life stories?"
Method
The study rested on qualitative naturalistic paradigmatic preassumptions (Lincoln
& Cuba, 1985) and applied a narrative feminist approach (lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach,
& Zilber, 1998; Reinharz, 1994). Coming from a naturalistic approach, we assumed
that the experience of living with an alcoholic partner is multiple, constructed,
and holistic, that the understanding of women's perceptions of this experience is
bound within particular context, and that the inquiry of these self-perceptions is
value laden (Lincoln & Cuba). Because the narrative reflects the interface between
the personal identity and the social, historical, and political contexts of the individual's
life, it provided an opportunity for a multidimensional study of women's life situations
and for discovering women's voices as constructed within a particular sociocultural
context. The feminist lens provided the study with a moral and critical-theoretical
framework, stressing the impact of gendered relationships on the women's experiences
and selfperceptions. It was also reflected in the researchers' efforts to facilitate
participants' sense of empowerment, reduce to a minimum the usual hierarchy between
researcher and participant, and maintain reflexive examination of the researcher's
intentional and unintentional influences throughout the investigation, as detailed
in the following sections (Davis, 1986; Lincoln & Cuba).
Sample
The purposive sample consisted of 10 Jewish Israeli women aged 30 - 55 (M = 41, SD
= 8.4), married to alcoholic men with whom they had lived for 10 or more years (M
= 15.5, SD - 8). All but one of the women were mothers; the number of their children
ranged from one to five (M = 2.3, SD - 1.2). Eight of the women were Israeli born
and two immigrated to Israel as children. As regard to formal education, one had
completed elementary school, six had graduated high school, and three had higher
education. All but one worked outside the home during the course of the investigation.
Participant Recruitment
Eligibility criteria for participation in the study were few. We sought adult women
who were living with an alcoholic partner for at least 5 years, who could speak fluent
Hebrew, and whose partner was not treated for his addiction. This last criterion
reflected our effort to locate potential interviewees who have not been previously
diagnosed as "codependent." After the study was approved by the Internal Review Board
of the Tel Aviv University School of Social Work, we published ads in a popular women's
weekly magazine, hung notices in offices of social services and public institutions
catering to women in the country's central region, and communicated by telephone
with social workers in several social services. This campaign produced a single interviewee.
Thus, we reluctantly changed our initial plan and set out to locate women who accompanied
their partners to treatment centers for alcoholics in die region, and it was from
this population that the sample was mainly drawn. We made a point of interviewing
women whose partners were in the early stages of treatment and who, according to
the referring social worker, were not yet involved in the treatment or diagnosed
as codependent. Potential participants were first identified by a social worker who
requested their permission to give their name and phone number to the research team.
They were then approached by telephone for a preliminary explanation of the purpose
and processes of the study. It was emphasized that there was no connection between
their agreement to take part in the study and their partners' treatment. Before the
interview, each interviewee signed an informed consent form.
The decision to discontinue the recruitment efforts after reaching a sample of 10
was affected by the sample characteristics, the nature of the accumulated data, and
pragmatic considerations. Great efforts and many months were required to recruit
10 research participants who matched our eligibility criteria and who would be willing
to reflect on their experience as partners of alcoholics. The reluctance of women
living with an alcoholic partner and who have no history of alcohol-related treatment
to participate in a narrative study, as observed in our study, might be an explanation
for the small sample size in two other interview-based studies of this population
(i.e., five in Banister & Peavy, 1994; six in Velleman et al., 1998). At the same
time, the characteristics of the attained sample were diverse, and more importantly,
the interview data were rich in themes and meanings. Thus, we concluded that the
sample met our goal of including as much information as possible on the phenomenon
under study and directed our efforts to a thorough analysis of the attained narratives.
Data Collection
Data were collected through unstructured in-depth interviews designed to elicit the
interviewees' detailed, authentic, and uninterrupted life stories (Patton, 1990).
The interviews opened with a general question: "I'm interested in the stories of
women who live with partners who are addicted to alcohol, and would like to hear
your story." The rest of the interview followed the interviewee's narrative, with
minimal interference or structuring by the interviewer, who only used active listening
techniques or requests for elaboration or expansion of information already provided
by the interviewee. The interviews lasted between 1.5 and 2 hr and were conducted
by the second author either at the interviewee's home or at the researcher's office,
at the interviewee's convenience. All interviews were recorded and fully transcribed.
Consistent with feminist narrative approaches, we attempted to minimize any hierarchy
between researcher and participant by being respectful and nonjudgmental toward the
participants throughout the study, by maintaining an open personal dialogue between
the participants and the researchers following the interview, and by stressing the
participants' rights and means to control the interview situation. As part of the
informed consent procedures, the sensitivity of the research topic was acknowledged,
and interviewees were granted confidentiality and told they could refuse to answer
any of the questions, stop the interview at any time, and receive a referral to counseling
if they felt the need for it. No material compensation was provided to participants.
Analytic Strategy
The interviews were content analyzed in a four-step process to identify major themes
in the women's self-perceptions as partners' of alcoholic men. Our initial reading
of the interviews yielded over a 100 content categories included in the women's life
story narratives. These were then reduced to 40 central coding categories encompassing
mostly alcoholrelated personal and interpersonal dynamics. Examples of coding categories
included staying and leaving; being a caretaker; secret and shame, coping; comparisons
with other women, mothering, and turning points. Having sorted the interview texts
into these categories, the coding categories were then analyzed separately to learn
about common themes related to the women's self-perceptions as evident in their descriptions
of their marital and personal experiences. The women's narratives reflected images
of who they are, as they chose to present themselves through their stories. We regarded
these images as evidence of the women's self-perceptions. This third stage of analysis
revealed a shared and dominant feature of the narratives pertaining to the women
selfperception, namely, their dialogical nature. We identified 18 dialectical pairs
of adjectives delineating continuums used by the women to explore and discuss their
self-perception within the context of their life story (e.g., confident-unsure, good-bad,
and successful-a failure). Finally, further in-depth integrative analysis of the
texts represented by these continuums was used to identify the major and inclusive
shared dialogical themes in the women's self-perceptions. This fourth stage resulted
in the three central themes reported in this article.
The analysis was carried by the second author, with an ongoing and intensive involvement
of the first author. The dialogue between the coresearchers facilitated a reflexive
examination of the analysis processes. For example, as feminist social workers, one
of whom had previous practice experience in the field of alcohol treatment, the researchers
made a conscious and deliberate effort to avoid as much as possible an interpretive
reading, labeling, and classification of the texts during the data analysis stage,
be it a psychopathological or feminist one, and use the women's own terminology as
much as possible. These efforts, in addition to the interviewing method, supported
the trustworthiness of the findings. Furthermore, we made an effort to obtain feedback
from the participants about whether and to what extent the shared story, as told
through the three central themes revealed through the analysis, reflected their personal
story and self-perception (Lincoln & Cuba, 1985). We managed to locate only three
of the interviewees because of changes of address or phone numbers and lack of cooperation
of family members in passing on messages. All three stated they felt that the findings
represented their stories. One of them remarked that the findings reflected the person
she had been at the time of the interview but now, at the time of the follow-up interview,
she felt differently.
Findings
In the interviews, the women, identified here with pseudonyms, described their childhood
and families of origin, their adult lives-primarily with regard to their relations
with their partners, the realities of living with worsening addiction, and its impact
on family life-and their thoughts about the future. References in the texts to the
women's self-perceptions revolved mainly around aspects of their life with an alcoholic
partner and were often of a reflective, conversational nature. The women seemed to
have taken the interviews as an opportunity to examine what they think about themselves
in light of internal and external standards and expectations. We identified three
such central "inner dialogues" interwoven within their biographic descriptions: a
dialogue with deviance, a dialogue with strength, and a dialogue with self-fulfillment.
A Dialogue With Deviance
Alcohol addiction was perceived by the women as nonnormative. Throughout the interviews,
they sought to locate themselves in relation to this deviance, often referring to
the extent they resembled or differed from their social environment. Lea, for example,
opened her interview with the following statement:
Okay, I will start by saying that living with an alcohol addicted husband or family
members is extremely difficult. First of all there is the wish to hide, the shame.
You go out and people see, and sometimes ask what's wrong with him. (Lea, 54 years
old, a mother of three, married 31 years)
The women's statements on this issue were mostly direct, using the adjectives "normal"
and occasionally "all right" and "not sick." They brought up the question of the
normative in two contexts: one, in discussing their deviance in relation to standards
they described as normative, such as earning capacity, a sense of security, partnership,
and tranquility in the marital relationship. second, in expressing the wish to belong
to the norm and describing their efforts to achieve it and get rid of the sense of
being different. Most women made a point of noting that they came from "ordinary"
families, emphasizing that they were "normal" women who found themselves in an anomalous
situation.
Though they were not asked about this specifically, almost all the women went into
lengthy descriptions about how they had met their partners and decided to marry them.
It appears that living with an alcohol-addicted partner led the women to wonder,
examine, and explain how they found themselves in this relationship. Some of the
women described the process of choosing their partners as a reasonable and natural
move-being attracted to the warmth, love, and protection they provided. Others commented
on the accidental nature of meeting and choosing a partner, implying that any woman
could find herself in a situation in which she was involved with a partner who is
an addict.
Although the choice of a partner was described by many participants as "ordinary,"
they described their marital relationship as "different" from others. They defined
a "normal" marital relationship as a partnership providing a sense of stability and
security. It was within this context that women's selfperception as being different
from other women found its main expression:
With people, when I sit and look on from the side, I keep making comparisons. I say,
they're talking about the house, the children, a car, listen, and the wife, and this
one says such-andsuch about the wife, and this one says what he gives her, what he
does to her, how the woman has to buy what she needs, and how they look after her
in everything. I look on from the side. . . I'm talking about the normal ones who.
. . They care, they get up in the morning and they go and plan trips and. . . That's
how it is. Why, don't I deserve it? Why don't I have it? (Rona, 37 year old, a mother
of two, married 11 years)
Seeking to achieve a "normal" life, Rona and the other women made great efforts to
create a secure environment for themselves and their children and to hide the problem
of addiction, which they perceived as the main reason for feeling different:
Though the children were small, but like I didn't want them to smell, I didn't want
them to. . . [I wanted them] to grow up like in a normal family, so I covered up
what I could so they wouldn't see. If there was a fight, if I quarreled with him,
that was also when the children were not at home, or when they were at my mother-in-law's.
. . That's how it all was, as if there's nothing. I always swept it away so it wouldn't
be seen, always so it wouldn't be heard. And so I tried to bring the kids up in a
normal way. (Rona)
Another related issue of concern for die women was the extent of their responsibility
for their situation and that of their partner. Some of them have been conducting
a prolonged inner dialogue with various accusatory voices-their own, that of their
spouse who blamed them for his addiction, and that of the society, which blamed them
for not leaving their drunken and sometimes violent husband but also for failing
to look after him properly:
In my house there was always beer or. . . not tons. . . there was always in the house,
because people come, visit, or in the summer they want a botde of beer or whatever.
I didn't think it was. . . then they'd say to me, you're stupid, what are you bringing
it in for? So I stopped it, because as I explained to you, I didn't think I was doing
anything bad. I said, all right, so I won't bring it, so he'll go to the store and
buy and it'll be the same thing. In this I admit I maybe made a mistake. His family
used to come, I'd keep the bottles for him. What's the use, such things, you're talking
nonsense, it's your fault. They blamed me a lot. Why is it my fault?. . . Why? Why
did they blame me, I don't know. You're not, you're responsible, you shouldn't have.
What shouldn't I have? Right from the start it wasn't. . . I'm telling you again,
he didn't overdo it, when he came in at eight or so, had a good dinner and drank
a beer, maybe a shot of something strong, but a little bit, so I didn't see anything.
. . Maybe I'm not smart enough, I don't know. I didn't know. (Tanya, 55 year old,
no children, married 29 years)
Their inability to prevent their partners' addiction and deterioration was described
by about half of the women as a personal failure to do what is expected of a normal
wife, that filled them with guilt and shame and further distanced them from the more
competent "others":
You're powerless and useless and feeling guilty, like, what's wrong with me that
I can't help? Where am I, where am I wrong? Why, why doesn't it work out for me?
Why can't I help him? (Romi, 40 years old, a mother of 1, married 12 years)
It would seem that the sense of guilt and difference seeped into the women's self-perception,
largely because of the surrounding society that reminded them of their responsibility
for their partners' behavior, which was seen as their problem. Some of the women
struggled against this perception of themselves as "out of order," by hanging on
to the normal aspects of their lives, as described above, or by countering the charges
leveled at them:
And I mustn't say, Did you drink today? I mustn't say to him, Don't drink! Because
if I say it then I caused him to drink. They always blame the wife, in any situation,
it's the wife's fault. Although I always did think so, that it was my fault and that
I shouldn't speak, I shouldn't. But today I know that really it's not my fault, and
it's not any other wife's fault, it's their own fault, it's they who are destroying
the home. (Michal, 30 years old, a mother of 1, married 10 years)
To summarize, a central dimension of the women's self-presentation in this study
concerned their location on the continuum from "deviant to normal" relative to other
married women-given their partners' excessive use of alcohol, which went far beyond
acceptable norms of social drinking, and their unsatisfactory marital life, which
greatly differed from their ideal of harmonious relationship. The women conducted
a painful and complex dialogue with these deviations from their social environment-they
defined, measured, and strove to reduce them, tried hard to lead a "normal" life,
and suffered from the failure of their efforts to ameliorate the situation. They
made various attempts to maintain an apparent resemblance to the general society
by hiding the addiction and its concomitant problems. As suggested by the words of
Michal and Tanya above, for some of the women, their selfperception as "not normal"
was an obstacle they confronted through a critical self-examination of their responsibility
for the deviant situation in which they found themselves. The considerable efforts
required to maintain a normal routine in the face of their husbands' drinking were
plainly expressed in the women's description of their strengths.
A Dialogue With Strength
All the women we interviewed spoke of various dimensions of their strength, coexistent
and interrelated, reflected in their actual functioning, as well as in their inner
emotional world. A central perception of their strength was related to their ability
to function simultaneously on many planes in a reality fraught with difficulties
and emotional distress. They described many ongoing situations of physical and emotional
overload, sole responsibility for the children, looking after a nonfunctioning partner,
pressures from others in their social environment, social isolation, and, for about
half of them, also verbal and physical abuse by the partner. About a third reported
that they coped with similar situations throughout their lives, beginning in childhood
when they bore heavy responsibilities for their parents and siblings. Their stories
of coping reveal the double burden laid on the women when on the one hand, they suffered
great distress on account of the addiction, and sometimes abuse, whereas on the other
hand, they were required to overfunction and take over the partner's role as parent
and breadwinner. The words of Michal, who was severely abused by her husband, demonstrate
these challenges:
Let me tell you about the daily routine of a husband, an alcoholic husband. You get
up in the morning with hopes. All the time you hope that you'll have a quiet night,
that there won't be any incidents in the night, that you'll get a night's sleep.
That you won't have hours, till four in the morning, to cope with an alcoholic husband.
And you go to work and at work you're supposed to forget it all, simply. . . .That's
a lot of strength, lots of strength to cope in the sphere of work and forget what'll
happen to you at home. To go home and pick up the child, even though you're picking
him up late, and cope with the child's routine too.
About half of the women described the uptaking of the breadwinner's role as a forced
consequence of their partner's failure to meet his expected masculine role. Their
stories revealed their ambivalence about playing masculine roles in the family, as
evident in Rona's use of disclaimers: "I think that I, maybe because I work and I'm
supposedly the earner, as you might say . . .. That is, I feel as if I'm strong,
like I'm maintaining the house, and if I do everything then I feel I'm the man in
the house." (emphasis added)
Another aspect of participants' strength was the ability of most of them to express
their opinions and remain firm, vis-à-vis their significant others. Several of the
women described familial and social messages to the effect that a "good" woman must
put other people's needs before her own. Thinking and expressing independent opinions
enabled these women to counter the messages they received from their families of
origin and to speak their mind to their families or to an aggressive partner. For
some, this was strength they felt they had always had, whereas for others, this was
part of a process of growing assertiveness they had undergone. Yokhi, for example,
described herself as a child who was "always afraid to be bad, to do things others
wouldn't like," and who did everything others asked in an effort to be "good, nice,
and lovable." It took her 30 years of abusive and disappointing marital relationship
to be able to voice her frustration and pain and to decide to take care of her own
needs and plan to leave her partner. Sometimes, in Romi's words, the process of self-assertion
called for "mental powers and intellectual capacity." For the women to stand up for
themselves, they had to be aware of their wishes and thoughts as well as be able
to voice them. The pride with which the women described these instances of self-care
suggests they were powerful experiences for women who were in constant attention
to the needs of others in their immediate vicinity. Sharon, a 38-year-old mother
of five who was abused by her partner, told us of her partner's reaction to the first
time she left him in a restaurant after he started swearing at her: "I would have
never done it before. I told him 'I leave now' and he simply didn't believe it. .
. he was astounded! [He said] 'how could you do this to me?!'"
The third dimension of strength of which about half of the interviewees spoke of
was described by Rona as "inner strength." The use of the word "inner" suggests the
personal, the emotional, and the spiritual elements said to be present in this feeling
of strength. As distinct from the strength expressed through the intensive multitask
functioning referred to above, this "inner strength" was described by the women as
that which enabled them to continue to cope with difficult mental situations, when
they had outworn their abilities to function. For some of them, the inner strength
was their ability to extract themselves from situations on the verge of collapse
and disintegration. For others, it was demonstrated by their survival in situations
of weariness and exhaustion:
He can, for two-three hours, drive you nuts. . . threaten you, get you to the point
that you're simply worn out. Worn out because that's it, you don't have the strength
for it. I'm staying with what's there, you see, you have no choice. After every step
you make you have to. . . you must have. . . I don't know if it's physical strength,
like spiritual strength, a whole lot of inner strength. (Rona)
Most of the women regarded their motherhood as the source of their strength. The
responsibility for bringing up their children, the desire for continuity, and the
sense that they are needed, nourished the women's resilience and hope in the worst
moments. For example, 41-year-old Vered attributed her capacity to survive her hectic
life with her partner to her determination to provide her two daughters the "normal
childhood" she never have had growing up with a schizophrenic mother.
The interviewed women differed from one another in the degree and forms of the strength
they claimed, at least at certain times in their lives. Not all of them perceived
themselves as successful in functioning well, in developing an independent voice
and expressing it, and in taking care of themselves. Some defined themselves as depressed,
even if it did not show in their day-to-day functioning. They spoke of feelings of
helplessness, sadness, anger, and low self-confidence. Yet, none of the participants
described themselves as weak.
To summarize, it appears that the ability to function under harsh conditions was
central to the women's feeling of strength, and that some of them drew considerable
satisfaction from it, as evident in Sharon's laughter when she told us "I do everything
at home, I mean everything!" Fulfilling the traditional gender roles, such as bringing
up the children, looking after the spouse, and doing the housework, were described
by many of the women as "natural," but those who had the sole or major responsibility
to provide for the family and manage its finances showed ambivalence about these
roles, which they regarded as an evidence of their failure to experience a "normal"
and satisfactory marital relationship. When the women's ability to take care of themselves
and their families failed, some of them were able to muster inner strengths, which
enabled them to withstand the crisis until the situation improved.
A Dialogue With Self-Fulfillment
The interviews provided the women with an opportunity to reflect on and assess their
life so far. Many years of constant struggle to maintain a family routine against
all odds set the stage for a keen examination of the meaning of their life. A central
dialogue evident in most of the interviews surrounded the extent to which the women
felt self-fulfilled and satisfied with their life achievements, asking themselves
out loud: "so, what have I done in my life?" "Not much" or "not enough" were the
answers given by many of them, as they described how they have missed out on their
lives so far:
It's just that people get older and it seems to me, I think that slowly their lives
are disappearing, slowly disappearing, and when they get to this age they say, what
have I done all my life. So I lived and looked after a drunken husband, that in the
evening you have to receive him drinking, if it's not curses and violent things,
then it's seeing him sprawled on the floor, dragging him, changing his clothes that
got wet in the rain. . . that he peed on himself, and hold him and drag him and then
he gets up and slaps you for doing everything for him. . . It's awfully hard. Ten
years burned away. Without thinking for a moment where I was, what I've done, what
I wanted to do with myself. (Michal, 30 year old, a mother of one)
As mentioned above, most of the women drew meaning in their lives from their mothering,
and many of them conveyed a sense of success and achievement in their descriptions
of their children. Nevertheless, some made a distinction between their self-fulfillment
as mothers and their ability to feel satisfied with their lives as a whole, as reflected
in Yokhi's words:
"I actually keep saying, Yokhi, what have you done with your life? Aside from the
fact that you gave birth and raised four children? It's true they're not street children,
they're my children, children who had a home, lovely children . . . But beyond that,
emptiness, I have emptiness . . . (Yokhi, 51 year old, married for 32 years, a mother
of 3)
Further, several older participants told of feelings of grief they experienced when
the children left home. They described how the business of looking after the children
mitigated the deprivations in other areas of their lives, such as marital relations
and intimacy. It seems that the very fact that their partners were dysfunctional
and left the upbringing of the children entirely to them intensified the feeling
of emptiness when the children grew up.
The women's sense of loss of self and of selffulfillment seemed to have played a
major role in the dynamics leading all but one of them to contemplate separating
from their partner, as described by Sharon, a 38-year-old mother of five, married
for 10 years:
Either he quits drinking or. . .no one said we have to stay together until we're
120. Many couples divorced and nothing happened. I kept thinking about the kids,
[I stayed] because of the kids. But I came to a conclusion that I am also important.
Yet, self-fulfillment and self-care were perceived by some of the women and people
around them as less important than their personal and social obligation to care for
their "sick" partner, making it extremely difficult for them to actualize their fantasy
to start a new life:
Sometimes I think that, here, he will quit the alcohol and I will leave him. But
when he was deep in the alcohol and I thought about this I was terribly afraid of
what the close family would say: It's exactly like a person sick with cancer, he
is sick now and you throw him out. (Yohki)
Yet, more than half of the women described the absence of self-fulfillment as a temporary
situation and stressed their hope and potential for fulfilling their needs and aspirations
in the future. They defined self-fulfillment as doing for themselves, satisfying
personal wishes and ambitions, and achieving intimacy in marital relations. It is
like a dream suspended:
I feel like creating a kind of a work of art, you know, and succeeding with it. That's
what. . . that's what I really would like. OK, I'm young, I'm 30, I've got time.
A guy who appeared on a [talk show] about a month ago started to write at 40. So
all right, life isn't over yet. I've still got time. I'm waiting patiently for when
my turn will come. Listen, seven bad years, seven good years. I'm waiting. (Ofra,
married 10 years, a mother of two)
On the whole, the interviewees described themselves as unfulfilled women who missed
out in their lives, exposing a painful gap between their competent everyday functioning
as wives and mothers and their failure to take care of themselves. Some expressed
the ambition and hope that in future, they would be able to fulfill themselves and
then, perhaps, they would be happy. Their hope for a change and a better future can
be seen as another form of strength. The very decision to tell their personal story
in a research context, after many years in which they strained to hide their situation,
is evidence of a process of allowing greater space for themselves and their stories.
Discussion
This study sought to learn about the self-perceptions of women who shared their lives
with an alcoholic partner. A feminist framework stressing the significance of the
women's subjective perceptions and the impact of gendered relationships on the women's
experiences and perceptions is a lens by which we interpret the findings. In this
discussion, we center on the perception of the women as victims and the compatibility
of the findings with the social perception of these women as codependents.
The Women as Victims
All the women we interviewed described their experiences of being controlled by their
partners by means of direct threats or as a product of their addiction and dysfunction,
and many told of their sufferings as victims of spousal abuse. Are these women victims?
Much has been written about the meaning of victimization in the lives of women. The
social depiction of women as victims is a complex one. The victim is seen as pure,
innocent, and helpless in contrast with the "evil" aggressor, and when she overcomes
the aggressor, she is labeled courageous. At the same time, the "victim" is perceived
as an incompetent, powerless, unsuccessful woman, who displays psychosomatic symptoms
(Lamb, 1999). The concept of "victimization" implies a process whereby the personal
strength of the victims is taken away and they experience loss of control over their
lives, whereas another person controls them physically, mentally, or economically
(Barnett & LaViolette, 1993; Kirkwood, 1993). It has been found that abused women
prefer to avoid the label "victim," because of its negative connotations, and to
stress active aspects of power and control in their conduct (Kirkwood; Lamb). Similarly,
the women we interviewed did not depict themselves explicitly as victims. The women
also did not fit the common social definition of "victim" because despite having
suffered greatly in their lives, they continued to function and mostly portrayed
themselves as strong and capable, though frustrated and sad. Moreover, most of the
women's descriptions of their partners did not fit the common definition of "aggressor"
because of their own complex predicament-categorizing addiction as an illness and
a weakness turns their partners also into victims and exonerates their abusive and
domineering conduct toward their partners.
If women who live with alcoholics do not perceive and present themselves as victims,
it may prevent them from accessing the social and professional
support
 which is extended to "worthy" victims in our societies. Nor, at the same time, will
they be likely to win recognition of their success in overcoming the distressing
hardships of their lives and continuing to function. No wonder, then, that when professionals
do approach them, it is usually in order to enlist them as agents of change for their
partners (e.g., O'Farrell & Fals-Stewart, 2006; Walitzer & Dermen, 2004).
Are the Women Codependents?
This study was conducted against the backdrop of the common professional perception
that wives of alcoholics suffer from an emotional disorder (i.e., codependency) that
causes them to facilitate and preserve their partners' illness of alcoholism. The
findings propose that many of the interviewed women felt responsible for their partner's
functioning and health, invested extensive efforts to control their partners' drinking,
and experienced difficulties in finding self-fulfillment other than through their
roles as mother and wife. Although such a portrayal could have been interpreted as
typical of codependent women, suggesting the women chose and remained in the relationship
for the emotional and relational benefits it provided them (Beattie, 1987; Subby
& Friel, 1984), the meaning the women themselves attributed to these stories was
very different.
Rather than seeing themselves as rewarded facilitators of the men's drinking problem,
the women seem to have portrayed themselves as struggling with the fatalities of
their partner or his addiction. These women were concerned with the impact of the
addiction on their self-image and social image, and on their ability to find meaning
in their lives, and stressed their means of coping with the ongoing distress they
experienced as partners of an alcoholic. As demonstrated by the findings, many of
the women suggested that following a normative upbringing and courtship, they found
themselves in an anomalous marital relationship with a problematic partner. They
attributed their deviation from the prevalent norms to their circumstances rather
than personality. It appears that, from their viewpoint, living with an addicted
partner was not a choice but a dreadful stroke of fate inflicted on them and their
children and with which they had to contend. As in the majority of the families studied
by Haugland (2005), the women invested much of their effort in maintaining a normal
routine despite abnormal circumstances. This required various types of strengths
that they have mastered to differing extents.
The commitment and sense of responsibility toward the needy and dependent partner
conflicted with the women's desire to do more for themselves. The participants in
the study chose to contend with this inner conflict of intersecting interests by
devoting most of their resources to taking care of their partner and their children.
Does this mean that they are codependent? As we have noted in the introduction, although
the codependence approach describes this choice as a symptom of a disorder that causes
the women to preserve the problem of addiction in the family, a feminist interpretation
suggests that the women's behavior may be impacted in significant ways by the gender
norms in their society. Though there is evidence of growing power, choice, and freedom
for young girls nowadays (Aapola, Gonick, & Harris, 2005), traditional norms regarding
women's roles still impact women's lives in meaningful ways, making it difficult
for them to center on and fulfill their own needs (Bowden, 1997; Shalev, 2003). Within
these norms, self-care, particularly at the expense of the family, often leads women
to a sense of selfishness, guilt, and aggression. Thus, it is often easier for women
to employ their strength by advancing other people (Baker-Miller, 1987; Friedman,
1996; Tavris, 1992). It seems that the women we interviewed were socialized to give
priority to the needs of others at the cost of their personal benefit. Therefore,
the difficulty experienced by the participants in acting directly for themselves
should not be regarded as pathological but as the normative situation of women as
a whole and particularly of women married to ill or disabled partners (e.g., Dekel,
Goldblatt, Keidar, Solomon, & Pollack, 2005). Furthermore, it should be noted that
these women's awareness that they were neglecting their personal needs is inconsistent
with the codependency approach, which postulates that they should lack awareness
of their own needs (Subby & Friel, 1984).
An important aspect of die social construction of "wordiy victims" discussed above
is their visible attempt to free themselves from their victimizing predicament. Women
who do not follow this expected script are suspected of being not victims of harsh
circumstances but rather collaborators, either willing or driven by an emotional
disorder, in the problematic situation (Peled, Eisikovits, Enosh, & Winstock, 2000).
>From this viewpoint as well, the motives of the wives of alcoholics who continue
to live with their partners are suspect. The theory of codependence holds that a
woman's inability to leave an alcoholic partner indicates a pathological clinging
to the power and control she wields in the relationship. Indeed, the women we interviewed
did reveal to us various aspects of their strength, but they did not attribute to
them the fact of their remaining with their husbands. As they see it, it is their
commitment to maintain a "normal" home, to care for their "sick" partner and other
family members, and the lack of material means and social
support
 that prevented-and still prevent-them from leaving their partners. Further, these
social and gender limitations seemed to be particularly pronounced in Israel.
Specifically, a "familist" orientation, characterized by the centrality of marriage,
die unequal division of labor and prerogatives between husband and wife, and the
role of women as wives and mothers, is particularly dominant in Israel (Fogeil-Bijaoui,
1999; Tamir, 2007). The centrality of the family in Israel is reflected in the construction
of the individual's daily life by formal and informal institutions, both religious
and secular. For example, "domestic peace" (a rabbinical term for marital reconciliation)
is viewed as a value in itself, even at the cost of the individual's happiness or
wishes. Though divorce rates in Israel have increased over the past decades, they
are still low compared with other industrialized countries, and a divorce of a Jewish
couple is still granted only by an Orthodox rabbinical court and perceived by large
segments of society as a "failure" and an undesirable deviation (Halperin-Kaddari,
2004; Tamir). Women's wages, the policies of housing, education, and employment,
as well as the tax system all further reflect and preserve this perception (Fogeil-Bijaoui;
Halperin-Kaddari). This state of affairs makes it very difficult for women, especially
with young children, to leave their partners. Further, it is possible that the participants'
functioning ability and economic capacity, which could have helped them to leave
their partners, paradoxically caused them to stay with the men. The gap between the
women's strength and the men's dependence construct the leaving wife as the strong
abandoning the weak. From this standpoint, the better the woman functions, the greater
the social expectation that she will stay and "save" her "sick" husband. Such social
expectations also contribute to the women's sense of commitment to their partners.
Limitations and Implications for Further Research
Our findings correspond with research on the experiences of various groups
 of women who live with and care for an abusive, ill, or disabled partner. These
narratives depict the women's struggle to both comply with personal and social expectations
regarding their caregiving role and take care of themselves (e.g., Boeije & van Doorne-Huiskes,
2003; Dekel et al., 2005; Paun, 2003; Raschick & Ingersoll-Dayton, 2004; Taylor,
1993). Yet, our sample does not allow generalization to other settings but, rather,
posits a cautious transferability of working hypotheses on the basis of insights
gained in the study (Lincoln & Cuba, 1985). As noted above, we had difficulty in
finding women who would agree to take part in the study. The study's findings and
discussion offer possible explanations of this difficulty. First, the great resources
required by life with an alcoholic spouse, while maintaining a semblance of "normality,"
leave little time for other activities and possibly little interest in formulating
a coherent "story" to communicate to other people. second, the women may feel that
focusing on the life stories of the wives of alcoholics is inappropriate because
it diverts the attention from the "sick" spouse to them. Third, their life stories
contain a complex confrontation with difficult feelings of deviance, pain, frustration,
and so on, so that taking part in a study may appear off-putting and threatening.
There is no doubt that the participation demanded from the women considerable effort
and daring, as it entailed a painful inward look and the courage to expose their
situation to others. There is no telling to what extent the stories of the participants
reflect the stories of other women who live with addicted partners. Nevertheless,
it is possible to examine the insights derived from this study in relation to other
women, as individuals and as a group, and thereby enrich our dialogue with them.
Several future directions for research arise from this study. First, because most
of the women, with hindsight, emphasized the processes of personal transformation
that they had undergone, a long-term study tracking these transformation processes
as they unfold will deepen the knowledge about their selfperceptions and help formulate
suitable provisions for their changing needs. An additional focus could be a more
extensive examination of the issue of strength in general, and inner strength in
particular, which played an important role in the lives of the women participating
in this study. second, in view of the limited sample of this study, future research
may address other populations of spouses of alcoholics. For example, it is suggested
to examine the relevance of the themes found in this study for community women who
chose not to approach intervention services for their or their partner's problem.
Third, the gender/social-based explanation proposed for this study's findings raises
the question whether similar themes are present in the experiences of women whose
partners are not addicted to alcohol.
Implications for Practice
This study has implications for direct intervention with spouses of alcoholic men,
for policy, and for services development. The three themes emerging from the experiences
of the participants concerning their self-perception call for going beyond treatment
that sees them as agents of change for their partners, to one that caters to their
own particular needs. Such intervention will require an emphasis on listening to
the women's stories and understanding their subjective perspectives regarding their
life with an alcoholic partner (Bepko, 1986; Bepko & Krestan, 1985; Burnett, 1984;
Lederer & Brown, 1991; Sloven, 1995). In the light of our findings about the meaning
of strength for these women, it is proposed that intervention programs consider accommodating
this topic as part of a general empowering intervention approach with them (Burnett).
For example, practitioners can help each woman review her life, identify her various
strengths, including latent "inner" ones, and discuss how she may find self-fulfillment
in ways other than providing services to others.
The study offers several promising directions in the areas of policy and services
development. First, it points at the value of broadening the existing knowledge base
relating to the spouses of men addicted to alcohol. This is especially salient with
regard to the social- and gender-based aspects of diagnosis and treatment. Recognizing
the distinctive needs of these women, and understanding their difficulties in opening
up toward society in general and toward professionals in particular, may help to
make the various services available to them more accessible. Conveying this information
to professionals in the field will allow for suitable treatment to be tailored for
women who apply for help. It may also help formulate a more comprehensive and effective
outreach effort for women who, in their daily struggle to survive under difficult
and pressured life conditions or who are overwhelmed by feelings of shame and guilt,
are unaware of the social resources available to help them. Increasing the awareness
and sensitivity of professionals in this area will allow them to be more effective
in recognizing women who need help but find it difficult to accept it. At the system-political
level, this study suggests a need for policies that
support
 the economic, social, and employment status of such women, by allocating suitable
resources to the appropriate programs at the various treatment frameworks, as well
as to other services that help women living with alcoholic partners to break free
of the cycle of unemployment and economic hardship that often accompanies their gender
or social roles.
-1-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication Information:
Article Title: The Self-perception of Women Who Live with an Alcoholic Partner: Dialoging
with Deviance, Strength, and Self-fulfillment. Contributors: Einat Peled - author,
Ilana Sacks - author. Journal Title: Family Relations. Volume: 57. Issue: 3. Publication
Year: 2008. Page Number: 390+. © 2008 National Council on Family Relations. Provided
by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Jessie Rayl
thedogmom63 at frontier.com
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