Human Growth and Development
Emerging Themes
In this conversation with Brendan, Deanna is describing her partner’s drinking problem and her concerns about it. Alcoholism, like any kind of substance abuse, is a problem that is challenging to manage, both for the person affected and for those close to them, and this is one of the themes here. But you may also have noticed how Deanna talks about the problem, and what we learn about the context in which it has arisen, and about the dynamics of the relationship between Zoe and Deanna.
Deanna makes it clear that she is someone who prides herself on her ability to cope, to ‘get on with it’, and we also know that she has chosen a career helping those with mental health problems. She became a carer for her sick and depressed mother (who also had a drinking problem) at an early age, so there will be something very familiar about the role she has found herself taking in relation to Zoe, who was ‘a mess’ in the early days of their relationship. It is significant that after Zoe stopped drinking and got her life back under control she and Deanna encountered serious difficulties in their relationship. As Zoe’s career took off again they found themselves having to juggle the competing demands of two different, equally demanding, lives and sets of priorities, and Deanna was no longer in her accustomed role as carer. We can see how she tried to hold onto this (‘I thought the commute would be too much for her’). And she tells us she had reservations about Zoe going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and doesn’t sound enthusiastic about her going back again now, which begins to sound like an unconscious attempt to preserve the status quo. After all, when Zoe stopped drinking before it was nearly the end of their relationship.
This is not necessarily just about Deanna trying to hold on to a familiar role. There may be deeper psychological defences at work here, which we will discuss in the next section, and which make Deanna’s narrative unreliable. For instance, when she tells Brendan that everything is fine, he knows her too well to take this at face value, and gently encourages her to say a bit more. However, she still glosses over quite a few difficult areas. She only mentions in passing the decision that they are now facing about what to do at the end of Zoe’s maternity leave, just as she presented the decision about which of them should have the baby as a foregone conclusion (the age difference between them is not great). Both of these decisions have a huge effect on their roles within the family, and the dynamics of their relationship. She also lets Brenda know that she is under considerable pressure at work, but doesn’t acknowledge the stress that this work–life imbalance may be causing, both to her and to Zoe, or the effect it is having on her relationship with Sophia. It is not an unusual pattern for couples after the birth of their first child that the parent doing the child care and the parent with the work responsibilities outside the home find themselves on divergent tracks, each finding it difficult to appreciate the stresses that the other is under, and it sounds as if this is happening now with Zoe and Deanna. (In heterosexual couples, the male partner would typically be the one going to work and the female partner the one who stays at home, which can lead to resentments about being pushed into a stereotypically gendered role. Obviously, that doesn’t apply here.) It will be made more acute by the fact that neither of them has much family support to draw on; as Brendan observes, this can be a life saver at this stage in the family life cycle.
We don’t get much sense from Deanna about what Zoe’s life is like at the moment, or how she is feeling, though we know that she is drinking again, which is likely to be her way of expressing that she is struggling with her role. She is probably drinking more than Deanna thinks, too. There is denial on both sides here. It is common for people with a drinking problem to deny its extent, both to themselves and to others; the first stage of AA’s twelve-step programme is for the alcoholic to admit that they are powerless over alcohol and that their life has become unmanageable (Alcoholics Anonymous, online). So Zoe is probably not acknowledging the full extent of the problem (though her reluctance to drive may be a clue, given her previous drink-driving conviction). Deanna is also tending to minimize it (‘it’s not as if she was on the vodka, like she was before’), and it is clear that she herself, like many people, uses alcohol as a way of relaxing and managing stress. Having a glass of wine with Zoe has been a way for her to relate and reconnect, and she is reluctant to give that up.
We also know that Deanna is someone who needs to feel that she is in control of her life, for very good reasons rooted in her history. So, like Zoe, she will find it hard to acknowledge when things are out of control. She sees herself as strong and capable, but while her narrative emphasises Zoe’s dependence on her, she does not recognise the extent of her dependence on Zoe, though we can see how she reacts against anything that might mean that Zoe is less available to her (working a distance from home, attending AA meetings). She is also not taking much of a share in the care of Sophia, leaving Zoe with most of the responsibility for this. Perhaps she finds the absolute dependency of a small baby difficult to cope with, as she tends to deny her own dependency needs. Deanna identifies Zoe’s drinking as the problem in their family, but for Zoe to be able to change this, Deanna will need to change too.