Being able to recognize if your spouse is an alcoholic can be difficult in many ways. Understanding your partners drinking habits and your own possible role as an enabler can be as stressful to your emotional well-being as your partners alcoholism.

Anyway, first on the list is to discover any particular pattern in your partner's drinking habits. For example, Is drinking a daily event? or is maybe just the a weekend habit? Do they tend to hit the bottle after a sudden row? Or would you say their stressful job is always a good excuse for a drink or two?

As we all know, an occasional social drink and drinking to forget a stressful situation are two separate entities. Someone who is clearly drinking to relieve stress is to be considered a potential alcoholic. If you spouse is consistently having to have a few drinks after work just to relax, most likely they are having alcohol dependency problems.

Many recovering alcoholics state that they always tended to blame someone else for all of their problems; their boss was difficult, their spouse nagged all the time, money was scarce. Instead of admitting to any responsibility, they drank their problems away. Has your spouse been blaming everyone around them for their perceived problems?

One of the sadder aspects of this disease is how it affects the whole family in general, as an alcoholic will avoid all his family commitments. If you feel that the financial burden is falling upon you and that your partner is not responding, then should just try and work out how much of the family budget is being diverted to alcohol.

The facts of the matter whether taken from a survey or a book are always identical and that an affirmative answer to the above questions can only mean one thing and that is that your partner is an alcoholic. A further complication to the situation is that it doesn't only depend on the quantity of alcohol consumed but also any resulting erratic behavior patterns that upset the family ambiance. But putting all this aside, there is a way forward, but first you just need to able to sit down together and talk about it.

The only comforting fact to come out of this really is that there are a lot more people out there in the same boat as you are and that this can be sorted out through their support and guidance. A great way to get started is by looking at the comments made by these people which can be found on the stopDrinkingAdvice.org blog and You will soon realise that you are not alone on this quest and that help is on the way.