“A woman drinking is not very pretty.” Phrases like this, Pamela H. Heard them too often in her life. Today at age 43, he knows that it was precisely this little insidious music of shame that locked her in silence around her alcolism for too many years.
In adolescence, this resident of Montpellier (Hérault) slid gently to alcohol, without a clash, almost without realizing it. At age 17, it was for the party, like the others, the vessels became reference points for years, she begins to drink silently. Because when you are a woman, you don’t drink. Or at least not outdoors.
“I was especially drinking alone. At night, sometimes in the morning. White alcohol because it looks like water. I didn’t do anyone,” he told BFMTV.com.
“Liberating speeches”
“I returned from work: a good day? Well, well, a small drink. A bad day? Well, a drink, then two, then three, then the bottle. Then a bottle of wine was not enough, so it was crescendo and I arrived at strong alcohol as vodka even during the day,” recalls this former sales manager, today for 10 months.
“You have to break the vicious circle of shame!”, Touch your fist at the Pamela table, which now wants to “talk to him” so that women care about their silence. If alcoholism affects one in 10 women in France, between 1 and 1.5 million women, Laurence Cottet points out that the problem is still largely invisible due to the taboo that surrounds the question, although the lines begin to move.
Several personalities, including actress Muriel Robin, recently revealed to have been an alcoholic in a documentary “Female alcohol: break the taboo” Transmitted to mid -May in France. 5. The model Noémie Lenoir always hoped that suffering from this addiction: “I am an alcoholic and I will be my whole life. And it is not a shame. It is not a pride, it is a disease,” he summarizes.
“Libéricos” who speak that Laurence Cottet is delighted, an ancient alcoholic who has become the patient with addictology and the president of the association, which accompanies women with a problem with alcohol.
“In my time, when I was sick, there was talk so much that I had the impression of being alone on earth to have this problem. In these cases, we continue at home like in a hole with rats and die.”
“Pophtrone” versus “Bon Vivant”
Mounted by shame, Rachel had also become accustomed to drinking in secret, camouflating her bottles. This 52 -year -old woman confesses, for example, that during the alaris, she was absent to drink so that those around her think she was reasonable. “The result was visible, but I didn’t want them to see me,” says this woman, who has managed to get her head for several months thanks to the mutual aid group “Stop alcohol & addicons.”
“The eyes of others in me pushed me to hide to consume,” said Rachel, who explains that this shame “prevented him from being transparent in consumption (his) consumption.” “Only the situation worsened, because suddenly drinking in the shadows no longer made me filter or limit.”
As a woman and mother, Rachel explains that Avori always had in a corner of her head the idea that her behavior was “misleading”: “When she drinks, a man goes through a good life, a woman much less because she is in charge, very often, the education of children, the work, the outfit of the house. What is obviously irreconcilable with excessive consumption of alcohol.”
A gender analysis that Laurence Cottet also shares, for whom the woman plays “a kind of sacred figure that is supposed to show the example at home.” “The aspect of society in the woman who drinks is much more difficult, much more violent than in man.” It is enough to look at the vocabulary used to describe both:
“On the one hand, we will have the Pochron, the depraved, the wandering, the easy woman,” he says. “On the other hand: ‘He who takes advantage of life’, the ‘fun of the service’ or even the expert, the connoisseur in wine or whiskey.”
“We are noted, we are observed”
Stéphanie, a 48 -year -old former alcoholic for 10 months, has had the impression that alcoholism was not considered a real disease. “It is still 10 or 15 years ago, it was seen as a weakness or a vice. We thought it was a choice. And when we fell, that we lost the orientations or that we were kidnapping our children as if it were my case, we simply listen: ‘It is well done for her. “
According to her, society prefers “to look the other way” in front of female alcoholism. In the last 20 years, the forties have seen everyone around her move away from her. “I experienced the isolation of my friends who stopped giving contact and after my family, my spouse, my children. It sank even more, because we can no longer talk to anyone and we upload it,” said this resident of Yenne (Savoie), who fell into his mother’s march.
“When it is so, we are bad and when we are going wrong, we drink even more.”
This woman tells the lies, pretexts and other bank strategies that she could invent to pretend “normality.” “We are indicated, we are observed,” he recalls, however. “I said that I bought red wine to make a meat of Burgundy meat. But hey … the Burgundy, it was four times a week.”
“Even when I hadn’t got drunk, they looked at me badly. Every time I left, when I was talking on the phone, people listened to my voice to find out if I had drunk or not,” said Savoyard. “People moved or ignored me without understanding why. When it was the birthday of one of my children, I invited friends, friends … and nobody came.”
Although all this is now behind her, Stéphanie has the bitter feeling of having been marginalized and still be classified by her alcoholism. Nice, he regrets that some people have not tried to communicate with her, still giving her a look of contempt and judgment on her today. Two months ago, for example, he had the sad surprise to discover on Facebook that his son had married and that he had not been invited.
“It’s a fog”: Muriel Robin returns to her 30 years of alcoholism to “try to help” worried women
“It is not a pity (…), it is a disease”: Noemie Lenoir trusts for the first time in her alcoholism
Source: BFM TV
