About James
Written by the drinker. Which is the wrong way round, and worth saying.
James was the one being managed, not the one managing. That is useful for one specific reason and useless for several others, and both are set out here.
The wrong way round
This site is written for the person at home by the person who was the reason somebody else was at home. That is worth saying at the top rather than burying.
James Roberts. Born in Manchester in February 1976. Drank daily from eighteen to forty-five while running a headhunting firm with twenty staff in travel and hospitality. Functioning, by the measure people use when they mean the bills were paid. Residential treatment at Delamere in Cheshire in June 2020, sober since the twentieth of that month, and never relapsed.
He will not tell you that his stopping proves anything about yours, or about his. It does not, and the network rule on this site is that no page and no guide on it ever says if I could do it, you can.
What that vantage point is good for
One thing, mainly. He knows, from the inside, what was going on behind the answers a partner is given. The reassurance that was calculated. The amount that was negotiated down before it was admitted. The genuine intention at nine in the morning that had gone by six. The relief when somebody stopped asking. None of that is guesswork here, and none of it is said to excuse it.
The second half is other people. From December 2020 he lived in Tenerife and spent several years around people in recovery and the families who arrived with them, from a dozen countries and systems. That is where most of what this site says about the person at home came from — it was said to him, often at kitchen tables, usually by women who had not said it anywhere else.
What it is not good for
He has never been the partner of a drinker. He does not know what it is to lie awake listening for a car. Anything on this site that reads as though it were written from inside your position is written from beside it, and where a claim needs a professional it says so.
He is not a counsellor, a therapist, a domestic-abuse adviser, a social worker, a solicitor or a clinician, and this site is not supervised by any of those.
Declared interests
He was a paying patient at one private clinic in England in 2020. That clinic is named on this page and nowhere else on the site, it has never paid for anything here, and it is not recommended.
He ran a guesthouse in Tenerife used by people in recovery. It has been sold. It is not offered, suggested or bookable through this network.
No clinic, broker, fellowship or medication provider has ever paid for placement, mention or a link on this network. No referral fee has ever been taken from anyone. The rules this site is written under are published in full.