As a middle-aged woman with a pulse, it’s not often I look at Brad Pitt and experience a crushing sense of disappointment.

But this week, I encountered this curious sensation as I read the interview he did with Esquire magazine, in which he revealed that after seven years of sobriety, he has started drinking again.

‘I got back off the wagon,’ he told the magazine. ‘In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple of times went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.’

The journalist then asked the single most dangerous question you can pose to someone who’s had to quit drinking because of a problematic relationship with alcohol: can you now have a glass of wine?

Oh, sure, it might seem totally innocent if you’re the kind of human who can pour a small amount of rosé out of a bottle then put back in the fridge door for the rest of the week. But Pitt is clearly not that, admitting that he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, his divorce from Angelina Jolie prompting him to quit the booze in late 2016.

Pitt is, by his own admission, a problem drinker, and asking a problem drinker if they can have the odd glass of wine is a bit like asking someone with a nut allergy if they can occasionally treat themselves to a Snickers bar.

Brad Pitt is a self-described problem drinker, but says he can now have 'a few glasses' of wine if he is 'professional about it'. Bryony Gordon warns, 'Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic'...

But to be fair to the interviewer, Pitt also seems to have misunderstood the nature of sobriety and alcoholism.

‘Well … I can have a few [glasses of wine],’ he told the interviewer. ‘But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.’

And in just a few deluded sentences, I went from fancying Brad Pitt to pitying him. Because in my experience, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Being able to abstain from booze for long periods of time doesn’t prove you can drink responsibly, or ‘professionally’, as Pitt refers to it – it just proves that you can’t drink. And in saying otherwise, Pitt is doing some of the most terrible acting of his career.

Perhaps I’m being uncharitable. Maybe Pitt really has pulled off the almost impossible, and taught himself to moderate his alcohol intake after finding himself in a situation where things got so bad, he was forced to remove his ‘drinking privileges’ (his own words).

But in my nine years of sobriety, I’ve not yet met anyone who’s succeeded in doing this.

However, I have seen plenty of people who have relapsed, and tried to convince themselves (and everyone around them) that they’ve got things under control, but they usually crawl back to sobriety with their tail between their legs some time later – if they’re very lucky. Many never make it back, living out their lives in alcoholic misery and squalor.

And this is why I’m so disappointed by 62-year-old Pitt’s public pronouncement. Because he must know, deep down in his soul, how unhelpful such declarations are to a community where denial and delusion aren’t just pitiful – in many cases, they can be deadly.

I know too many alcoholics who have lost everything in their attempts to drink like a normal person. I imagine that, given Pitt has been to a few AA meetings, he has encountered these people too. What message is he now sending out to a world which already misunderstands addiction and alcoholism?

Angelina Jolie filed a lawsuit in which she claimed Pitt threw alcohol over her and their children while on a private jet. Reports say she ‘is not surprised’ her ex-husband is drinking again

When I was in active addiction, I used to see those ‘drink responsibly’ signs on the back of wine bottles and wonder what was wrong with me. I was an alcoholic, of course, but the shame attached to that word was so big I went out of my way to prove it didn’t apply to me. It was only after a series of increasingly dangerous scrapes that I realised it was going to be much easier to simply accept I was one and that I was lucky to be alive by this point.

One of the things you learn, when you finally come to terms with your alcoholism, is that drinking nothing is genuinely easier than trying to only have one or two. Alcohol lights me up like a Christmas tree – once I start, I don’t stop.

There is a truth we all learn, in recovery: that for us, one drink is too many, a thousand is never enough. And this is why I don’t believe a word that Pitt said in his Esquire interview.

After their break-up, Angelina Jolie filed a lawsuit in which she claimed Pitt threw alcohol over her and their children while on a private jet. Though the actor vehemently denies these claims, not a single one of their six children is said to speak to Pitt now, with several of them recently filing to legally remove his surname from theirs.

Reports say Jolie ‘is not surprised’ her ex-husband is drinking again, and suddenly you realise this is not some superficial drama, but a situation involving children that is kind of tragic. Because take away the Hollywood gloss and the magazine covers, and the truth is that Brad Pitt isn’t actually anyone special. He’s just a sad old man in the grip of a relapse.