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Hi all, I've been sober for a year and some time now. By the end of my drinking, I weighed 96 pounds, looked like **** and actually was a day or two away from death from anemia and whatever else was ailing me if I hadn't entered rehab when I did.
My husband has continued to drink and I've been told by my counselor that I have to suck it up and recover despite his usage. I don't think my husband is an alcoholic. He doesn't drink like me and he doesn't create the kind of chaos and pain that I did when I was active. But he does drink every day and has since I met him 17 years ago.
So I know the potential is there. I work a program every day and have a really solid support system which includes my husband but it kind of irks me that he continues to use the stuff that almost killed me.
I don't know. I guess "irks" is a good word because I feel pretty strong around his using otherwise. It only bugs me occasionally.
Any thoughts would be welcome. Thanks in advance.
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Cue the McGowdog... No! Thank YOU!
I think your "recovery program" is failing you if you're a year sober and know that your husband has been a drinker for 17+ years. He may drink more than you know. Do you want he should go elsewhere to drink? Do you want him to abstain from booze because you're spiritually weak? If so, why not just leave him and find a non-drinker?
The bottom line is, are your troubles of your own making or not? If they are not, then you don't need a solution. If you are, perhaps, the source of your problem, you've got hope. You can seek a solution and get free of what's bothering you and the world can go on the way it is and you'll be A-ok!
As far as the box of wine... grow up.
If you're willing to put aside your pride and ego for just a second, maybe you might want to consider the A.A. program. Let me read to you the 10th Step promises if I could. They are, btw, my experience;
And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone, even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.
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Now if you decide to do A.A., you can start by putting your husband's name in column one, what he did to you in column two... drink booze and not hide it from you, and solve your problem in column three because he doesn't have one.
More wisdom gleaned from SR huh?
ReplyDeleteMyself, I don't think I'd want to live with a full blown alcoholic or even a heavy drinker. Not because I'm afraid of booze, but because it just doesn't go along with the life I live.
One of my house mates is alcoholic and in recovery. The other two drink moderately. In fact there is a box of wine and and two or three bottles of Fat Tire or some such beer in the fridge as I type this. The wine has been there for a couple of months, in fact I was telling Kerry she better drink it before it goes bad LOL!
Both of the non-alcoholic house mates also happen to be on a spiritual path, both practice Insight meditation, a Buddhist meditation, and both are socially active in the community. All the same though, their drinking is neither here nor there to me.
My wife seems to be more of a teetotaler than a social drinker. She fears that once she gets started drinking, she might like it too much. The closest I've seen her to drunk is on our blind date 11 years ago at the bar we met in. I was sober and in the Denver group at the time. She only had 4 drinks that night, two of which I bought her, and she later said she was seeing two of me. She described it as feeling uncomfortable and out of control. I don't understand that feeling. She pretty much would like to let loose and drink sometimes, but just doesn't because of her strong sense of "do right". I don't understand that either... not at all. I'm always quite sure I can do both... once the thought of a drink comes. But it hasn't come... and that's the undescribable miracle of it.
ReplyDeleteBut to mock your spouses stash and then drink it... that's kind of childish.
She quickly qualifies herself, unveils her commendable length of sobriety, a vague description of that path to sobriety, then rants like a baby about her rights to power and control.
If you want to drink, honey, then drink. If you have to worry about the world about you and for it to kiss your rosy ass, you might as well get started on them whine bottles, (sic).
My wife is a cheap date, two drinks and she is done, says weird stuff like "I'm starting to feel it, I'm good". I have absolutely no experience with this!
ReplyDeleteLike Jim, I've got booze in the house, bottle of absolute and captian morgans in the freezer. It has come in handy a few times helping a wet drunk through the shakes. Other than that I don't think about it, except for when I mention this at meetings and folks stare at me like I'm an alien. Yep, 10th step promise of the problem being removed is not a theory.