Welcome to MIP Sarah - glad that you found us and glad that you joined right in! Your post tells me that you'll do well in recovery! I totally understand the fear of the first meeting - I was scared to go and walk into a room full of strangers. That fear melted away almost as I crossed the threshold. Al-Anon is truly the only place where I felt 100% safe. I did not know what insanity was around me vs. in me. I did not know there were others who were also affected by this disease in family or friends. And it seemed like a foreign language when they told me that I should focus on putting me first.

Let us know how it goes - looking forward to getting to know you better and to hearing about your first meeting. We use the meetings, the literature (should be available at meetings), the 12 Steps, fellowship and sponsor to work on healing ourselves in recovery. We learn how to detach from the disease and the diseased as well as the insanity and we learn how to establish healthy boundaries. It works really well when we can put it all together one day at a time!

My parents owned a business with my aunt/uncle many moons ago. I and 2 of my cousins worked there. Without the disease, it was quite dysfunctional. I learned my lesson then - will not ever work with/for family again!!! Keep coming back - there is hope and help in recovery!

Sarah, you sound like you are already well on your way. Great awareness. You beat yourself up a bit too much for trying to help/fix at first. We all do that...it's natural and shows you are a caring person. The fact that they are addicted is what makes your intervening unhelpful and stressful to yourself.

So you are already voicing the best plan of action any of us could probably tell you. Face to face alanon...sponsor...you have willingness. Keep it up! Give yourself some credit for getting to this point.

Thank you both for your responses. I have come to a point in my life where I have realized that the only changes I can make, are changes within myself. I have to accept everything as it is, and learn how to maneuver within it.
I do know that I have a LOT of work to do though.
I am very weak right now where my family is concerned.
I love my mother, but I have realized that she is incredibly narcissistic and I am co dependent. I really do thrive on my parents approval. So much so that I've taken on more than my share of the family business, covering my hours as well as my brothers and the entire workload, just to "help". I now realize I was never helping. I was looking for a pat on the back, and assurance that I was doing a good thing.
I never got it, I only got frustrated, overwhelmed and eventually grew very resentful of my brother and my parents.
My brother hasn't spoken to me in over a year. My resentment caused me to get angry with him (which we all know is a waste of your time and energy).
Covering my brothers hours at work caused my boyfriend to have to pick up the slack at home. My kids were missing their sports practices and sometimes games because I wasn't there to divide the work.
Eventually we gave up extra cirrikculars all together, and my kids came to work with me every day as I couldn't afford childcare. I kept telling myself to be grateful and appreciative, because I could have NO job and NO care for my kids.

I had myself convinced that I was doing such a good thing for my parents, but it came at the expense of me being a good parent. I regret that a lot. My parents took advantage of that.
Even as I begged them to hire another employee to help out, they refused and said they needed to keep my brother on salary so we couldn't afford another employee.
Because I was getting paid, I should be grateful that I had a job and a roof over my head.
They used that as a way to get me to shut up, and keep the toxic circle flowing.

As a child, my dad travelled a lot for work. My mother treated me as a friend, a shoulder to lean on. She would drink heavily and go on about how awful my dad was to her and to us children.
She often left me in the care of my oldest half brother, who molested me my entire childhood until I told him to stop - I was about 10/11.
My abuser was getting married that year. When I spoke up about my abuse, I was told to be quiet or I would ruin the wedding plans.

I carried that for many years, even having to spend time with my abuser. Shut up Sarah, you should be grateful for what we have. And I was. Or I was trying to be.
"see? I'm doing such a good thing. Carrying this burden and not talking about it, for the sake of my family. Pat me on the back."

I can tell many, many stories about the same scenario, just sub person/situation. I was told to keep quiet, be grateful. Be a good daughter and do it for your mom. She's too sick and stressed to deal with it.

It's even difficult to write that. I have been conditioned to defend my mother. But yesterday, when I told her how much all of this was hurting me and how I felt in my heart, she flat out ignored me, talked circled around me and then told me to stop talking because I was making her sick, stressed... it all clicked. That lightbulb moment everyone speaks of.

She has no desire to make any of this, any better. The toxicity is helping them to thrive in their addictions.

She even told me that the liver specialist tried to talk to her about her alcoholism, and that he just didn't understand how much "stress" she was under.
They hand my brother large sums of money every month, knowing full well he spends it all on drugs. They just keep doing it?
My two older half brothers, the same story. Neither of them work, they live off of the family money. My parents hold the strings, and we are the puppets.

So now here we all are. No one is speaking, everyone is miserable. Most everyone has addiction issues.

It makes absolutely no sense to me. The simple solution (ok not so simple, but BEST solution) would be to get everyone healthy & functioning again.
Let's hash this out, lets get ourselves in some sort of therapy or rehab and make the madness stop!!

And when I said that, suddenly I become a pariah.

When I told my mom how much her behavior towards me hurts me, she somehow twisted it to be my fault, and that I was in fact, the one hurting her.

I can't make them choose health and happiness. I know I can only do that for myself. I'm really hoping that the group I meet will be a good group and that someone with some experience will provide suggestions for how to untangle myself.
How to create my boundaries, and keep them.
I am so scared. I know that my creating boundaries will cause so much more drama with them.
They'll accuse me of being ungrateful, or spiteful, dramatic and crazy.
I'm going to have to learn how to not react to that, and keep my boundaries in place.

Welcome Sarah You have received great responses so I will simply say that I am glad you are here and please do keep coming back. There is hope and help. Please let us know how the meeting goes.

Hi Sarah - welcome! I'm also the child of two alcoholics and the partner of a long string of alcoholic/addict boyfriends. I didn't come in to Al-Anon until years after my parents had both died of the disease. I did (and do) have other active addicts/alcoholics/humans in my life and found in Al-Anon many tools for living -- ways to understand (and improve/change) my responses to other people. I'm pretty new to this MIP board (been here about six weeks) and have found it a great addition to my in-person face to face meetings and literature. I hope your first meeting is a good one. Each meeting group has its own flavor, so it's good to try several out. When I first went to a meeting, I cried the entire time. I went to meetings nearly every day for about two weeks before I could stop crying enough to even say my name.

I am a different person from the person I was before I entered Al-Anon. I have grown and matured immensely and have recognized patterns of behavior/thinking that no longer serve me. I'm still imperfect, it's easy to get my Irish up, I'm judgemental and indulge in all-or-nothing thinking and have made many poor choices when I could have chosen differently, but I take responsibility for my actions now and am continuing to learn how to live with compassion and love towards myself and others.

I hope you'll find the meetings offer you the peace that many of us have been priviledged to enjoy (there's a line like that in the opening statement).

Sarah - you have a great outlook for recovery. You already realize that what you can change is you. So many of us come here hoping to get answers to fix the qualifiers in our life. So - when I read your posts, I see you a bit ahead of the starting line. There is no shame in loving an alcoholic. There is no shame in realizing and accepting that we are powerless over other people, places and things. And, there is no shame in accepting that you've got things to work on.

You will probably hear at meetings that we focus on one day at a time. We try to not focus on the past nor the future but just this day only. We also keep the focus on ourselves. When we are more focused on what others around us are doing, we do our best to redirect our thoughts and efforts back to what we can control/change/do differently. It is in becoming self-focused and self-assured that we find serenity.

We also look for our part in situations. We learn in recovery that when we learn better, we do better. We let go of blame of others, see this as a disease, detach with love and find empathy for those still suffering. The more we learn to love ourselves, the more we can accept that we are all imperfect humans in an imperfect world. This disease is a thinking disease. No alcoholic wakes up in the morning intending to trash themselves, hurt others, and be selfish and self-serving. Many actually want to be 'normal' and turn off their obsession for the substance(s). It's just an impossible task without recovery and a spiritual program.

My hope is you got out to your meeting and felt welcome. Keep coming back - you are not alone!

Thank you so much for all of the kind responses.

I did go to the meeting last night, it was better than I had expected. Every fear I had was quickly squashed.
It is so nice to hear the stories of others, and how they are progressing with their own healing. Including those on this board.

e_i_m : I appreciate you speaking about the regret over your own choices. That is where I am stuck right now. Realizing my own behaviors and how they have contributed to my situation. For so long I blamed others and their actions, but in reality it was my inability to deal with them as they are, and getting frustrated/angry with others because things aren't going the way that I want them to. Life does not our way.
It gives me great hope that you have learned how to manage your own feelings and feel able to deal with the active alcoholics in your life.

Iamhere : Thank you for the encouragement. It is very difficult for me to find empathy right now, but you're right. I have to detach and accept that they are sick. My dad always said "you can't make sense of nonsense". That applies here. Not to say that the alcoholic/addict are nonsense, but they are sick and I am baffled by why they can't behave like they are healthy. My mom truly does believe she is doing her best, and coping in a way that is helping her. My parents truly do believe they are doing the best they can for my brother. I can see that they are not, but I guess it is not mine to change. Letting go of that idea has served others in the program well, and I would like to follow along and learn how to do this myself.

I was reading last night about enabling, and how enablers continually "throw pillows" under the addict in order to prevent them from feeling the fall.
In my personal situation, I don't have financial pillows to throw, I only have my words to work with.
I drink with my mom to make her feel comfortable, even at times when I don't want to. I stroke her ego and tell her how well she's managing considering the situation, when in reality that is not AT ALL how I feel.

If anyone has any advice, or maybe some personal stories about how their families/loved ones reacted when you started putting up your boundaries, I would love to hear them.
I am expecting them to call me dramatic and ungrateful. Every time in my life that I have stood up for myself, I have been told I was being dramatic. Always an effort to silence me and my feelings, to discount me.

I will make every effort not to mince words, not to raise my voice, stay calm and speak softly. Even with that tone, I know there will be a huge fallout and I will just have to accept it.
Luckily, my parents will be traveling for the next few months. I will have a lot of space, time to go to meetings and speak with members here.

I will be going in to battle with armor.

My experience - when I put boundaries in place, they did revolt. They preferred the old me - the do whatever it takes to cover up, fix, control, etc. person as it allowed them to continue in dysfunction and in their disease. So, the good thing about boundaries - they are for us. They are not punitive, but rather just for self-preservation and/or sanity-protection.

My qualifiers called me everything from drama-queen to bitXX to way, way, way worse depending upon their mood, my boundary and my ability to hold firm. I truly had to work steps 1-2-3 to have the sanity and faith to put boundaries in place that I could hold. In time, when I did not cave and did not JADE - Do not Justify, Argue, Defend or Explain - they came to realize I was changing and they would have to too.

I learned in Al-Anon that honesty is absolutely necessary for me to recover - in all aspects of my life. I can't recover if I am not true to myself. I also learned that I don't have to announce my growth, change, boundary or other. The best advertisement for recovery is attraction vs. promotion. Lastly - early on I learned that YES and NO were complete answers. Hope this helps a bit.

Yes - if someone is talking to me disrespectfully, I began just getting up and leaving the room. No words were necessary. I would go to the laundry room or bathroom - those were two places I felt I would not be followed. If I was asked later, I would say, I just can't take the yelling any more, and felt better leaving until things calmed down.

I statements matter and were another gift of this program. I have NO right to tell anybody that what they are doing is making me ____________________________. The reality is I give my power away and that's why I am _________________________________. So - I learned I statements. I started with simple, simple things. I started cooking what I wanted for dinner, and quit asking what others wanted and when they'd be home. I instead suggested, I am cooking XXX for dinner, and it will be ready @ x:00. If my qualifier was under the influence, I would take off for bed early. Again, if they asked or followed, I would then suggest, I am not comfortable being around you under the influence.

I did establish a sober home. My AH still snuck/drank but not around me and I didn't go looking for it. He kept his distance, and that was the best he could do to respect my boundary. My sons both were asked to leave my home because they crossed this boundary. I would first get to as many meetings as you can and get phone numbers. Even if you don't 'see' a sponsor quickly, having local support will help. My first tool that I used often was pause. It kept me from spouting off with my thoughts, my suggestions, my criticisms, etc. all of which were considered to be drama, nagging, bitching, and more by my qualifiers. By just shutting my mouth and finding different things to do with my mind/time, things changed.

Your mother is going to drink - that's her disease. You do have the choice to stop drinking with her, leave when she starts, stay and not drink - you have that power....you just don't know it. I did over time find a polite way to stop participating in the gossip. I now state out loud and proud that I don't do gossip, drama and chaos any longer. It took me a while to get there - and I did not get there for a while....

Practice, practice and more practice is how it works. We also work for progress, never perfection. Mistakes happen - we are human.