In todays ODAAT in Al-Anon reading, August 1, it talks about how sometimes we think that by running away from our problems that all could be solved. I know I have tried this approach myself and can attest to the fact that it does not work.

When I first married at 19 to an active drinker, I had no idea what alcoholism was or even for that matter drinking to access...how much was too much, I had no idea. I did not grow up in an alcoholic home, in fact I grew up in a home where there was total abstinence from alcohol. So imagine my surprise when I found out that I was married to an abusive alcoholic!

I tried to survive in that marriage for 4 and a half years, while living in Texas. My parents announced that they were planning on moving back to the family farm in Missouri in 1996 and I divorced my alcoholic husband and moved back to Missouri with them thinking that I was leaving my problems behind me.

Well within 6 months of moving to Missouri I met another alcoholic. We dated for 6 months and then he went off to Korea for a hardship tour on the DMZ. We had plans to marry when he returned home, one year later. I noticed in his daily letters to me that he was slowly changing while in Korea, especially the time he spent on the DMZ. He started to drink more and shared this with me and the drinking binges he went on were only an attempt to "cope" with what was going on around him and assured me that it would stop once he returned to the states. I was skeptical, but remained engaged.

He returned home one year later completely messed up with PTSD from being on the DMZ (demilitarized zone between north and south Korea). He told me of horror stories of having to pull dead bodies out of the ImJim River and guarding the bridge over the Im Jim and how once a truck tried to run the barricade and he almost had to shoot the driver...all reasons for him to drink.

I didn't realize until much later in the program that I had gone from one alcoholic relationship to another, not being sucessfull at all in "running away" from alcoholism, I had run right back into it. I thought a fresh beginning would solve everything. Being back on the farm in my home town would make everyhing ok. It was far from true. Despite what I was going through with the alcoholic, I noticed how everything had changed from when I left (I left when I was 14 and returned to my hometown when I was 24) People had changed, places had changes, things had changed, and I hated change. I wanted everything to be as it was when I left at 14.

Change is inevitable, it is not optional. Everything is going to change in time. I married my second alcholic and ended up with a second alcoholic marriage and found that I couldn't control him anymore than I could the first one. My plan of "running away" from the problem didn't work...but I wasn't done yet.

I divorced alcoholic #2 and immediately got involved with an adult child of an alcoholic. This time I didn't run from the problem geographically, but I did emotionally. I thought that by finding this seemingly wonderful Christian man, and his family that was in recovery (his dad, the alcoholic, was in AA) I could finally find comfort and solace in another human being. I could "trust" him. I soon found out that the family disease of alcoholism, is indeed just that, a family disease. And this family wasn't perfect either (like any of us is) but had HUGE issues from the drinking years that most of the family weren't dealing with. One of the issues was incest on the part of the alcoholic father while he was drinking and the victim was my husband. This ended up in numerous trips to the mental hospital and an eventaul breaking down of the marriage and destruction of what was once an illusion of a "perfect" AA/Al-Anon family.
I found there is not such a thing.

I once again "ran away" from this nightmare and divorced my 3rd husband with whom I'd had a child and had to put the child into supervised visitaiton with the father who had developed a child pornography problem of his own, because of the abuse he suffered as a child. So my attempts to "run away" from my problems wasn't working. I just got deeper and deeper into them.

Mind you, by this time I had joined al-anon and was starting to piece together some of my part in all this and was starting to realize it wasn't all the alcoholic, but a BIG part of it was me. This didn't stop me from going into a fourth alcoholic marriage with a dry drunk, I'm sorry to say. I still wanted "the dream" of a perfect marriage and since he agreed to quit drinking to make me happy (no AA program or any other program of recovery, just cold turkey-quit) I succumed once again to the "dream" of marrying my knight in shining armor (a cowboy) and his promise to help me save the 5 generation family farm of which was to be mine and my daughter's when my parents passed.

We lost the farm due to mismanagement of funds on both our parts and he left me shortly after moving into town into a house mom bought with the money from the sale of the farm. I actually tried once again during this time to "run away" literally from the problem. When we were in the throws of the financial mess, I actually packed myself and my daughter up in the car and headed for Texas (for some reason at this point Texas seemed like nirvana to me). I got as far as a little town called Braman, Oklahoma just on the other side of the Kansas line, when I finally came to my senses.

"How could I leave my elderly mother in the care of my crazy alcoholic husband with a farm to manage and no way to do it, but him?"
"Why was I running in the first place, and was it going to solve my problems?"
I remembered the original flee from Texas and how that didn't solve my problems with the alcoholics in my life, it just compounded them. I had gone from one alcoholic, to another, to the dysfunctional child of an alcoholic, to a dry drunk. What had become of me? I finally started working the steps in earnest, although by this time I had been in the program for quite some time. It takes some of us longer than others to "get" the program .

In Today's Reminder in ODAAT it states that a big step towards becoming an adult is to realize that I can't run away from my problems. I can choose to change my point of view about my problems and their effect on me- but I have to change myself first.

That's where I'm at today. No more running. Facing Reality sux, but it's mine to face. I am going through my fourth (and hopefully) final divorce. I will not waste another minute on someone else's sobriety or lack of it. I am here to learn about myself and to grow into the person that my HP intended for me to be. This means setting boundaries, because I seem to have a high affinity for attracting alcoholics. It has always been this way for me and I imagine it will always be, as long as I am not taking care of myself.

Today I choose to take care of myself and work my program with my sponsor and attend f2f meetings regularly as well as post on this message board of my progress and share and volunteer my services in the on-line meetings offered here. I am grateful for this program because it has saved my life and given me my life back.

No more running...

Overcome