The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
My AH was sober for 33 days....until last night. He decided to go to an AA meeting. I thought that was a positive thing. Well, I should have known better (he came home drunk from the last 3 meetings he went to before getting sober). It happened again. I knew something was "off" when he came home an hour after the meeting was over (it is about 5 minutes up the road from us). He said that he drove a guy home and the guy offered him something and because he was feeling so much pressure from work and a bunch of other no good excuses, he took the drink.
He ended up sleeping in our bonus room last night. I had started to regain so much trust toward him again (before last night). I just don't know how to feel now. He says that he is truly sorry and not back to where he was before. But right now its hard for me to see otherwise.
Just a little foot note....he also says that I've ruined his life because his friends and his family know about his "problem". I know that's not true, but I just want to ball up and cry when he says those things to me.
Well I think its normal to feel disappointed. I also think its normal to have that sense of impending doom. I have had that for a while now. Then the A acted out in vairous ways.
Now he is probably going to tread water again for a while until he starts up again.
Who knows.
I know they are huge on making everything a secret.
The issue is he doesn't do the same for me. His idea is that I make herculeean efforts for him and he does something like raise an eyebrow for me which is huge for him.
These days it it isn't enough.
I think it is huge to get to a point of detachment.
I also think it is very difficult to deal with their up and down stuff.
Be kind to yourself, don't blame yourself. Take care of yourself.
Start over. Every day I just keep staring over and working on better ways to take care o fme.
Maybe you don't need to feel anything. Maybe what you're looking for is permission to be emotional about the fact that you "had your husband back" and he's "gone again."
Feelings are personal, to some degree, private. We don't need "permission" to have them, nor to we need to let them rule ourselves. What we do need to do is honor them by looking at their causes--tracing where we're at to when we've felt this way in the past, why we've felt this way in the past, and looking for patterns. As you can imagine, this takes alot of work. This takes enourmous support from people who are recovering, people who have tools to offer us, and, above all, our higher power. In truth, your husband's recovery is between him and god--his willingness and his humility is between him and god. Yours is, too. However much you want to recover, to figure out why you feel the way you feel, this is up to you. But, as you can imagine, what you put in, you get out. ((HUG))
