family of alcoholic can be hard, are you apart of family of alcoholic.

LIVING WITH AN ALCOHOLIC

For most families, living with an alcoholic, the addiction snuck up on them little by little. They didn’t realize it. They didn’t realize the alcohol was becoming addictive to the drinker until it was a fact. And even living with an alcoholic, they think it will get better on its own. They always have eternal hope that one day the alcoholic will wake up and see what he is doing to himself and to everyone else.

the next step is up to you Al-Anon will help you recover

False hope makes you put up with all kinds of things. You do whatever it takes to hold your marriage together….even though that marriage is not what you wanted or expected for yourself. You spend nights worrying until you make yourself sick. Every siren you hear frightens you so bad you sit and shake. You’re hoping almost against hope that nothing will happen and your spouse will come home safely. You cry until thee are no more tears. Then you become angry….and the longer they are gone, the angrier you get.

How dare they treat you like this. How can they use the words “I love you” while they constantly commit havoc.

Living with an alcoholic means abuse in some form or another. People jump all over an abuser who does physical harm and almost except the mental abuse. But the mental abuse can be far more damaging than physical abuse. The mental abuse is far harder to heal from.

No matter how hard we try, we can’t understand what is going on inside the alcoholic and they can’t understand what they are doing to us. To live with an alcoholic is an ever changing lifestyle…and all the wonderful things they say when they are sober are deleted as soon as they pick up that next drink. You know it will not end well, yet you stick it out. Isn’t that what wives are suppose to do…stand by their man…no matter what. After all, marriage is till death do you part and in sickness and health. Besides every part of you believes he will change and all will be wonderful again.

It’s our nature to protect the ones we love. To do anything less would be against everything we believe. So we lie to everyone so they don’t think our alcoholic is an alcoholic. Living with an alcoholic we lie to protect their jobs (because as far as you know it’s the only time he stays sober). Or does he? We catch them in one blatant lie after another. We forgive them. We enable them without even knowing it. Along the way we have become so sick that we keep playing the game. But the rules keep changing and the game gets more difficult….more difficult to maintain any part of the you that you used to know. You are lost too. Instead of living with an alcoholic, you find yourself existing, not living with an alcoholic.

Day after day living with an alcoholic I became more and more afraid of what he would do next, where he went and if he would ever come home again. I feared who he was spending time with…it sure wasn’t me. Yet I loved him and I would wait. I would be there when the next shoe dropped. Living with an alcoholic is hard, real hard.

Now you are two sick people trying to tread water but you are both drowning. All you understand is that if he would just stop drinking, everything would be all right. But, then again maybe too much damage has been done living with an alcoholic to hold the marriage together. Maybe it’s too late. That alone makes you angrier than you have been and more hurt than ever before. You don’t even recognize yourself anymore and now you are truly alone….the loneliness you felt was now permanent. And what is just as painful is that you know in your heart, the alcoholic would never have started drinking if it weren’t for you. It must be your fault because you were the closest person in the entire world to the alcoholic. Guilt can eat you alive just as loneliness does.

the next step is up to you Al-Anon will help you recover