Hi DrainedWife,
Please excuse the length of this reply - when I started writing I didn't know it was going to be a book. I also ask for your forgiveness if this post sometimes seems hard. I am writing to you out of love. Your post got through to me. I will make this my last post if I get it wrong but I think you are worth it.
Please read my post without your rose coloured glasses on. These words are fact. I know where you are. You are lonely. So is your AH. Every day you have hope. Every day it is dashed. This will lead to a very bad end for you. You can avoid that end.
I am Stephanie and I am an alcoholic. By the grace of God, I have not had a drink for 33 days. This is a miracle for me.
I have lived with a man who is also an alcoholic, abusive like yours and who does not abide with boundaries. I went through exactly what you are going through.
I hope I can help you. By starting to understand my own alcoholism, after years of living with this, I have finally started to understand his.
Sweet, we are not able to be helped by any human intervention. No doctor, no amount of love, no medicine will lead to a temporary or permanent reprieve until your AH is ready to stop drinking.
Your efforts to get through to him in a rational and sane way with your love as your motive are not going to work because while we are drinking, we are not rational and sane. Sure it may seem to get through to us first thing in the morning but when the drinking starts, we have no human control over it. We are not there any more. Our souls and our will are not available to us. The alcohol drowns out rational thought. It is king and it rules us totally. It wins daily. Even when we are sober, we are numb from drinking and feeling bad about what we have done. We go and drink to stay numb to cope with pain in our lives - including pain we are causing you. We do not trust ourselves and so we do not trust others. We trust the bottle only. It brings relief.
Yes - we know the pain we are causing you. This is a disease that is the only disease we tell ourselves we do not have. We would not deny having multiple schlerosis. No one would shout at us to stop having it. We think our wills will be enough to moderate our behaviour. Would will power cure multiple schlerosis? We are that powerless against the booze. It has always been our strong will that got us out of trouble in the past, helped us succeed. In this - our strong wills are our biggest enemy along with pride, denial and alcohol. We need to be broken before we give in and begin our recovery. We deny how bad it is. We deny the extent of its effects. You may be doing that a bit as well in order to survive.
The insanity of it comes from doing the same thing over and over, day after day, and expecting a different result. We tell ourselves we can drink today and it will be different and that we will not hurt our loved ones any more. You tell yourself that he will not drink today and that if he does, the outcome will be different. The illness progresses.
That is the alcohol in control. Your AH is not. Of course the result is always the same and it will get worse. It never ever gets better even if we use our wills to try moderation for a while. The only way it won't get worse in the end is a temporary reprieve coming from a desire by your AH to stop drinking.
Also, it may help you to know that putting rules in place will definitely lead us to do the opposite. We will use the rules as an excuse to have another drink -along with every other pathetic excuse under the sun - including, being misunderstood, Christmas, Birthdays, hard day at work, bored at work, good news, bad news, arbor day.... you get my drift. We will use our loved ones as an excuse too and if the excuse is not apparent we will engineer an excuse, possibly even starting a fight with you to make that an excuse. Alcohol is king.
Aren't we nice? Not!
I will not put us down though because we are very very ill. We will be ill for the rest of our lives. That does not mean there is no hope. I know dozens of people who are living good lives now and have managed to keep their families together and all are happy. There are millions who have conquered this addiciton one day at a time. Maybe they are even happier than some famiies who have not gone through his suffering. Reprieve may be just around the corner or, sadly, your AH may need to go further down into hell first. He is already in hell - believe me.
This illness is very very powerful, baffling and cunning and can be fatal. Some of us are prepared to die to have another drink. Tell me another disease that would do that? If we had diabetes and could not have sweets, because it would kill us, we would not have sweets right? Alcoholics are different from normal drinkers - even heavy normal drinkers. We have an enzyme that our liver uses to get nutrition from alcohol. Normal livers that don't have this enzyme and so they feel sick after a few drinks. They have an off switch. Our bodies and minds are telling us that our very survival depends on a drink in the same way a starving person needs food. Even as it kills first our happiness and then our bodies. There is no off switch until we pass out or need rest for a short time.
Here is what you can do. You can pray. It works. It will help you regain some serenity in your life. Ask your Higher Power to take this burden from you. Put yourself in his hands. Then, put the life of your AH in his hands too. Do this out of love for him. Definitely suggest that AA might help him and then leave it. Ask him why he doesn't get some help and then walk away from his problem. You may need to leave him so that he finds his rock bottom or the stepping off point. That will be hard to watch but there is no other way to help him. Until he wants to stop, you are a barrier - yes - that is right - you are a barrier to his recovery. He will hold out longer the more he thinks he is safe in your care. Think of it this way - if you tell him he must go to AA, that adds another month before he would have gone if you had said nothing. Unbelieveable that our love can't fix this but it's true.
Insisting that he quits or cuts down or does not bring alcohol into the house will delay his recovery.
Remember this - he loves you but he can not act that way. He has to learn to love himself now. This horrible addiction may take him to the point where he needs to decide if he wants to stay alive or not.
All this is going to take time for you to acknowledge and accept. That is OK. Be kind to yourself. Think it through quietly with peace and love for yourself as your first priority. If you are in danger, you must get help. There is never an excuse for a man hitting you or making you scared. He will not like you leaving because you are helping his addiction survive. Make sure you have family and friends who know what you are going to do.
I know it hurts to hear all this but I hope my honesty will help you have a good outcome. I am happy for you to ask him to read this and I am happy for him to contact me if he wants to. If he will not then he is far from the bottom. That can change in one day though so keep that hope alive, with new knowledge as your new tool. Read more here. It is a good place to be for you.
You are not alone and neither is he.
I am sending you love and hugs in your time of need.