ShellyH

Hello all!

I am so grateful to have found this forum tonight! I did attend Al-Anon meetings for about a year, from 1995-1996. I am married to an A, but, he has been in recovery since 1996. Another thing to be thankful for. So, how come I feel so lousy?

I am returning to this program because I have hit bottom. I have learned a lot about myself in the past 10 years, and have done a lot of good work on myself. Yet, I am still stuck in a place where my husband feels that I am never happy, and will never be happy. My response is that I can not be happy if I have anyone around me who is unhappy, then I feel that I don't deserve to be happy unless everyone around me is happy at the same time. That is never going to happen though, is it?

I am 30 years old, with a husband I have known for 16 years, and three children, all with special needs, one severely disabled.

I am desperately trying to find a way to find myself. I have no preferences, no likes or dislikes, nothing unique about myself. I have completely given all that up to make myself compliant to the people around me, and, as I said, I am never happy.

I want to be happy. I want to be able to be happy even if my kids are having their third meltdowns of the day, I want to be able to smile and feel goodness and help them through it. Right now, if anyone suffers near me, than I feel the same pain. I can't do that anymore. I need to set a good example for my kids, I need to have a life before too much more time passes.

Does any of this make sense to anyone out there? I am hopeful that this will be a place for me to feel some sense of the peace that I used to feel when I went to Al-Anon meetings, I already feel a little bit of that just lurking here today. It has been a long time since I felt that.
I will dust off my Courage to Change book, and the other one from Al-Anon, (it has been so long, I don't remember what it was called, that is awful, isn't it?)

Thank you all for the warmth and bravery that you have offered on this site.