Originally Posted by keithj

Katie,

You may not want to hear this, but please give it a chance. You've spent a page full of posts going back and forth about what might be wrong in this relationship. In doing so, you've overlooked an obvious possibility. Could it be your untreated alcoholism? I don't mean drinking being an issue in the relationship, but simply the way an alcoholic mind relates to the world.

I could never connect in a relationship before meaningful recovery. I required a pretty tranformative change in my outlook on life before I could really give (or get) anything to a relationship. I couldn't love or be loved. I didn't know what love was, but I sure thought I did. It wasn't until this new perspective developed that I saw how warped my old perspective really was. I'm a huge believer that fixing my outside circumstances (like relationships) is absolutely futile until the alcoholism is fixed. And I can't do a damn thing about the alcoholism while I'm focused on all these ancillary 'problems' that distract me from my real problem.

Is it possible, not right or wrong at this point, but just possible, that with a revolutionary change in your outlook on life, you might possibly look back at this time and see how unhealthy your way of relating to people really was? I don't know about you, but I took hostages. And I couldn't begin to change that or even see that until I recovered from alcoholism.