Enabling
AH has been out of the house for 8 days now, and today checked himself in for a 24 hour evaluation at the VA hospital in order to begin treatment again. It's a start, but we've been down this road before...
But I've been using this time to reflect and keep thinking about the subject of enabling. Of course I never realized until recently that all the things I was doing to clean up his messes was helping him to stay sick. I thought I was just picking up his slack in order to keep everything running smoothly, and needless to say I made myself a martyr and became bitter and resentful in the process.
But when I think back to all the enabling I've done, not all of it was to make life easier for AH. Some of it I did for my own personal reasons because I felt I had to "save face" in front of my family, friends and neighbors. I've kept all that I've been dealing with inside for my entire marriage, because I didn't want anyone else to know that things were anything less than perfect. My husband is handsome, clean cut, smart, and extremely charming and charismatic (aren't they all). Not the kind of guy you picture when you think of a "drunk." At least not until I learned that alcoholism affects people from every walk of life, not just the homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk. I've always been a perfectionist and afraid of failure or other people's judgement, so having people know I married an alcoholic felt like the ultimate humiliation.
I've spent so much energy through the years following AH around, trying desperately to keep anyone from being unhappy or upset with him, because I felt like it reflected poorly on me. AH is famous for making promises to people that he can't keep, and I'd obsess with making sure he followed through on what he promised, just so that no one would be angry at him. I still remember staying up all night working on a project for my daughter's classroom, because AH in a moment of grandeur volunteered to take care of it. Of course, he never did, and when DD came home with a note in her backpack asking for the status on the project, I about died from embarrassment. I also remember one of his friends leaving a message on our machine telling AH never to call him again. AH had promised he would help with a construction project and never showed up or called, after the friend had already paid to rent the equipment for the day. The fact that I still remember this almost 10 years later and AH would have no clue what I was talking about if I brought it up to him should give you some idea of how sick I was.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting subject. How much of the enabling do we do for them, and how much of it do we do for our own fragile egos??