I am going to an Al-anon meeting tonight.
Excellent!
I am just struggling right now with not knowing whether to contact him. I feel like if I could just talk to him and explain it more, and that what I did was out of love and not meant to hurt him, that he would be responsive. Besides him hiding drinking from me at times, we have always been able to be very open and honest with each other. I am just afraid that I did too much, and that he feels like I am abandoning him. I didn't want him to think I didn't want to talk to him, I just didn't want to be around him while he was drinking.
Right. It IS a struggle. We DO feel like we need to explain and we DO worry about their feelings and that they misunderstand. Or we think maybe they did not hear us right. We want to make sure that we are perfectly clear to them how we really feel and why we really behaved the way we did. So we tell them over and over again exactly what is going on. And we keep telling them and none of it ever makes a difference. It is like trying to reason with the Tazmanian Devil.
He knows all this instinctively. THAT is why he left the "I want my keys back" voicemail. To get you to second-guess yourself, to get you to react, to hurt you emotionally so that you have to run back to him. It is up to you to step off the merry-go-round, which you have done. You have made up your mind to take care of yourself by staying away from this very sick person. Now it is up to you to MAINTAIN this mindset and STAY OFF the merry-go-round. But it is just like the addict or alcoholic, we make up our minds not to drink or drug again and then two days later, we are back to where we started.