Do you have anything written down from the time you were living with an active alcoholic?
I kept a journal up to the point I married AXH. Then I stopped. I couldn't write anymore because I could not be honest with myself about how horrid my marriage was. But I wrote letters and e-mails and confided in a few close friends. During my divorce, I asked those friends if they would please send whatever letters they had back to me. Between that, the e-mails I have saved, and a blog I started (kept it closed and private) the night AXH threatened to kill me, I have enough to remind me of why I left and what it was I lived with for many years.
Pity is OK to feel, I think, as long as I don't think feeling the pity means I have to do something about it. I can have compassion for an addict without needing to step into some kind of action.
Guilt is trickier. I fought for about four years with the question of whether I had the right to leave before I actually did. I'm not a quick learner when it comes to these things, so it took me that long to actually believe that my AXH was, really, responsible for his own actions and choices. I didn't believe it during the separation that preceded our divorce, and I am extremely grateful that I was able to live NC for that time, because...
... because part of the dysfunctional dynamic in our relationship was that he wore me down with his superior argumentation skills, to where I would have believed that it was my fault that he was drinking and my responsibility to get him sober, had I had to have contact with him. Now, over a year later, it's weird to imagine that I was so manipulated, but I was.
The guilt has gone away for me -- but I think part of that is that I can sort of tell myself I was right: I never believed for a second that he would really become sober when he went into rehab, so when he started drinking again (after swearing up and down how much he was a changed man and had found God and seen the light), it was sort of a "confirmation" of sorts for me that I had done the right thing in leaving him.
The way I handle it when those guilt feelings occasionally rear their ugly head is that I imagine they're something I found on the ground. I can pick it up and turn it over and put it in my pocket and carry it around -- OR I can look at it, identify it ("that's guilt") and keep walking. More and more, I'm able to do the latter, and it really has lifted an incredible burden off my shoulders.