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Old 02-21-2012, 09:20 AM
  # 6 (permalink)  
EnglishGarden
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: new moon road
Posts: 1,545
13,

You write "I love my husband and would want more than anything for us to stay together." You also mention a daughter in this marriage.

Your husband has addictive disease which is highly prone to relapse. It is defined as a "chronic, relapsing" disease.

I believe that while he is now working to again stay clean, your responsibility is to engage in deep, intensive work around your complex feelings, buried resentments, expectations, and individual development.

To remain married to a recovering addict is to consciously and willingly be at peace with the possibility of relapse on any day in any hour.

It is to be able to detach from that relapse by not personalizing it as an action toward you or your marriage. And to be able to separate his path of personal growth and struggle from your own path.

When you return from Disneyland, if you wish to remain with this man you say you love, and to keep your daughter's father in her home, and to do your part in repairing the destruction addiction has wrought on your family, then your responsibility is to go for help for yourself with the same level of intensity and commitment you expect from your husband as he strives for sobriety.

If he is an addict who is verbally or physically violent, who steals or cheats, then I would suggest a legal separation.

But if he is an addict making (sometimes repeated) attempts to get and to remain sober, then my feeling is that your responsibility as the co-addict (the person who is mutually affected by the family disease) is to work your own program of recovery with all your heart and mind.

If you do not wish to do this, it would be better you let him go and make your own life. Living with him and resenting his relapses (which are common, most especially with opiates as there is a deep emotional element involved in opiate addiction), is, in my opinion, a subtle form of abuse: you abuse yourself by putting on a mask, you abuse him by passive aggressive resentments, and your daughter suffers because her home is filled with toxic emotions.

So search your heart, take your time so you are clear, and decide.
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