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Old 07-10-2012, 09:50 PM
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EnglishGarden
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: new moon road
Posts: 1,545
God bless you.

You cannot change that rewired, biologically, permanently altered brain which controls your wife today. You cannot reach in and remove all those new receptors and you cannot make her higher brain, that makes good decisions, take back control from her lower-- and unconscious--brain that operates purely on animal instinct absent of moral influence. Her lower brain controls her now. And it will not listen to you nor does it care about your love. It demands you step aside. Which you have.

You are right to remove yourself, given your powerlessness. You offered everything you could toward her recovery. But you could not direct her recovery, which began in 2008. Only she could. Only she could take responsibility for the profound lifelong work involved in that recovery.

Something went wrong. You cannot understand what went wrong, but it did and it had nothing to do with you. Something went wrong and she relapsed and she is right back in active and severe addiction and again she has lost choice. She may want to stop, but she's active and sick right now and today she can't stop-- she is driven to drink. Brain damaged, spiritually damaged. Her lower brain has again taken over, and when this happens, she has lost the ability to stop even if she wants to stop.

So it will take another crisis, which acts as an intervention, to level her, send her to seek medical help, get her back into recovery. That crisis may happen and it may not. But by removing yourself from the home and the marriage, you increase the chances that it will. You--Major People Pleaser--thus stop getting in the way of consequences. And alcoholics need hard hard consequences to make their lives so catastrophic that they find themselves code blue in the ER, or out of the house living on the street, or fired from the job they could not imagine ever losing-- leaving absolutely no other option but to drag themselves back to the rooms of recovery where, desperate and half-dead, they will find help.

She will choose the people in her life today who feed the drinking life. They will not be friends. They will be other alcoholics or deeply sick codependents and not one of them will be her friend.

You are in the right place, there in your sanctuary. She is still alive today so there is still hope for her.

And as for you: you planted the flag of hope the minute you walked out of that marriage and out of that house. You will be all right. You have been given the gift of life in a remarkably beautiful world, and it is time you stopped suffering and started living.
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