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Old 11-08-2012, 06:51 PM
  # 11 (permalink)  
EnglishGarden
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: new moon road
Posts: 1,545
Welcome to the forum. I'm glad you are living separately from your alcoholic husband, and encourage you to stay there with your parents for the sake of your young child. Your husband has a permanent condition. Alcoholism is for life. If he does not--on his own and without any coercion from you or anyone else--put himself into a committed program of abstinence and spiritual recovery and counseling, and sustain that for, in my opinion, a minimum of two years--he will remain a danger to you and your child should you try to live under the same roof.

Actions and sustained sobriety are what prove an alcoholic's worthiness to be a husband and a father, and that relies absolutely on time. Not words today. Not words in a month. Sustained, uninterrupted sobriety over time. People are too easy on alcoholics. They trust them too soon.

Some useful reading are these books:

Getting Them Sober by Toby Rice Drews (you need this for backbone)
The Addictive Personality by Craig Nakken (this describes the progressive stages of addiction)
The AA Big Book's first three chapters (found online at www.aa/bigbookonline)
How Al-Anon Works (available at meetings)

And we have a lot of information on codependency in the Sticky links on the opening page here. Codependency is essentially the loss of one's true self in order to sustain a relationship with an inappropriate partner. All of us here qualify, as we have all tried to bargain a way to keep an alcoholic or drug addict in our lives.

Stay with your parents for the good of your child. Things will get better for you eventually. But first they will likely get worse. That is the reality when we refuse to cooperate with addiction. When we upset the alcoholic's plans to maintain the status quo, things get worse.

But the alternative--submission--offers no hope at all.
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