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Old 02-02-2013, 07:56 PM
  # 4 (permalink)  
EnglishGarden
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: new moon road
Posts: 1,545
My suggestion is to throw yourself into recovery from addiction with all your heart and soul. Attend meetings several times a week, get a sponsor and be serious about doing 12-Step work with that person, volunteer for service (make the coffee, set up the chairs), and make friendships with other people in the groups who are SERIOUS about working a recovery program to save themselves. People are who ready to do whatever it takes and to work the program thoroughly.

If your AH stays home and gets high while you are at the meetings, let him do that. Do not lecture, beg, manipulate, guilt, or shame him into changing. It does not work and it makes you sick. Let him use. Work your recovery like it is a full-time job.

You are in early sobriety and have not yet put together a full year sober--if I read your post right-- so you might not be quite ready for Al-Anon. I am not sure about it but that is my feeling. What I have heard is that alcoholics are all over the place emotionally in the first year of recovery work and that it is better to get the sobriety issues stable and then follow that with work on the relationship issues and personal growth in Al-Anon. Some may disagree with me on this. But my concern is that addiction is far more life-threatening for you than codependency is today, and I would love to see you save your life before you try to save your marriage.

Your AH may not find sobriety until he finds a very deep and very painful bottom. This is most often the way it is. If you step out of his way and if you work your recovery so as not to engage with him in using, he might find that bottom sooner than later.

We are happy to help you with your boundaries or anything else that is a challenge in your relationship with your AH. Welcome to the forum! You are worthy of a healthy life.
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