So many of the posts on this thread have been so useful and so heartfelt. I'm trying to integrate the many aspects of resentment and anger that have been brought up here.
I'm thinking that part of what I've been missing here is that we are in a process as we work through what we need to do to deal with an alcoholic in our lives. There is a time-progression that happens in how we deal with anger.
I think when we are in the different stages of that process we may need to deal with our negative feelings differently.
Distress, resentment, anger, rage - we feel all of these emotions as we work through what is going on in our alcoholic relationship, and take whatever steps we need to take to eventually resolve how to live with (or not live with) our alcoholic.
I admire Mike and LexieCat for their very genuine detachment. Wish I were there. But I also think that they have worked on this for quite a while, very successfully. Evidently, I am not there yet.
But I am in a much healthier place than I was when I was submerged in such a dysfunctional destructive marriage with my AH. Then, I didn't feel anger overtly. My denial went along with my swallowing my true feelings, and I had a lot of serious health issues - major depression, auto-immune diseases like Rheumatoid arthritis. Now I keep coughing up phlegm from bronchitis that just won't quite quit. Telling, huh?
So I am getting to the point where I am stopping turning my unspoken resentment in against myself and causing myself physical problems.
I am getting through the knee-jerk reactions of outrage - and getting more and more insight and honesty about what actually happened to me. What he did was bad, hurtful, and destructive. Behind the alcoholism, perhaps deeper and more compelling, is his narcissistic driven need to feed his own self-esteem by tearing someone else down.
Out-rage: that's a new one for this thread. In my case, I think it's lightning flash moment. I suffered from "in-rage" if I can coin a phrase. When I saw my psychiatrist this week, he commented that I was kind of absent-mindedly scratching my wedding ring finger. Well, I have a skin rash there, right where my ring goes, have had it for years, and often didn't wear my wedding ring because it itched so badly. Talk about metaphorically trying to send yourself a message... I think that is "in-rage".
So maybe there are stages of different kinds of anger that we go through and different ways of acknowledging and handling it as we progress through the healing process to get to the much healthier place of genuine detachment.
There is still something lurking in there about guilt and blame and victim-hood and anger that I haven't gotten sorted out yet. May have to do with the "in-rage". Will think about it more.
ShootingStar1