Originally Posted by
Booo 
Btw. Your book placement, classic.
In the absence of wisdom a good joke will do I suppose.
If you search back two years you'll find I had all those plans, deals, strategies, and 'Hey, I know, let's try X!".
Because the other 57 Gazillion spouses of alcoholics clearly hadn't taken the time to just think it through logically like I was doing - bunch of yutzes that they are ;-)
The funny thing is that when you stop negotiating and get to that "You can do whatever the hell you want - I'm your spouse not your warden or your mommy" point it actually works better because if you get into that game where you give permission or refuse to what are you doing? You are either enabling or else you are the bad guy for saying no.
All I ever figured out was two simple truths:
1. I can't force my wife to be sober and stay sober
2. There ain't no way in hell I am going to live with an actively drinking alcoholic (actively using addict).
Did not make things easy necessarily but it made it simple. It so happens that my wife decided to go figure out that whole alcoholism thing at AA and good thing - those guys know about alcoholism, I theorize about it.
We had an epiphany around here this week that took me a few days to work through and identify - my wife had some of her girlfriends from AA relapse and it made her a little bit frantic and she got to join 'our' club - worrying like crazy about the problems of someone who was too high to worry about a damned thing. See my post 'full circle'... I think it might resonate with you right now.
Congrats on getting to the "You can do whatever you want' point. For some that is a sign of reaching understanding, for me it was less noble - I was just too damned tired to think of another plan or idea and said "Oh to hell with it - you are gonna get well or not but I am not gonna go crazy in the meantime". Exhaustion can lead to wisdom ;-)