Great question, lillamy. It sounds like your therapist was trying to get you to see that you didn't love your AH the way you should in order to sustain the relationship. She might have been trying to get you to see past any denial you might have had in order to get you to face up to the truth and move on.
Well, I do love my husband as a human being and a child of God. We have had 37 years together, sometimes good years/sometimes bad, and there have been a ton of happy times in there. While it's harder to like him when he's drinking (a lot harder), I can sit here and say that I love the man.
However, in my case, what I would need to have someone point out to me is not the love, but the contract part of the marriage relationship. I really agree with Stung. What breaks down in the alcoholic marriage are the commitments. When the AH/W is drinking, all the promises fall through the cracks--all the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" agreements. Suddenly no one is scratching your back. No one has your back, and a marriage needs to be equal. Maybe not equal 100% of the time--sometimes the balance shifts, and that's an agreement, too. So someone might say, I'll support you through med school, and then you will be able to financially support me. But when one partner is doing the heavy lifting, and that isn't what that person signed up for, the marriage winds up being a broken contract. So then what's the point? Love or no love, it needs to be fixed.
Sometimes I try to let myself rest on, "Well, what if he had Alzheimer's? I'd still be committed to the marriage, even though he couldn't fulfill his part of the bargain. And alcoholism is in the DSM as a disease--right?" But that whole thing about choice remains. And most sick people want to get better, and do what they can to recover. Alcoholism is a strange disease because the patient's response to it is often to choose sickness over health, which kind of is the deal breaker when it comes to the "in sickness and health" part of the marriage vow.
So the relevant question then becomes, what does it mean when you say you love yourself? Do you love yourself with the same abandon you love them or others? If you truly do, can you see what is best for you? Does doing what's best for you come easy? If it did, what would that look like? As we often say, if you put your situation in a friend's shoes, what would you want for your friend? What would frustrate you about your friend's actions? What would be difficult to understand about the relationship your friend has with their A loved one?
And because you are a child of God/the Universe/Your Higher Power, if the alcoholic lifestyle is putting barriers in the way of your living a life that you are meant to, isn't it your responsibility to yourself to get those barriers out of the way? Loving ourselves is the job our higher power gave us to do in this life. We can still love our alcoholic partner, and I do love mine, but my big question is, can I live with him, and still be 100% sure I am honoring the life my HP gave to me? Am I able to perform my calling here? Am I loving myself?