Hi Wife.
I am an ACoA. I had many opportunities to recognize that my upbringing had left scars on me that destroyed my ability to have healthy relationships as an adult. I was 19 before I even knew I had been raised in an alcoholic home -- my sister had to tell me. I always just thought Mom was angry and controlling. Even after reading a book that could have been written about my own family called Adult Children of Alcoholics I was STILL in denial that I had been affected. I just didn't know that the way I looked at the world wasn't healthy. I had never know anything else. I thought relationships had to be chaotic and melodramatic in order to have meaning. I did not know what love was.
It took my first marriage imploding for me to recognize that I was sick. I imploded it myself without ever feeling in control of the actions I was taking to destroy my own marriage. I had finally found someone who was not a jerk, and because I didn't believe I deserved real happiness, I screwed up the marriage myself.
It took many many years of pain and suffering to get me out of denial and into therapy. Today I am grateful to have been able to salvage a close friendship with my ex-husband, to have gone from being someone with no sense of self to someone with a strong self-esteem who knows how to make and enforce personal boundaries, and to have forged ahead into a new marriage based on love, mutual respect and acceptance, trust, and communication. I hope your husband will one day learn to recognize that he did not deserve the childhood he got and want something better for himself, but I cannot in good conscience recommend that you wait around for that to happen.
The damage done to ACoA's is formidable, though not insurmountable. But no one can move past obstacles they simply refuse to see. He learned all of these coping mechanisms in order to survive his childhood -- can you imagine how terrifying it would be to admit that they are no longer relevant? That he has to learn an entire new way of looking at the world and at himself?
Sending you strength and courage to navigate your way through this. We're here for you.