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Old 08-13-2016, 04:52 AM
  # 12 (permalink)  
LexieCat
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Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: South Jersey
Posts: 16,633
Impossible to say. There is a very specific category of people who come here, for the most part. That is people who are opening their eyes to how effed up their lives are becoming as a result of living with someone else's drinking. I think the categories you are talking about--where the RELATIONSHIP is at a given moment--don't tell you much. Nor does the state of the alcoholic's drinking or recovery.

So I think it makes more sense to think in terms of where partners/family are on the scale of their own ability to deal with it. Let's face it, plenty of people walk away, without a whole lot of angst, as soon as life with an alcoholic starts adversely affecting them. They don't try to fix it, they don't bend themselves into pretzels to accommodate it--they observe, maybe make a demand or two that things change, and when it doesn't, they split up. It happens, we don't see it here because they have already seen it as a deal-breaker and accept it, leave, and move on.

There are people in the throes of trying to "fix it"--by forcing the alcoholic to change or by losing themselves in the process of trying to make life so comfortable for the alcoholic that s/he won't "have" to drink.

There are the people who are nearing the ends of their ropes but feel stuck and can't figure out a way out.

There are the people who do a yo-yo dance for years, leaving and then coming back because they are unable to accept that it's over, or because they continue in the belief that "THIS time it will be different."

And then there are the people who leave and heal and move on with their lives, OR who are fortunate enough to have an alcoholic who embraces recovery and are able to make the adjustments to living with a sober partner. In this category, both are success stories.

I think the focus in your categories, Wells, is too much on the alcoholic or the state of the particular relationship, suggesting that "success" requires both parties to remain together happily.
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