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Old 10-30-2016, 10:27 AM
  # 6 (permalink)  
EndGameNYC
EndGame
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: New York, NY
Posts: 4,677
When it was over, with and for my XGF, it was over. We'd been good friends for several years before we were a couple, and I was sober for all those years. She'd wanted to become a couple back then, but I'd just recently suffered a devastating loss and, as much as I liked her and was attracted to her, I knew I wasn't ready.

After that, we lost touch for several years before I contacted her. We spent time together, fell in love and then lived together. She saw some red flags at first, but didn't seem to pay much mind to them. Knowing her as I do, she sees and thinks about just about everything. And then I got worse. She is a psychologist in private practice, with expertise in addictions and risk reduction. She at first tried to help, but no one can truly help an alcoholic who doesn't want to stop drinking.

As always happens, things got progressively worse until she asked me to leave. Nothing, not my suggestion for couples therapy, my empty promises to get sober, go to AA, or to do whatever it takes to save the relationship changed her mind or her feelings. It was over. Part of me was relieved, knowing then that I could drink the way I wanted to drink without having to hide it so much. It was about a year-and-a-half later that I put down the drink.

When I finally left, and after she'd changed the locks, she asked that I don't attempt to contact her in any way, that it was too painful for her to have to deal with that. I mostly complied at the very beginning and, later on, only contacted her to make written amends, and then much later, to ask for some kind of reconciliation via a written letter, some four years after she had had enough. Part of me expected that she wouldn't reply to my letter, and that's exactly what happened.

I continue to make monthly, financial amends, but have otherwise not attempted to contact her. Getting over that whole episode was a very difficult struggle for me, and it took a great deal of time for me to achieve some kind of internal resolution. I also lost someone who had been a very good friend in the process. And I don't know that I can ever fully "get over" having brought so much emotional pain into her life, though I've achieved a certain level of peace within myself in terms of forgiveness.

All of this made it extremely difficult for me to focus on my sobriety, to get sober. I didn't even allow myself to feel the heartbreak as fully as possible for the first several months. At some point, it hit me like a tornado. My heartache was both intense and exquisite, and it took a great deal of work for me to learn to work through it. There are still, and probably will always be, some lingering effects, but allowing myself to work through the process of grief, remorse, and forgiveness has helped me to find a place within myself where what I did and what happened during those years doesn't influence or determine my thinking and my behavior in any adverse way that is obvious to me.

It takes time.
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