Recovery and Marriage
I have learned to set boundaries, do they always hold in place, No. One thing I learned early on was that I needed to understand the nature of the beast, so I read a whole ton. Then I was able to understand the damage, the mind etc.
Next up I needed to get therapy for myself and then for our marriage. If it was going to work, no AA person, No sponsor, No 12 step person would help with that as they aren't trained in the in-depth issues and ways to resolve those issues in a marriage that has been damaged. I found one for myself that helped with the co-dependency issues and we found one for marriage. A man with 48 years sobriety that specialized in our kind of marriage and wouldn't allow the crap to fall out of my husbands mouth when he was still new in recovery.
As I learned more about sponsors, I set the boundary with my husband that our marital issues are off the table for discussions with his sponsor and that if he had a need to talk about marital issues, that was for our marriage counselor. My experience in the AA club was one of gossiping tongues and I won't stand for that.
Early sobriety is the toughest for them and I found out that less was more with my RAH. Because of all the shady stuff he did we set a boundary that if he was going to be over 30 minutes past the end of a meeting he should call me. That was a simple boundary he could remember and easily understand.
I flexed and agreed that we would "schedule" time for us. In the beginning it wasn't much time and there was still so much hurt and anger and betrayal that lots of times our "scheduled" marriage time was zero fun. We stuck with it.
I didn't find help with Al-anon, I already knew how to have my own life, my own hobbies, my own time alone as during the active addiction that is what was going on. I also didn't like the whole "click" mentality nor the fact that some people were in the meeting droning on about stuff as it related to a dead alcoholic spouse or a divorced spouse that hadn't been in their lives for 20 plus years. I couldn't relate at all.
My RAH is coming up on 3 years. At first I would go to meetings or an event with him or whatever to cheer him on. It became blatantly apparent that "normies" weren't really accepted, tolerated, loved and I also became stressed out listening to all the self-serving, big-book quoting, hypocrisy I so often heard. I didn't like the level of maturity, and emotional immaturity, I didn't like the gossip, nor the attitude of we help people, well sometimes if it suits us.
AA works for my RAH and good for him. I don't need it to work for me. We have found a way to work on boundaries that he falls away from all the time, but we keep trying. We are at a place now that no longer does our marriage counselor encourage him to make his whole life recovery first, he now coaches him to learn to make his marriage as equally important, because we are united as one, not two.
For me the key ingredient was to have boundaries in place. If you want to be in this marriage we are partners, a team, not you have your own secret life and ours will come into play as it suites you. That is old behavior. In early sobriety we literaly had to have lists of chores he needed to do each day, lists of bills we needed to pay and what he could expect to be accountable for. Dates scheduled on the calendar that we both agreed to and that no AA talk or interruptions would be allowed. It was our time, usually it was a super short time because he was still so crazy and new in recovery but I wanted to support him as well, so I accepted and tolerated that for a time. He still jumps into commitments without thinking about our life, and commitments to home but generally I try to handle that as it comes up and will take on more at home in order for him to get the recovery he needs, but again I have to be careful for you give them a foot, they take a mile. When the foot starts becoming the mile more often than not, I gently remind him of the boundaries. He too is learning to set boundaries, as he should!
I have seen quite a few people say usually after the first year things will settle down, but don't hold your breath for that to happen, it will be better, but it's not the be all end all of the recovery. What we have learned is that it can take 3-5 years to really settle in.