Great intro MB!
I was stuck for years caregiving my alcoholic chain-smoking mother.
By the time I realized I could step back, I really couldn't as she had eroded
so much mentally and physically and had left her affairs totally undone--
Her house was a hoard and she was in and out of the hospital and nursing homes.
That's when my drinking really exploded, and I became my own worst problem.
When I gave her the ultimatum that if she drank and smoked her way back into
the hospital and nursing home yet again, I would no longer move heaven and earth to
get her back into her own home, but that she would stay in the nursing home
unless she could find someone else willing to endure the hell, that's when
I first began to get unstuck. But by then I had stuck myself in the drinking.
That took several more years of staying stuck and gradually doing worse
at work, in my marriage, and destroying myself physically.
When all that came to a head--my boss asked if I was drinking and I said yes,
I had been but I was stopping, she said "I know you are" and that was the
one indirect warning I got that my job was at risk, and my husband in tears
and angry said he'd "had enough" of my drunken rants, and my body was
bleeding and I could barely function I realized how stuck I was but had done
this to myself.
That's when I stopped, and got unstuck again.
But that's another installment in the story.
The stopping drinking was the one thing, the only thing
that saved me from ruin. It isn't an exaggeration to say
that sobriety has to be, must be the most important "thing"
people like us must do to have a future or any chance of
happiness or fulfillment.
It's been so for me, anyway--