Originally Posted by eBeck

Did anyone else experience such incredible resentment while your spouse was at rehab and all the care and attention they get, while you are rewarded for not making poor decisions by having to solely run "real life" responsibilities. I'm beating myself up for having these resentments and so wish I could just be cool and supportive with her recovery and tell her don't worry, I've got home covered, while you work on getting better for the family. Why can't I do that. Ugh?

Originally Posted by FireSprite

6 months sounds like such a long time to be in recovery & working changes into your life but in reality at 6 months I was only just starting to feel my own rage & resentments & exhaustion at the whole situation. And I felt entitled to them; I had earned every bit of that heartache & I wanted answers & apologies. I wanted him to know how badly it hurt to have the person you trusted the most betray you, I was vengeful for a while... and how dare he now have this positive attitude, full of snappy AA quotes & glass half-full thinking while I was just starting to feel the edges of the white-hot rage I had buried inside.

For me things stayed very much the same for the first (almost) year of his recovery especially since I hadn't yet understood how to embrace my own (or understand how badly it was needed). Yes, he was no longer drinking, but instead of being locked away in bars & spending his time with other A's he was locked away in daily AA meetings & sharing all the details of his drinking problem with a bunch of strangers which I found isolating & a bit insulting - here I was the person MOST affected by his poor decisions & I wasn't even privy to understanding how or why we got to this point. I felt abandoned by him for his alcoholism at first, and then abandoned for recovery/AA after.

Even though our area has literally about 100+ AA meetings each month, Al-Anon meetings are very few & far between & never during times I could actually attend. And when I did I felt such a disconnect - there seemed so little information about moving forward with a RA, more of the topics speak to supporting those with active A's or those that chose to leave. I wasn't finding anything relevent to MY life or challenges.

I was still having to hold down the roles of being both Mom & Dad to our DD since he was only able to concentrate on his recovery. I still went to work every day to a job I only half-liked and I still struggled with the financial fallout he had created in our lives. I was the one searching for solutions, assistance, debt consolidations, etc. I was forced to look at the Big Picture & he was living One Day at a Time. Nothing really changed for me as quickly as I expected. No one in my circle really understands addiction so even though I had a few shoulders to lean on, they couldn't really understand anything that I was going through. And I really didn't want to run around announcing how wonderful his recovery was going since I essentially knew nothing about it and didn't want to look like the fool if/when he relapsed.

I was never so happy as I was the day I googled and found SR. I learned SO MUCH about things I had no understanding of - resentments, detachment, the chemistry of addiction, the physiological changes happening in his body during his detox, how very not unique our situation was, etc. That's when things changed for me - that's when I started to see my own recovery needs more clearly. That's when I was able to better separate Me from Him & start handling things with a Me-First attitude.

There was also the element of feeling like I would NEVER be done supporting him..... while my own support seemed lesser both in volume & intensity. Some days the "issues" in my mind got so tangled up that I just wanted to be free from all of it & I thought about leaving more AFTER he sought recovery than I ever did before. I wasn't sure we'd ever be on the same page again.