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Old 12-02-2019, 08:33 PM
  # 15 (permalink)  
Sasha1972
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Posts: 1,618
I’m sorry for what brought you here, but welcome. There are plenty of people here who have started over in their 50s, so it can be done. I left a 25 year marriage to an alcoholic (but I had always worked full-time, so my situation is a bit different).

You mention that your daughter is 11 - that’s how old my daughter was when she first started to become really aware of what bad shape her father was in (we had already been separated for a long time at that point). Adolescence is a terrible time to have an alcoholic parent (well, any time is terrible ...) - old enough to know that there’s something very wrong with your father, but not yet mature enough to be able to assert yourself and detach from the chaos. And for the alcoholic, an adolescent child is old enough to be recruited into becoming a caretaker/codependent/substitute parent/ally. If you search “family triangulation”, you’ll find lots of information. Your daughter may need some kind of buffer or safety zone between herself and her father, which may or may not take the form of moving out.
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