For me I lived with active alcoholism/addiction for over 10 years. I had my AH committed not because I thought he would go into treatment(He had tried that twice before we were married) - just for the 72 hour watch to get him out of the house.
That was almost 3 1/2 years ago - It would take hours and hours to type all the things that we went through to get us where we are today. But after 15 months of living apart, we were able to save our marriage. Let me stress that in that 15 months apart, we both did some serious work in our seperate programs, he in AA and I in Al-Anon (acutally he went right into AA and it took me 9 months before I would go to Al-Anon-I'm a little stubborn - didn't think I had a problem - wrong)
But, I know now that in that 10 plus years of living with the active part of the disease, I could have learned so much from attending Al-Anon and learning info on setting boundaries, not accepting the unacceptable, etc. But it just wasn't my time yet.
If you haven't attended any Al-Anon meetings yet, I urge you to give the meetings a try - we suggest a least 6 meetings before making a decision.
Don't give up before the miracle happens in You,
Progress not Perfection,
Rita