thotful

I have been sober for over a year and a half and am loving working the 12th step program (I attend both Al-Anon and AA). I am now on step #5. My wife has expressed concern for how much time and energy I've put into my meetings and personal work. Like there's little room left for her. When I reply that it's helping me and I'm getting healthy, she points out that "I just don't want to talk about it ALL THE time - you talk about your dysfunctional family, AL-Anon, AA, etc wayy too much and I want a break" - I keep my work to myself and she still complains that I'm not "present" and that she feels disconnected. That I'm so different than we first met. That I'm obsessed with it and it's all I think about (honestly it is because I find that the recovery feels ridiculously good and I feel like I'm walking a better path - why not stay on track?)

At the same time, I'm loving my recovery and found that I am being a better husband than I have in years. I don't feel irritated when she wants to go on a hike and I enjoy myself. I go to first friday (art exhibits around town) with her and don't complain and am engaged. I ask her about her day and make a major effort to listen more. To understand...to be supportive. I TRULY believe I'm making progress.

I feel irritated that at a counseling session today the counselor said that there are "buckets" around me that I would need to "tend to" and that the Al-Anon and AA buckets are just a few of the things I would need to worry about. I'm honestly feeling really pissed off about it because I feel like my 12th step work cascades into EVERYTHING in my life including how "present" I am for my wife. My fourth step was really intense and to say that AA and Al-Anon are just little buckets and that I need to focus my attention on something else for a bit seems to TOTALLY miss the point. I'm becoming a better person and the 12 steps seems to bring me closer to myself and my wife.

I don't get it. Is there something I'm missing? Does the Ms. Thotful just need some more attention? She even asked "does this mean you'll be doing your Al-Anon meeting EVERY saturday for the rest of your life" - I replied with "yeah, it might - if it feels good and it helps me - yeah". It's like she's jealous of the attention or something? I just feel like I need to be a better me in order to be a better husband and AA + Al-Anon is ALL about that.

Needing some support. How do you show attention for spouse asking for more of your time, but still doing the work to keep me sane and keep me sober?

zjw

I agree with you there it isnt just a little bucket and honestly to recover for me took ALL my focus I HAD to OBSESS on recovery or else i would still be drinking now.

I hear the same stuff from my wife that i obsess over everything etc.. that i'm not the same person she married and here I thought i was making improvements? I dont know what to make of it myself.

I dont have any magical answers Kinda in the same boat I feel you. I have almost 3 years sober and some of what your talking about does even out and get better but I still face some of the same complaints from my wife. I just dont know what to do about them either shes really understanding but sometimes I feel the world like the drunk me better? I dunno.

In my case i try not to allow it to get to me and I just charge forward with what i'm doing becuase its working for me and i feel better and I dont see what i'm doing as selfish in anyway as I'm doing it for everyone elses benefit as well.

Dee74

I'm not trying to be a wiseguy here Thotful....but do you think it's possible your two threads today may be related?

D

thotful

Dee74:
Admittedly, I was thinking the same thing. I'm sober with alcohol but not porn (two different time-lines of sobriety). I don't know for sure.

zjw:
Some of your comments literally read like something I would have written myself. I'm making so much progress despite a long ways to go. It feels good to not feel alone.

Thanks!

EndGameNYC

If sobriety is about anything, it's about balance. There may be a time when sobriety seems as though it's everything to us, that we would not exist without it, that working the Twelve Steps will solve all our problems, and that if we're not vigilante about our sobriety during all our waking hours, we will fail. But to stay in such a place is unhealthy and can be, I believe, an insidious way of beginning a relapse. The more obsessed I am, the more toxic and the more powerful is the fear that drives my obsession.

Placing sobriety, or anything or anyone on a pedestal will surely lead to disappointment; becoming obsessed with anything or anyone will ultimately become a process of self-degradation.

I haven't heard it recently, but when I first got sober many years ago, people used to say, "AA is a bridge back to life, not a bridge to AA." It's not for me to determine whether or not someone else's sobriety is interfering with their lives in unhealthy ways, but being in the grips of an obsession rarely lends clarity to the person who's obsessed.

You may not like what you're counselor observed about you today, but that doesn't mean she's wrong. Or that she's not paying attention.

zjw

I agree and I disagree. I know I need to find more balance But i'm still obsessed about healthy eating and my running. It keeps me in check and I'm constantly seeing improvement so I just keep at it I wanna be the best I can be. IF i could find the time to do more i would. Obsessed? yeah probably but is a pro athlete obsessed with there craft? I used to Obsessed with my job I got really good at that it was no longer a challenge so I stopped caring.

I go from one obsession to another. I Dunno I think obsession could be a good thing for some folks. Some of the greatest folks in there various fields are obsessed and that obsessesion is what set them apart from the rest.

I try to get more balance but it seems I always find something to obsess over.

Hammer

Hey maybe just be glad she still has any interest in you?

Just saying.

Maybe read The Family Afterward . . . together. Tends to cover much of what you are discussing.

Big Book On Line - Table of Contents

http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_bigbook_chapt9.pdf

(also would NOT recommend Chapter 8, To Wives)

btw, is SHE doing Alanon, or anything like it?

I tracked some hundred couples, and the only ones I found on the Happily Ever After side of things . . . . ONLY ones I found that made it were where BOTH were working their OWN programs.

Best to you.

CodeJob

Thotful,

Interesting post. My RAH has been sober almost a year. No intimacy now for over a year. Yesterday my RAH got all excited about a house that "we" would build for retirement. We need to rebuild our communication and intimacy pretty soon or I am leaving. Retirement if even feasible for our generation is 20 years away. Nice to see him thinking of the future and having plans, but this guy has his head up his butt if this is what his focus should be on right now.

I have told my H that I am lonely IN my marriage. I have told my H a lot of things and I get rebuffed, scoffed at, questioned and dismissed by his denial. He of course refuses marriage counseling. So I started listening to him and realized he has a real problem with strong women. And guess what 20 years of living with an A made me? A capable independent strong woman who speaks the truth. Not exactly what he likes in a woman. He doesn't listen to a darn thing I say. It is all about him from his viewpoint. Do you listen to your wife?

Your post has that freaky self focus. You are irritated with your counselor for trying to get you to focus on multiple priorities. You are irritated with your wife and think she is jealous of AA, but then you don't initially mention your porn addiction here?! I assume she knows. I guess I need to check our computer and see if that is what my H is now into - unreal sex.

Men can multi-task. Do you know how I know this? Because the short order cooks at Waffle House are like demiGods. When your counselor tells you that you are not filling buckets, that means you are messing up your breakfast orders. You are missing the rhythm of life. You are so focused on the hash browns that you are messing up eggs, burning toast, the bacon is not crisp and you keep forgetting to drop another waffle. I hope you pull it together and figure it out for yourself.

EndGameNYC

We tend to tolerate the idiosyncracies, shortcomings and character flaws of people of great achievement. It happens all the time in the arts, professional sports and other fields. It happens in most successful relationships.

If you're satisfied that your life is both a fulfilling and purposeful life (if those are of value to you), who am I to argue? I wasn't calling into question your achievements. My concern is your apparently misplaced energies. Given your comments in this thread and in your other thread, I can't help but wonder what all the compulsive activity is about.

In the absence of a causative, organic agent, virtually all compulsive behaviors are meant to deflect fear. If, as you've acknowledged, your compulsive behaviors are born of your obsessions, then you will experience irritation (which is a camouflage for fear) in response to anything that threatens those obsessions -- such as the observations from your wife and counselor. You'd otherwise be okay with their mistaken assessments.

What you seem to be asking (or perhaps promoting?), is whether or not some obsessions are better than others, or whether some obsessions are better than no obsessions. It's not my place to answer either of those questions.

Johno1967

Hi Mate,
I'm going through pretty much the se sort of thing. The BB discusses it and the changes in relationships as recovery progresses.
Stay the course and be mindful. A calm and kind approach will score you points. Most of all don't worry about it. She'll come round if you don't push it. My experience anyway.

afloatsober

The book covers much of this in 'the family afterwards'.
I am just mindful that my partner was neglected and lost me to my drinking. Part of my amends is to make sure that i attend to her in my recovery.
I need to strike that elusive balance and not have her 'lose me' to recovery.
My self seeking can manifest in the sober me, just as it dominated the drunken me, if i allow this to happen.

readerbaby71

I love this analogy! You always make me laugh. I'm sorry your husband is not open to communication. There's only so much you can do. You can't "force" him to meet your needs, either emotionally or sexually. Believe me, I know what you're going through. xoxoxo

sugarbear1

step 5 helps us to stop being so selfish and start focusing on others and being useful to them....

get to step 7 would be my suggestion, maybe reduce the number of meetings you attend, too? those steps help us to have a design for living in the real world, not in a meeting. I have to check my motives for attending a meeting other than my home group today (that's for me).

I wish you well!

Gottalife

I think sugar bear is on the right track. In 18 months you have competed only one action step, step 4. Your recovery is barely off the ground and your wife is seeing that. She wonders why it is taking so much time. But from your post I can see your defects of character, especially self seeking motives, must really stand out to her.

Endless meetings will not solve the problem. Steps are the only thing that will bring on a spiritual experience and full recovery. It seems like it's over due to get them done.

Sorry if this post hurts your feelings, but I hope it helps you to see the truth of your situation.

GreenEggsAndHam

How many meetings are you going to that interfere with your time with her? Just the Saturday one?

When we get sober things change. It sounds like she feels that you are moving on to things that don't include her (and that she doesn't fully understand) and she feels she is less important to you now.

Mountainmanbob

my reply to the little MountainLady could be
possibly so sweetie
but
only if you and I don't have something planned together

it can be a hard one
we know that our recovery must come first
they wish to know that they always come first

MM

LightInside

Someone told me her story once: She was married to a guy who wanted non monogamy. She went along with it even though it really wasn't okay with her. Then she started working her program. She decided she'd had enough and they divorced. After awhile he came to see how he'd hurt her he made amends, they remarried each other.

Years later, she divorced him again. His latest obsession when she left? Survivalism. The recovering codie realized that he had what she called a "cyclic obsessive personality" and she just didn't want to be with someone who was obsessive.

I bring this up, because the obsessions; whether they are good, bad, or neutral take away time and attention from other areas of life, including relationships.

I hope your wife is working her own program too. Maybe your wife doesn't want to come first. We don't know unless we ask. Maybe she just wants to be equal with AA. We don't know.

Aellyce

Hi Thotful,

I'm the kind of person who, if very interested in something, I would want to find out absolutely everything and anything about the subject. It's almost like I would want to be merged with that subject, be one with them every possible way. Be it an abstract concept, scientific problem, curiosity about an artist's or writer's work, spiritual systems, a person I'm interested in, my own psyche... anything, really. This has always been a major motivation of mine, how I work... of course easy to see how it creates lots and lots of obsessive tendencies - some of which can lead to important discoveries, others can be utterly destructive to me.

I was trying to understand the underlying motive behind this tendency several years ago, and came to the conclusion, that's also mentioned above: it's basically fear based. Driven by anxieties in major ways, that are born in my mind and I project them into my environment (sometimes into specific features of myself). I find myself often especially drawn to disturbing and/or very complex, unusual things, which I think is yet another manifestation of my own anxieties. I want to understand these things as much as possible driven by the psychological motivation that knowing them inside out will neutralize the threatening aspects of all these things. I often made myself believe, unconsciously, that knowledge is the biggest power in the Universe. Of course it is not. Maybe fear is, at least as far as the universe of our psyche's go...

So in the past couple years I've been trying to consciously dissolve these obsessions in my mind in a variety of ways. Stopping drinking was one of the most important steps, of course, but only one step, I feel. It's never an easy journey. I still find myself reacting to many things obsessively but it's getting a lot better.

My suggestion to you is that you talk with your wife about what's going on in your mind and life openly. Including the need to be heavily involved in the AA program, if you feel that need. But maybe have yourself make conscious decisions that every now and then your attention and time will be primarily focused on her and your relationship as well.

Good luck

zjw

I like codejobs point. I question if I'm being selfish but then I think about the mountain of stuff i do for my family and think how could be selfish? I dunno maybe I am? I hate to constantly huck blame on myself for everything which is what I'm dang good at. So sometimes these days I'm like hey wait a sec is this really my fault again? cuase it sure seems like its always my fault?

My wifes amazing I have no idea why she stuck by me. But I hear some of the same stuff. I know part of my problem is I've shut down some emotions to protect myself and my mind. This is causing problems for her she wants these emotions back and I wont give them. I feel as if she takes advantage and it ends up makeing me beat on myself and feel awful about myself. Shutting them down however I feel better. I guess I dont open up like i should I know this ot be true but i'm trying to protect myself.

But codejob you have some good points otherwise.

thotful

I hardly think that 3 nights a week for an hour and talking with my sponsor once a week for an hour is "too much". Members have talked about daily meetings and daily contact with sponsors and late-night contacts.

I think it's more about the discussions we have. She wants a different topic to discuss. It's hard because I feel like I take all the weight of the topics to discuss. Every day after work I ask her, "how was your day?" and she says "fine" - she admitted that maybe she should open up more. I've told her I can't really talk to her about how she's feeling and how she's doing if she doesn't talk back.

After some more thought, I definitely disagree with the "buckets" analogy. In the 12th step it specifically states "practice these principles in ALL our affairs".

He was on a chair swiveling around saying there's all these buckets around you and here's one for your work on the 12 steps and AA/Al-Anon. I see things completely differently in MY life. I see the 12 steps as finding the perspective to SEE all of the buckets and also the chair, the universe and everything around me. I literally SEE things differently now. I've made enormous progress. Another way of looking at it is trying to argue that the buckets are mutually exclusive and that the 12 steps don't go into the "wife" bucket. In my life, that's not how it goes at all. I believe I'm learning how to be a better me - which includes caring about my behavior (when we were wrong, promptly admit it, right?). I believe the 12 steps gives me a road-map to how I interact in the world - HOW I address the "wife" bucket. My first sponsor said that I need to find the balance between physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Thus, I believe it's an entire philosophy of life. Heck, in my Al-Anon meetings one member said that the group, the program, the 12 steps is like a class called Life 101.

I do not want my progress trivialized, yet at the same time I do believe there's more progress possible ahead of me. My wife used to refuse to do counseling or anything that might help her. When I let her go and simply worked on myself and did meetings, worked the steps, I found my judgment of her life literally diminish drastically. It's still there and I keep working on it but it's definitely whittling down. All of the sudden, ON HER OWN, she started attending group and individual counseling. She has her own path to work on herself and has made a lot of progress herself (she just got diagnosed with ADHD and is trying to figure out how to address that in her life). Sounds like progress to me. Just not perfection - Maybe I need to do some work on acceptance.

I believe that turning away from my wife and judging her life or not attending to her needs (with reasonable boundaries of course) may be me turning away from my higher power. My sponsor once said that when we turn towards the higher power's will for us, we find health, serenity, etc. And when we turn away from it, we find pain, suffering, etc. So, I look at the situation as something to be solved through my 12 steps and new philosophy and not "setting it to the side". I literally speak differently to people because it feels a lot more genuinely me and it's the way I like to be spoken to. My entire being is different and I feel much better. How could that be a bad thing?

My wife may simply be asking for some more attention, but not wanting to interfere with my 12th step work (she admitted she didn't want to mess with it because it's getting me healthy). That's easy enough to do without violating my boundaries in the effort to keep me sober (and get clean) and get even more progress. Attention to my wife doesn't have to interfere with my 12th step work, I could make it a part of my 12th step work (practice these principles in all our affairs).

I personally believe that the 12 steps is a WAY OF LIFE. My own life though - I should probably avoid being "preachy" to miss thotful.

Task for thotful - more attention for wife about her life and our marriage - got it.