lizw

I suppose this could also be described as a 'rock bottom' but who else here has noticed that they keep moving the goal line on their A?

For example:
my life would be good if he got sober,
then when he/she stops drinking the goal changes to
if he/she attends AA my life would be good
then when he/she starts attending AA the goal changes to
when he/she starts working the steps (especially 9) my life will be good
then when he/she gets a sponsor and starts on the steps it changes to
now if he/she would stay home more often instead of going to AA my life would be good....etc, ect...

Anyone see the pattern here?

Realising I had this type of thinking is what sent me to Al Anon. I realised it did not matter what my A did, it would never be good enough for me, because I was unhappy with myself.

I often read on here things like 'the A can't love you because they don't love themselves etc....' and it has been my expereince that this works both ways. As family members we are unable to love our A's because we don't love ourselves either.

I think that sometimes the only difference in my behaviour compared to an A is that they drink - I can say with 100% conviction that I can to be highly irrational, abusive, hysterical and controlling without the need for a drink! Except I blame my behavior on whatever A happens to be in my life at the time.

When I think of my past, I tend to have two types of thoughts.
1st lot being OMG I can't believe you stayed
2nd lot being OMG I can't believe I behaved like that
And I am grateful I no longer have the 'OMG he was a b*****d - I'm such a victim' thinking anymore.

I think I am having one of those days where I can clearly see why I've got involved with A's. Our behaviors complimented each other, for want of a better expression.

:chatter

denny57

I agree with this up to a point insomuch as he and I were both flawed humans.

So take away the alcohol and - no - I was not abusive to him in any way - emotionally, mentally or physically. I did not lie to or cheat on him. I don't blame any of that behavior on his drinking.

So where it counts - character - he and I are nothing alike.

lizw

An accurate example (of me being abusive) that I have just thought of was, in my 1st relationship with an A (we are going back 14 years here) we had a pet rat. It was tame before any one starts freaking out. His name was Mr Squeaky.

Anyway, after having Mr Squeaky for awhile I got rather sick and tired of feeding him, cleaning his cage and thought my A wasn't doing his fair share of 'caring' for Mr Squeaky.

So in my attempt to get my A to pull his weight (teach him a lesson), I stopped caring for Mr Squeaky. I.e. feeding him etc.... And eventually he died. In hindsight, it must have been quite a slow painful death.

I was very upset when he died and blamed it entirely on my A which is not the truth by a mile. My need to teach my A a lesson, I believed he should learn, (control him) far exceeded me preserving the life of a living creature.

I could have given Mr Sqeaky away to people who would have taken care of him, but I didn't. I choose to try to teach my A a lesson using a poor creature and play God.

It's good for me to remember things like this. It stops me repeating them.

sailorjohn

Ditto with that. In fact, I've come to realize that what drew me to her was that we were a lot alike. I can and have treated women the way she treated me. Today I've decided that I don't want to be in those relationships where I am either the victim or the perpetrator. The one thing in this last relationship, I always just moved the goal line forward. I won't leave because she hasn't done this, etc. After a while, the weight of everything reaches the point where the slightest hurt causes everything to collapse, and I finally just said 'enough'.

Ago

As a "double winner" I have had this experience on both sides, I have done it, and I have been in a relationship on the other side of it.

What I called it was "make believe bad" and "really bad"

When I first got sober, I was living my dream, I was a quasi well known Sculptor, I surfed every day, I spent 4 months a year living on the beach in Mexico surfing, I was a Fireman/EMT that specialized in Helicopter Cliff rescues, So I was on TV a few times a year, and I had "saved" many locals life, I Bartended 2 nights a week, and my "fall from grace" and ultimately "sobering up" was very public, so the fact I was clean in an isolated rural community, made people come to me to find out how I did it, they brought their wives, husbands, children, so I took them to meetings, and many many of those people are sober today, AND I was living with a BEAUTIFUL woman, who, truthfully, could be pretty nice...

(she was the one that kept moving the bar on me but that's irrelevant to my story)


I suffered the tortures of the damned the whole time, I was miserable. All I did was **** and moan about this woman.

Ultimately I drank and became a Logger, lost my license to drive fire trucks and ambulances, lost the career, lost the girl, lost the place, stopped sculpting, ended up getting a 4 mo. jail term for a DUI, typical wreck your life alky stuff, we've all heard it.

So one day, it's the worst storm in a gazillion years, I'm 100 feet up a giant tree, wind is blowing 70 mph, and I'm taking the top 40' of this tree out on a rope that goes through a block a foot away from me over high voltage electric wires.

I say to myself, if I make a mistake on this, am I going to die? I look around,....yup....any accident, I'm a goner, I might get ripped in half, fall out of the tree, fall in to the power lines, the tree top may hit the power lines, in which case I'll be eloctrocuted...Hmmm, this is bad...this is REALLY bad...wait...then I remembered all that daily surfing, how good my life was...and how I suffered all day every day and b1tched and moaned and complained, I said if I get out of this, from now on I'm onna be able to tell the difference between really bad and make believe bad (in my head bad).

that turned out actually not to be the truth, my head can get pretty scary sometimes, but at least now I know, "this is all in my head, this is make believe suffering" and "the spiritual axiom is if I am upset, it means there is something wrong with me" it can still hurt pretty bad in there, but that thought helps.

P.S. Sidenote, Today I climbed and wrecked (cut down) the first tree I have been in for YEARS, I was SCARED, it was HUGE, and of COURSE it was next to high voltage wires, but the fat old guy came through, it's on the ground. God has a sense of humor, the first day I "ran away from home" I was looking at some huge local trees and I swore I wouldn't go back to Logging/wrecking trees because it's so dangerous, oh well, it seems I have the next few weeks booked up, word got out that I climbed today, and big wood guys are scarcer then good boyfriends/girlfriends (pretty scarce huh?) so my phone is ringing off the hook..../sigh

The funny thing, is, something I've learned about myself lately, is I take on the characteristics of who I am in a relationship with, if she's wonderful and a great communicator, so am I, but if "she" is a nasty, vindictive, abusive manipulator, rather then leaving, in a short period of time, so am I.

Anyhow, I guess that I "move the bar on me" if that makes sense, but as an alcoholic, the truth of the matter is all I want "is a little more" money a little more please, sex, ditto, chocolate, OH HELL YEAH, I think they coined that phrase in Oliver Twist, "Please Sir, may I have some please" for me, whatever...aaaaah well, if only this then that, long day, I'm onna go cry and take a shower

lizw

I am a double winner too (AA 10 years/ Al Anon 5 years, I could say 3x winner as I recently started going to SLAA too) but funnily enough me and a friend were talking about this the other day. She's a 2x/3x winner too who is a NA rather than an AA.

We were talking about how as Al Anoners, we use anothers bad behavior to justify our own. I.e. he yelled at me so I had to yell back. It's a bit like tick tack toe. Or a kid saying 'well he started it' or 'he did it first' etc....

Over the last few months I have started to think this is because I am a chameleon and change myself to suit what I think another person wants because I do have ESP, you see (not). It's like an extreme lack of 'self' or something.

Becoming my own person, in my own right, instead of being so and so's GF or my daughters mother and being self supporting (emotionally) is pretty hard! It's worth it though.

veryrestless722

i never realized how bad i acted until after my husband left, and then i had to take a hard look and say he did have some valid points on my behaviour, i was controlling, mean, crazy, and even probably bi-polar, i felt like i didnt have any control , no matter what i did he still drank and cheated and lied, so the controlling didnt work , and ive realized im only crazy when im with him and yes thats my fault but i wouldnt be so crazy had i not put up with his bullsh*t, my nerves cant handle someone like him 24-7 without flipping out
but i didnt deserve to be left two months pregnant, or made to lose everything i owned because of him, nor did my parents deserve to be put in the position of supporting me while im pregnant, i never cheated on him, never lied to him, i did everything i thought possible to make my marriage work and then some, i take blame for things i can change and my codie ways but not for the marriage failing or him being a dead beat father, well i really hate calling him the father cause all he is really is a sperm donor, but he cant blame me for his problems and i no longer take the blame for what he does or doesnt do, cause the blame im gonna get is that i never let him see his child, but guess what im ready for that and sorry it was not my choice for you to leave so therefore not my fault you dont get to see your child, i didnt choose for you not to help with baby stuff, so go ahead blame me i am beyond caring what people think of me anymore - pardon me while i do a happy dance

its so nice not to be "crazy" anymore, no matter how much it hurt with him leaving, nothing beats not havign to deal with an alcoholic :chatter , ive never done drugs but i would figure its like finally being off the "drug" and realizing your not crazy , it was the drugs making you crazy

Ago

My sponsor actually said the samr thing about the chameleon thing, "The Zelig effect" (required movie for alky/co's, Woody Allen at his finest)

As far as that ..."he hit me first" kinda thing, truth is I've been pretty good about that for the first 13-14 years around the rooms, (well after 5 years or so I guess, being my own person I mean) I was...just so unequiped to deal with the barrage of living with (on the same property) and working with my family (3 practicing alkies and a practicing junkie) then finding a GF that recreated all those dynamics in one wonderful package, I "lost it", After about 6 months of lies, manipulations, "gaslighting", fill in alcoholic behavior here____________ that I just ended up spiaraling out of control emotionally, I was an insane angry confused mess and didn't even trust myself, my sanity, my intuition, anything.

I was calling my sober friends and literally saying, " I feel like I'm literally going insane, nothing I'm being told is matching my "reality" and everyone there was saying it's all me, now the reason I know that was "gaslighting" and lies etc, for one it's all documented in emails, two I was talking to sober alcoholics every day, and three I had just lived for 12 years and it had never come up, and the moment I walked away, it stopped. I know am able to communicate with people, people who communicate back, peoples who's "reality" agrees with mine, even if we have bitterly opposing viewpoints.

I finally just had to remove myself from those sick, sick dynamics....The funny thing, is I feel better every day, True I am meeting with my sponsor twice a week, going to meetings every night, reading my brains out on every piece of literature I can get my grubby little meathooks on, but I am TERRIFIED of going back to any sort of relationship like that, I believe that's as important to me as my "sobriety", hell, it IS part of my sobriety, I ended up drinking last time.

lizw

I hope you don't think I am blaming anyone for anything.

The point that I am trying t make is, as family members/partners of A's we do not accidently fall into relationships with sick people. Believing this, is similar to alcoholics who say they 'slipped'. Using the word 'slip' makes a relapse sound like an accident. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Consciously or unconsciously I choose to be in 'alcoholic relationships' because it is what I knew. Like you said, I could have easily been diagnosed with bi polar too as my behavior was (at times) so irrational. And like you said, I stayed too, I stayed too and continued in this sort of behavior, regardless of what the A did or did not do.

Personally I didn't learn this behvior in my relationships with A's I learnt in my family home growing up. It was there that I learnt, the silent treatment, walking out, threatening to leave, the idea my life would be good if he would just behavior, that what I wanted wasn't important, that I wasn't important and that love must hurt. So when I met my first A (for want of a better expression) I was a prime canditate.

I also wanted to say this stuff because on this board I read a lot about how the A is doing this, and doing that or not doing this or not doing that, and I know didn't start to get well untill I admitted that maybe I couldn't control another person and it was fruitless trying. Control is an illusion.

But what stopped me from admitting this for so long was that as soon as I let go of the A, all my own issues from growing up in a crazy family came to the forefront, and this was even more painful than what was going on with the A as they were blood and I loved them dearly. I didn't like to admit maybe they were unable to love/care/nurture me as they should have. It just hurt too much and I felt like I was 'telling on them'. One of my Dad's favourite expressions (when I was a kid) was, 'you better not be telling the neighbours anything that happens here!' I.e. keeping secrets.

TooMuch4TooLong

I lived most of my childhood hearing that very same thing Liz. What goes on in this family is no one else's business and you better not make it their business.

Here is how I learned. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, one died before I was born, the other when I was five. I still remember sitting on his lap on the back porch listening to the BoSox on the radio. He always had a Budweiser and a cigar. That was my memory of him. I did not find out until about two years ago while taking care of my mother the extent of the damage both of these men had done to their families. My parents lied about all of it. I never knew either of my grandfathers where alcoholics.

Flash forward to my childhood. All three of us were adopted. What a cruel weapon that can be in the wrong hands, it justifies so many things in a mind not healed. I was sexually abused by my father and oldest brother from the time I was two until I was thirteen. It stopped when I was thirteen because I smashed a mirror belonging to my great grandmother into my oldest brothers privates. Sorry Na, but it was worth it.

From there I was on my own. I worked, went to school and actually did pretty OK. I was in a relationship for two years that ended when he was killed on the freeway. Single for two years after that. Met my first husband at 21. We moved in together six weeks after we met. He was physically and sexually abusive. Our daughter only saw one small incident when she was very young, I "stayed for the good of the child". I stayed because I thought that was what I thought was supposed to happen. I guess I thought I deserved it.

I went to counseling for a few years while still in the relationship and eventually left him for good. Met R. He treated me like a goddess, I wanted for nothing and he never told me no. Life was perfect except for the drinking. At first it was OK, he was funny and charming and as I said, treated me like a goddess. Our first four years together were pretty great even with the drinking.

I learned how to behave this way, I had years of training in it. I have learned recently that I don't have to behave this way. I do not have to sit back and say it is OK for you to treat me like crap. No matter who you are. I am learning that being passive aggressive is not OK under any circumstances. I have to stand up for myself and speak for myself. I have learned it is OK to say no.

What I have not learned yet is how to leave. I knew from day one R was bad for me but that didn't stop me. I am not one of those girls that has to have a man in my life but i am very much a one man woman. I have to learn that when it is not right for me it is OK to leave.

I don't blame anyone for where I am, why would I? I am on a journey. It is like a mountain climb, not always easy, not always pretty and sometimes pretty damn scary, but when I get to the top I will do it on my own volition. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

lizw

I think in a round about way we may both be saying the same thing.

TooMuch4TooLong

Yup.