oln

Hi thankyou for all your help, yesterday i read on another site somewhere that if you ask an alcoholic to cut back or stop drinking you will make them worse, so now i am worried that i turned my partner into an alcoholic and that now after 9 years not drinking and having got rid of me maybe he is no longer an alcoholic. could this be true?

Freedom1990

Remember the 3 C's:

You didn't cause his alcoholism.
You can't control his alcoholism.
You can't cure his alcoholism.

We aren't powerful enough to make them get sober. We aren't powerful enough to be the cause of their drinking.

As a recovering alcoholic, I can assure you that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.

I will never be cured. However I hope to someday be buried as a sober member in good standing with Alcoholics Anonymous.

Jadmack25

oln..If it was true, just asking an alcoholic to cut back or stop drinking makes them worse, then, OH My God, I really don't want to go there.
Nor I suspect would anyone here, because I would bet a years pension that everybody involved with an A, has one or a hundred times asked them, begged them, to cut back or stop drinking.

If you were troubled enough by your partner's drinking habits, to ask them, to cut back or stop drinking....then I assume it was pretty bad...

Whether they were alcoholic or not, they drank enough and caused you concern.
You asking them to tone it down, sure didn't turn them into a raving alcoholic, anymore than 9 years of not drinking and having got rid of you, suddenly means he is no longer an alcoholic.

I don't know what site you found this wacky info on, but please disregard it, as unless it is something NEW and valid that came thru overnight, (and I missed it) then it is a load of something to grow roses.

I asked my XAH and now RABF to cut down or cut out, not once but many, many times, and feel no regrets or 1 eeny teeny bit of guilt for doing so, only that I wasted my time and energy.

My XAH died sober, (after drinking himself into a nursing home), only because he could no longer walk, talk or even find a pub.
My RABF decided to quit, after I said bye bye and went NC, and I leave it all to him.

If anyone had the CURE for alcoholism, trust me, it would be spruiked all over the world, on Oprah and every channel, paper, magazine and at the top of SR, and these forums would be humming themselves to overload.

Please do not think about accepting responsibility for his problems, you are NOT to BLAME for his drinking, not to praise for his sobriety and your absence is NOT the CAUSE of his supposed cure from alcoholism.

God bless

Daisy30

The good news is! You did not make your partner an alcoholic
the bad news is
Unfortunately, There is no cure for alcoholism

but there is hope for A's if they are willing to work a program like Freedom and other RA's here.

Have you done any reading about the disease? Some quick easy reads that helped me are, Getting Them Sober, and Marriage on the Rocks.

Be gentle with yourself

coffeedrinker

oh, honey, there is no way on planet earth that YOU did anything to either cause him to become alcoholic, or to speed up the process. it just doesn't work that way.

why don't you keep coming to this message board, read and post, and in a short time down the road, you'll be telling someone else with absolute certainty, that it's not THEIR fault, either.

oln

thankyou so much, i have been crying whilst reading your replies with relief, i thought i had overcome the many years of him telling me it was my fault he drank and was verbally abusive, obviously not. for many years after he stopped i had nightmares about him drinking again, now i seem to find it difficult to remember how it was, my mind seems to have wiped it, i remember feeling so low at one point i seriously thought of suicide. I know it was bad but i don't want him to kill himself because of his drinking and im not there for him, his children who are only 5 and7 love him so much and he was a good dad to them whilst sober. i had truly believed he new drink wasn't for him but i guess i was wrong. Anyway thankyou again without reading all your sense i don't know how i would keep going at the moment i hurt so much.