Tao

I posted this in the newcomer section...thought it might be more appropriate here:

I am married now 3 years to a man who has been sober for about 12 years. When I met him, he was 47, never married, and no long term relationships. We've had a pretty good relationship up till now....and as I've looked to build closer, more intimate connection with him...all sorts of "stuff" has come up. We are in couples counseling, and looking at childhood wounding ect.

We seem to have no ability whatsoever to really openly and honestly talk about feelings...he says he can't and has no capacity to. He said just today he'd rather divorce than think he could ever build those skills.

I'm of course, devastated...and have no idea how to help him. I don't know enough about how the alcoholic is hard-wired to really know what is true here.

I just asked him if he was willing to stick with counseling, and he reluctantly said he is...but pretty much admitted he simply cannot do relationship.

What do I need to understand? Is true closeness and intimacy impossible with someone who was lost in the bottle for ten years??

Impurrfect

((Tao)) welcome to SR!

It sounds to me that, though he no longer drinks, he is not recovering. Recovery is dealing with what led you to drink in the first place..and that involves dealing with feelings. The fact that he doesn't want to do that, seems (to me) like he's just "dry"...not drinking.

When I first got clean (I'm a recovering crack addict) I did the "just stop using" thing and I was pretty miserable. I didn't want to deal with anything. After I relapsed, I chose recovery. A huge part OF my recovery is talking to people about how I feel and working through those feelings.

If he's saying he "cannot do relationship" he may be telling you the truth. He may not be willing/able to do the work that's required. I'm sorry, but if this is the case, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't MAKE someone open up. It has to come from them.

I'm sure others will be around and many have probably gone through something similar. You may want to read some other posts..especially on the Friends & Family/alcoholics forum. Though he hasn't had a drink in years, he's still an alcoholic. We A's (alcoholics/addicts) are that way for life. We're never cured. We simply have a daily reprieve from our disease.

In the meantime, I would continue to get counseling for YOURSELF, no matter what he does. Take care of YOU...this is the best thing you can do.

Hugs and prayers!

Amy

smacked

Sometimes 'the bottle' isn't to blame.. Maybe he just doesn't want to be in a relationship, like he said.

Tao

I'm not trying to get him to change his mind...I'm simply trying to understand. It is HE who most wanted to marry, I didn't ask him! We both looked forward, felt like it was something we wanted, and talked about a way forward. He was very much in favor of marriage...or the idea of it, up until it required feelings, or empathy or perhaps hard work. I've been married before, so I know what work a good marriage is. I took him at face value when he said this is what he wanted....

totfit

Maybe he just is who he is. I here so many comments about "they aren't really in recovery" etc. that are just ridiculous. Some people just aren't intimate or open, never have been or will be. We are all different whether its nurture or nature and sometimes we will not change. Just because alcohol affects us differently than others doesn't mean the "humanity" is any different at all. It is just how we react to a substance. No reason to awfulize and read so much more into it than there is. The way we react to alcohol will never change, but the we will always be alcoholics behaviorism etc. is a load.

Thumper

I don't think this is caused by his alcoholism to be honest. It was probably there first.

I'm sure there will be more helpful responses coming soon - thankfully

LaTeeDa

Hi and welcome. Love the name....

As far as I know there is no checklist that says alcoholics are capable of A,B, and C, but incapable of X,Y, and Z. And, really it seems to me that the fact he is a recovering alcoholic is a bit of a red herring.

The bottom line question is really whether or not you can live with what he is willing to give you. All the counseling in the world is not going to change him into someone he is unwilling to be.

So, can you accept him, as he is, today? And accept that he may never be anything else?

L

Tao

That is a really good question. Based on his own statements...accepting him as he is would require no emotional intimacy (or physical either, really)...so I agree...I'll have to really think hard on these things to see how they fit.

On the recovering note...our therapist has stated that alcoholics stay at the "age" emotionally that they were before drinking. Drinking in order not to feel...keeps one stuck at that emotional age. So I'm trying to understand this concept...if feeling emotions causes one to want to drink to avoid them....what does that mean to someone who is now married to one? This is my question...

Tao

You know what Anvil...somebody else asked that exact question and I think it is a wise question. Can I look into the good parts of the relationship, knowing I'll never have the intimate parts I wanted, and will it be enough? Thank you so much for raising this...it's a great, provocative, self-investigative question!

least

I've known a lot of men who were afraid of emotional intimacy. This can be overcome, but it takes effort to find out what they were/are afraid of and how to 'fix' it. This may have nothing to do with his recovery or his relationship with you, but the fact that he'd rather divorce than work on his intimacy skills says a lot.

The best marriages I know are those where the partners are best friends besides being husband and wife. He may have some long standing issues with emotional intimacy and not want to 'dig up the past' by exploring those issues. I wish you the best at understanding him but it may be difficult if he doesn't want to understand himself.

Tao

yes...I have to really hear him when he states he feels he neither has the capacity to deal with emotions, nor the will to do the work. I really do hear him. I suppose my work is to get really real with myself about how I feel about that.

Still Waters

I'm wondering why he got married if he can't do relationships??

I do believe that, 100%. My AH is still in a junior high fantasy land.

BuffaloGal

You may want to google "alexithymia." It's a personality trait of being unable to interpret one's own emotions, and it's hardwired. Some 50% of addicts of all kinds are estimated to have this trait to varying degrees. The bottom line of it is, for alexithymics, emotions don't get translated into something that feels good or bad; emotions are a foreign language that makes no sense, and trying to speak it causes immense anxiety. They can't understand or learn from their own feelings, so they tend not to be able to understand others' emotions either.

The description fit my aexh very well. When we were together, I was struck at how two dimensional his conception of a romantic relationship was; all picture and not a whole lot of depth. He cared, but he had no concept of how to translate that into ongoing interaction. Real emotions and real work made him reach for the bottle or click on the nearest porn site REAL fast.

Be well

Freedom1990

That is very true.

I was emotionally 'stuck' long before I ever took that first drink. I needed a drink about 5 years before I ever picked up the first drink.

My underlying issues were there long before the alcohol.

So does that mean for every year I am sober that emotionally I grow a year, if at all?

There is no formula, and there is no guarantee a recovering alcoholic will grow emotionally at all.

What sort of program does your husband have? 12 step groups, counseling, alternative methods of sobriety like SMART recovery? What sort of internal work has he done since quitting drinking?

My emotional progress has been slow, and it took many years of being involved in one unhealthy relationship after another before I realized I knew zero about a healthy relationship.

Sometimes alcoholism gets too much credit, to be honest.

Whether I became an alcoholic or not, I just flat out did not have the capacity for a healthy relationship.

As someone else said, the alcoholism is a red herring in your situation.

Learn2Live

There are no hard and fast rules about this kind of thing. I am an alcoholic and I have always been VERY emotionally in-tune, emotionally aware, whatever you want to call it. I have also known people alcoholic and people who are not alcoholic who just do not have the emotional capacity that others have. Whether or not that is "normal" is not for us to decide; it is up to each individual person to decide whether or not their OWN emotional state is healthy for them.

I knew a man who was a recovering alcoholic, who was in my ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) homegroup, who had NO FEELINGS. He KNEW he had no feelings and it bothered him that he SHOULD feel but that he DIDN'T. He thought it had something to do with growing up in an alcoholic family and he was working on that but he was not hopeful that he could change it.

I hope you know that if it's not something your husband cares to work on to try to change, that is not a reflection on YOU at all. There are good things and bad things about EVERYONE. Does his good outweigh his bad for you?

Dee74

I merged the two threads here
D

MissFixit

HI,

I know many people who share your husband's idea of marriage and intimacy. I used to judge them as fake or shallow, but now I see them just as living and choosing differently than me. We are all different and have different notions about the way things should work.

The question that I would pose is that is THIS the type of relationship you want or can live with. It is what it is, so the ball is really in your court.

dollydo

Well, if he did not marry until he was 47, there was something holding him back. Sometimes people his age just get married because society makes them feel like there is a problem when you reach middle age and have never been married, so, they marry to quiet the busy bodies. To feel like they are one of the "normies". Whatever that means! Define normal?

If he feels that he is not marriage material I would accept that as truth, after all, who knows him better than himself?

Emotionally, he is not ready for this marriage, he has made that clear. What is not clear to me, is whether you are ready to spend the rest of your life being emotionally unattached.

Tao

thanks to BuffaloGal...here is what I found out: (seems this condition affects approx 50% of alcoholics)


Alexithymia is considered to be a personality trait that places individuals at risk for other medical and psychiatric disorders while reducing the likelihood that these individuals will respond to conventional treatments for the other conditions.[3] Alexithymia is not classified as a mental disorder in the DSM-IV. It is a dimensional personality trait that varies in severity from person to person. A person's alexithymia score can be measured with questionnaires such as the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ),[4] or the Observer Alexithymia Scale (OAS).[3]

Alexithymia is defined by:[5]

1.difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
2.difficulty describing feelings to other people
3.constricted imaginal processes, as evidenced by a paucity of fantasies
4.a stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style.
In studies of the general population the degree of alexithymia was found to be influenced by age, but not by gender; the rates of alexithymia in healthy controls have been found at: 8.3% (2 of 24 persons); 4.7% (2 of 43); 8.9% (16 of 179); and 7% (4 of 56). Thus, several studies have reported that the prevalence rate of alexithymia is less than 10%.[6] A less common finding suggests that there may be a higher prevalence of alexithymia amongst males than females, which may be accounted for by difficulties some males have with "describing feelings", but not by difficulties in "identifying feelings" in which males and females show similar abilities.[7]

The alexithymia construct is strongly inversely related to the concepts of psychological mindedness[8] and emotional intelligence[9][10] and M. Bagby and G. Taylor state that there is "strong empirical support for alexithymia being a stable personality trait rather than just a consequence of psychological distress".[11] Other opinions differ and can show evidence that it may be state-dependent.[12]

Bagby and Taylor also suggest that there may be two kinds of alexithymia, "primary alexithymia" which is an enduring psychological trait that does not alter over time, and "secondary alexithymia" which is state-dependent and disappears after the evoking stressful situation has changed. These two manifestations of alexithymia are otherwise called "trait" or "state" alexithymia.[11]

[edit] Description
Typical deficiencies may include problems identifying, describing, and working with one's own feelings, often marked by a lack of understanding of the feelings of others; difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal;[1] confusion of physical sensations often associated with emotions; few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination; and concrete, realistic, logical thinking, often to the exclusion of emotional responses to problems. Those who have alexithymia also report very logical and realistic dreams, such as going to the store or eating a meal.[13] Clinical experience suggests it is the structural features of dreams more than the ability to recall them that best characterizes alexithymia.[1]

Some alexithymic individuals may appear to contradict the above mentioned characteristics because they can experience chronic dysphoria or manifest outbursts of crying or rage.[14][15][16] However, questioning usually reveals that they are quite incapable of describing their feelings or appear confused by questions inquiring about specifics of feelings.[5]

According to Henry Krystal, individuals suffering from alexithymia think in an operative way and may appear to be superadjusted to reality. In psychotherapy, however, a cognitive disturbance becomes apparent as patients tend to recount trivial, chronologically ordered actions, reactions, and events of daily life with monotonous detail.[17][18] In general, these individuals lack imagination, intuition, empathy, and drive-fulfillment fantasy, especially in relation to objects. Instead, they seem oriented toward things and even treat themselves as robots. These problems seriously limit their responsiveness to psychoanalytic psychotherapy; psychosomatic illness or substance abuse is frequently exacerbated should these individuals enter psychotherapy.[5]

A common misconception about alexithymia is that affected individuals are totally unable to express emotions verbally and that they may even fail to acknowledge that they experience emotions. Even before coining the term, Sifneos (1967) noted patients often mentioned things like anxiety or depression. The distinguishing factor was their inability to elaborate beyond a few limited adjectives such as "happy" or "unhappy" when describing these feelings.[19] The core issue is that alexithymics have poorly differentiated emotions limiting their ability to distinguish and describe them to others.[1] This contributes to the sense of emotional detachment from themselves and difficulty connecting with others, making alexithymia negatively associated with life satisfaction even when depression and other confounding factors are controlled for.[20]

[edit] Relational issues
According to Vanheule, Desmet and Meganck (2006) alexithymia creates interpersonal problems because these individuals avoid emotionally close relationships, or that if they do form relationships with others they tend to position themselves as either dependent, dominant, or impersonal, "such that the relationship remains superficial".[21] Inadequate "differentiation" between self and others by alexithymic individuals has been observed by Blaustein & Tuber (1998) and Taylor et al. (1997).[22]

In a study, a large group of alexithymic individuals completed the 64-item Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-64) which found that "two interpersonal problems are significantly and stably related to alexithymia: cold/distant and non-assertive social functioning. All other IIP-64 subscales were not significantly related to alexithymia."[21]

Chaotic interpersonal relations have also been observed by Sifneos.[23] Due to the inherent difficulties identifying and describing emotional states in self and others, alexithymia also negatively affects relationship satisfaction between couples.[24]

In a 2008 study[25] alexithymia was found to be correlated with impaired understanding and demonstration of relational affection, and that this impairment contributes to poorer mental health, poorer relational well-being, and lowered relationship quality.[25]

Some individuals working for organizations in which control of emotions is the norm might show alexithymic-like behavior but not be alexithymic. However, over time the lack of self-expression becomes part of their everyday lives and they end up losing their original self-identity

MissFixit

Hi again.

I know you mentioned that you posted that for another poster, but I want to pose a question to you?

If he is purple, a fish, an alcoholic, Alexithymic, whatever, how does that affect you? If he is whatever, isn't that for him to deal with? Are you willing to accept the situation that he is offering to you?