duqld1717

Everyone talks about how alcoholics have to hit rock bottom in order to change. Well, let's switch the focus to us-the friends and family of an alcoholic....What was everyone's rock bottom that they hit when they realized they couldnt take their A's behavior anymore??

I'll start with mine-One of my good friends from college got married this past December on our college campus. They have a chapel right on campus and I was so looking forward to going back to where I went to school and seeing people I hadn't seen in a few years. It was a beautiful but cold day, the sun was out and she looked beautiful. I had been anxiously awaiting her wedding since the day I found out she got engaged. I had brought my now XABF as my date. Big mistake. He ended up ripping shots and chugging beer and getting so drunk and sick and obnoxious at the beginning of the reception, we had to leave. (We were basically asked to leave). I missed her entire reception. I WILL NEVER LET SOMEONE STEAL ANY MORE MEMORIES FROM ME. That was my rock bottom where I knew I was done. What is everyone else's???

KerBearz

I haven't quite hit the "rock bottom", but I am very, very close. My slide towards the bottom has been going on for the last couple of years... my moment of epiphany came to me while we were on a much needed family vacation to Florida. On our second night (in a beautiful resort), my AH proceeded to get very, very drunk and he was insulting the other vacationers, got a switchblade and was approaching "suspicious" people on the beach and basically terrorizing us (his family). He kept saying he needed to protect us and running to the door and flinging it open. It was a kind of crazy that I had never seen before and it scared me to death. In a very tense moment, I looked around the room and saw the faces of my children... my oldest was angry, my youngest was terrified and my middle was the peacemaker trying to calm AH and everyone else down. I knew immediately that I needed to make some changes!
The changes that I have made have been slow, but noticeable. I started attending al-anon, attending family seminars at treatment centers and working very, very hard on detaching. I struggle a lot with just letting go, but I am getting there.

buttercream

DUI #2 plus a drunken rage where things in the house were broken (and I grabbed the dog and left for a few hours to avoid being struck by flying objects) was when I told him I wouldn't have drinking in my house any longer, and he would need to move out to continue.

tallulah

Mine was quite unremarkable really. I heard of some news which made me realise that I was never going to have that happy ever after I thought I would. Not with him. I felt uneasy as I went to bed that night.. it was the knowledge that I'd never have that kind of happy news with him and that life was too short to waste it.

The next morning I said, 'I'm done'.

Thumper

I had planned to leave my xah for a long time and was prepared to make that 'announcement' in 2005. I had already moved accounts, made some other financial plans/arrangements. I then had an unplanned pregnancy. I stayed. Things improved for a couple of years...and then they got worse. Life got very big. This is when things began to get murky for me. I painted myself into a box of the only ending was me, him, and the kids. Together. Anything less was failure. I would read and re-read information about how terrible divorce was for kids in order to convince myself I needed to figure it out. I couldn't cheat and bail. The day to day things of life kept me very busy - sometimes to busy. I began to change. Shut down. Very numb to most everything. No joy. No outward anger. No nagging. No opinions. The rage and resentment grew. The denial grew. The pretending grew. The alcoholism progressed. The logistics of living with alcholism became more complicated.

We went on a vacation - camping - and my xah came with. This was rare, he usually didn't go. It was an utter disaster. He drank 24/7 the entire time. Slurring, staggering, on a family vacation. it was scary, shocking, appalling, and I was unable to deny it any longer. I saw my little boys following him around like that I was depressed, exhausted, flat, ashamed, confused, on the edge, exhausted. I was becoming a mother full of anger and unhappiness. I came home and felt like I had hit my bottom. I honestly felt like I was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. I did not know what to do. He went on-line and found some **** about saving a marriage and how wives can have more sex with their husbands to save the damn day and I refused to look at it. I refused to discuss counseling. I wanted a divorce. I felt like I might burn in hell because I had convinced myself that any decent mother saves a marriage for the sake of her children but it finally occurred to me that my children were losing me. I was causing more damage then he was because i was going crazy.

And then I posted here an you can read the rest!

Payne

My parents drank and I separated myself to a certain extent from them years ago. But the "alchoholic" per se ruining my life was always me. As an ACA generally we grow up with little alcoholic personalities without the need to add alcohol. For me my rock bottom was this summer. Over the last couple years my inability to let anyone in, or trust anyone, or feel was coming to the edge of a cliff, I was either gonna fly or fall. Well right at that cusp I found a wonderful friend and i thought I had "finally found someone" who i could trust and who cared about me. We got into one fight and I assumed the friendship was over. I immediately pulled away. My friend let me. In my mind that was further proof that I was right. I spent the summer in one huge spiral not trusting anyone around me. Wanting so deperately to find some semblance of a safe place.
It wasnt until I started trying to find a safe place in myself that I began to heal at all. The blowout happened in June, I began to find some semblance of sanity again in september. In October when I felt safe with me (not always perfect but better) I asked for the friendship back.
I was granted the gift of getting that friendship back immediately, better than ever I might add, along with the new found independence and self comfort that I had never had. Now months later that friend has been a source of constant support to bettering myself, but my new outlook has made it so that I don't lean too heavily on another person. I am my own person with friends, with a messed up family, and my own personal strength to make everything better. It wasn't until I hit my own "rock bottom" that I realized I had to find recovery for the alcoholic demons that were placed in me long before I ever became myself.

LifesALongSong

Yep, I have been skidding bottom as of late, Im sure. Same as other folks, wife recently got 2nd OVI while on probation for the 1st. So she's SOL for awhile, guessing 60 days in the county Hilton. Sitting in the hokie as we speak.

Couple of turning points was a few days ago when my 18 YO son mentioned that he has dreams of Mom being drunk every 3rd night.

Also when he told me to "SHUT-UP and lets not talk about mom's alcoholism right now" WOW!!!! that hit me like a ton of bricks! I thanked him for pointing it out to me that I'm obsessed with it. I realize now how much her drinking has changed the family dynamics. I need to make a change and get a focus for myself and to help my kids.

JACKRUSSELLGIRL

I pretty sure I am at my bottom and it is just sick and tired of the promises of him saying he is going to stop but then he starts up again. The rollercoster ride is what is getting me at my bottom. Say yourself the ride.

LexieCat

It didn't take me long to hit it when my new husband (#2) returned to drinking after a near-death experience with liver disease. I would come home from looking for a SECOND job to support us, only to find him passed out on the sofa.

I believe the coup de grace was when, after I had told him we would have to find another place to live because we could no longer afford the rent on house we were renting, he went and signed another six month lease expressly against my wishes. (He had NO job--I was the sole support at that time.) I told him he signed the lease, he could deal with the rent, and I moved out within a couple of weeks after that. I left him one month's rent. I found an apartment, handled the move myself. I divorced him about a year later.

HeyImme

I guess I have to answer that I'm not exactly there yet, because I'm still mulling it over. But I am also able to say that I'm not willing to hit rock bottom with him, and I am actively making plans to make sure I'm not there when it happens...

Chelle3

My botton was when AH was verbally abusive to me in front of my 16 yr old daughter. It was pretty extensive and pretty bad.

I then discussed his drinking with my girls and realized they were more affected than I realized.

I am the child of pretty bad parental abuse. They weren't alcoholics, but were physically and emotionally abusive and very negligent.

I'm a mama bear with my children and if anything remotely abusive happens to them or in front of them, it's the end.

wpasierb

My first bottom was last summer when we went to CA for my oldest daughters high school graduation. My AH drank from the morning we left, on the airplane, when we landed, and into the night. My sister, whom I hadn't seen in 5 years picked us up and he was drunk. He drank the whole trip. The last day of our trip he wanted to go hang out with his friends and leave the graduation party, but nobody would take him to where they were and they WERE NOT invited to the party. The party was at my ex husband's house and he doesn't drink but supplies plenty of liquor for guests, so my current husband got absolutely sloppy, mean, ugly and all of the other wonderful personality traits Alcoholics possess. That night he raged at me about what and awful person I was, etc...with my sister and her husband with us.

The second bottom was last summer after the CA trip when he started puking blood and was hospitalized with liver failure, and after he got home started drinking again. Unfortunately I'm still here with him, and I hope when I hit my third bottom I will leave.

jrlcpl

Mine was coming home from work on 2 different occassions the same week and finding my STBXAW passed out drunk while our infant daughter and toddler son were totally unsupervised.

Tuffgirl

Mine was far more subtle - nothing special - just another stupid conversation full of blame and projecting. Only this time I sat quietly, watching objectively, listening as he called me a passive-aggressive manipulator and a lair for the umpteenth time, and realized he has been talking about himself all this time. He's not describing me. Anyone else who knows me knows I am not those things. He's describing himself. He's throwing his baggage at me and expecting me to take it on so I can feel as bad inside as he does. And he was 40 days sober and attending AA. It was the realization that nothing is changing on his part, now its time to change it on my part. I deserve better than this; my daughters deserve better than this. Heck, the dogs deserve better than this. And I left that day. I don't miss those conversations.

lillamy

I think I had been stuck at the bottom for quite some time when something someone else said validated my feelings. I was on the phone with a friend when AH went into one of his screaming, belittling fits. My friend overheard the whole thing (AH didn't know this) and said later, "What I heard was abuse. You know you don't have to choose to live like that, right?"

That's what I needed. One person I trusted telling me I wasn't crazy. That it was OK to save myself and my kids.

johnnymau

My Al-Anon bottom was relatively high, but it takes what it takes.

My primary qualifier is my sister, who is older than me by 16 months. We had a fairly prickly relationship as children, but that changed when we started partying together at ages 15-16. I turned her on to weed (to my everlasting guilt), we stared drinking together, then trying any type of drug that came our way. At first we had a ball, it was fun and exciting and we bonded deeply over our shared adventures and black sheep status within our family.

It didn’t take long before her emotional volatility made her extremely un-fun to party with: she would throw a drink in someone’s face over a perceived slight, challenge large men to fight in scary bars, and just generally cause drama and get in trouble with increasing regularity. I started to distance myself from her.

When she started having children, she began to put together many periods of white-knuckle abstinence of varying lengths. My own drinking was getting worse, and her temperance didn’t make me want to hang out with her any more than her problem drinking did. She still seemed crazy, and her life was still full of drama. She was having trouble in her marriage and wanted a shoulder to cry on, and I did not want to talk to her, if I could avoid it.

Then I got sober in AA, and she stopped wanting to talk to me. After I was in for about a year, she joined me in AA. We started hanging out, going to meetings together, and began to get close again. She lasted just short of a year and relapsed. And that is when my “untreated Al-Anonism” (isn’t there a better term than this? I guess “insanity” would suffice) started to kick in.

I became completely obsessed with the idea that if I could just get her back into AA, everything would be fine. And, of course, I was the only one capable of that job, since I got her sober the first time (grandiosity much?). At the time, she had a huge resentment against AA (since it had “failed” her like everyone/everything else), and said unequivocally that she would never return. That did not even slow me down. I figured if I was just a patient, kind, loving, tolerant model of sobriety that she would eventually come to her senses. That did not happen. What happened was I started to get sick. I could not understand why my efforts were failing, and I became obsessed by the idea that she needed to get sober my way. After all, it worked so well for me! I spent countless hours ruminating about her situation. I gave up my boundaries about her not calling me when she was drunk, and then not calling me at work, and then not calling me at work when she was drunk. It started to create a strain on my marriage.

There finally came a day, though, just like with my drinking, that I had a moment of clarity and was done fighting. I knew enough to ask for help and where to ask. Two things really stand out in my memory from my early Al-Anon participation: 1) I was flabbergasted to discover that the 12 Steps in Al-Anon were exactly the same as the ones that were already working for me in AA, 2) ACAs who had one alcoholic parent and one untreated Al-Anon parent sharing that it was the non-drinking parent that created most of the chaos in their homes. I heard this a lot. It really brought home to me the insanity that being in a relationship with an alcoholic can cause.

I have been in Al-Anon for over ten years now, and, I am happy to say, my sister has been sober again in AA for almost two. She had to do a whole lot more damage to herself and the people in her life to get willing to try it again, but willingness is one the many excellent and admirable qualities she has in abundance these days. Nothing I could do got her to that place of willingness. She had to find her own place where the fear of stopping was finally less than the pain of keeping on.

While my sister was finding her new bottom, everyone in the family wanted me to get involved in the drama and could not fathom why I would not. I gently (and sometimes not so gently) recommended Al-Anon to my parents, to my brother, to my sister’s children and to her partner, but so far no takers. That’s OK. I hope I have planted a seed, or at the very least served as an example of loving detachment.

I am beyond grateful to both programs for getting me my life back (twice), for making it possible for me to be closer to my sister than ever before, and also for granting me the knowledge that this is just a daily reprieve for both of us, and I need to work a strong program today to ensure that I have one tomorrow.

*steps off of oversized soapbox*

LexieCat

Thanks, johnny,

AWESOME share. You are dead-on. It's "willingness" that we can't give someone else.

wicked

My sister is only 16 months younger than me. she is still using oxycontins. pain pills are scary bad. incredibly and completely devasted her and her life.



Yes, yes! Me too! I am super recovery and I will save my sister.
Damn, that cost me a few thousand dollars and a tear in the the shaky trust I was building with my addicted daughter again.
When I start feeling like super man again, I need a reality check, or a smack!

Beth

Thank you so much for sharing this, many powerful messages in there for me,
(and it is all about me, right)

StarCat

I guess my bottom started when XABF reacted violently to my attempts to "detach with love" because I wasn't getting upset enough for his tastes. I had finally crawled into bed, and he came storming in and started throwing things, ripping the sheets off my bed, and yelling directly in my face all these horrible things.

I got really angry, took a swing at him, missed, and startled both of us so much that I announced "I'm going to work!" and he didn't try to stop me. I went to work at 10pm that night, my cell phone still on the charger, and spent the night there.

I found this forum overnight while searching for "raging alcoholic" and you can read the rest from there. I did eventually go to the psychologist, XABF eventually went to rehab, and he tried to control my life so much from inside that I finally bought the book I was recommended and started reading all about abusive men.

And that, as they say, was that. I'm not getting back on that roller coaster.

FindingPeace1

I find this interesting. Rock bottom can be pretty ugly, it seems.
What I observe is MANY things others talk about here would be SO FAR beyond what a "normie" would take!
The "final straw" is often a moving target - perpetually located after "one more" incident.

When I realized my AH was an alcoholic and had been drinking in secret and lying about it, you'd think it could have been my rock bottom.

But it wasn't.

I wanted to talk to him about it. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted him to agree to change.

When I told my AH I realized he was drinking and lying and hiding and depressed and he flipped out and packed a bag and left for 2 days, you'd THINK that would be my rock bottom.

But it wasn't.

I didn't want to end a relationship in such a b**ls**t huff. Rediculous and not my style. So I stayed. (did I see an opportunity to peacefully and quietly leave? nope.)

When he returned and was a pill for a year, did I hit rock bottom? Nope.

Maybe there is SOMETHING I can say or do...

I have been inching toward change.
I separated. Got a new job in a new house in a new state.
I am emotionally detached in many ways.

And, yet, I keep waiting for MY rock bottom so it is easy to end this!

While I can see (intellectually) his behaviors are deal breakers, they don't make me feel rock bottom-y (kwim??).

I am beginning to think I don't HAVE a rock bottom, or if I do, its so off the deep end, I don't want to go there.

I am beginning to think I may need to leave WITH all my doubt and love and wishful thinking and hope and clinging. That there won't be an obvious "when you know, you know". That I don't need to wait for a huge *something* to have enough reason.

It's a bit hard to grok. I want it to be clear.
It's not clear.
It may never be clear.
I may never feel clear.
I may need to leave anyway without ever having touched the bottom.

peace