EmmyG

Thanks for your input. He's actually from the same part of the world you are. He's made a lot of progress in the last few years. A few years ago he wouldn't even admit to having a problem. It feels really unnatural to him to talk about his feelings. He is asking me to go to a therapist with him and he'll go on his own as well, and if I don't see changes in him and see him consistently seeking treatment by the time our current lease is up in August, he will let me go amicably. I don't know whether to believe him. He says he will go this week. I don't know what to do. The only thing giving me hope is the fact that he's gone so long without doing this.

EnglishGarden

Alcoholics often go to therapy to get the family off their backs. It's so easy for an alcoholic to sit and chat for 50 minutes while he's planning his next drink.

So stay alert and aware and keep in mind what real recovery should look like.

MarkstheSpot

This is what I mean about finishing the job. He's displayed the ability and inclination to go without alcohol for long periods. Now he has to take it that one step further. And he has to really want to do that. If he doesn't like AA or opening up to a therapist, fair enough, neither of those options suited me either, but he has to find something that does agree with him. He has to find some way of cracking the code in order to keep alcohol out of his life and keep his family together.

lillamy

NONE of this is your fault. That's the first thing. I saw the title of your post and thought "without reading the story, I know for a fact that none of this is her fault."

I have a 9-year-old daughter. She said to me, "If I could only be better at cleaning Dad's house and nicer to his friends and pretty like my sister and good in school like my brother then Dad wouldn't have to drink. I think I make him drink."

I asked her if she had a gun.
She giggled and said of course not.
I then asked her if she had ever held a gun to her dad's head and told him that she would kill him if he didn't drink.
She said of course not.
"OK," I said. "Then you're not making him drink. He's choosing to drink."

It's what alcoholics do. Binge drinkers, daily drinkers, weekend drinkers, vacation bingers -- they drink. They find a reason to drink. And they lie about it. Accuse you of imagining things.

One of my "favorite" A stories is of the guy who snuck into the garage after the family was in bed to drink from one of the bottles he had sitting there. His wife walked in on him and said, "HONEY! Are you standing. In the garage. At 2 am. Drinking wine. Directly from the bottle?"

He said: "No."

She was standing there watching him do it. Described to him what she saw. And he STILL attempted to reject her observation and claim it was wrong.

Addicts have the definition of a one-track mind. Their life, existence, is built around being able to drink. One of my friends, a recovering alcoholic, described how she built her entire life around planning her drinking. She didn't take college classes after 3 pm, because then she'd have to postpone drinking. She didn't take work shifts in the evenings because then she couldn't drink. She wouldn't book doctor's appointments after noon because then she couldn't drink. She wouldn't vacation with friends who thought starting the day with vodka was weird. She wouldn't go see her family on holidays because then she couldn't drink. And she'd lie about it.

It's a horrid, soul-stealing disease. And as effing awful as it is to be the family of an addict, I would never trade places with them. They lose their soul, their personality, who they are. The choice they have to make, to give up their drug of choice, is one that is at least as hard to make as the choice we have -- to give up the relationship to save ourselves. I often think harder.

The point I came to in my marriage, long before I actually left, was that you can love someone, have compassion for someone, and want the best for someone without that meaning that you give up everything you want in life.

I don't hate my AXH. I hate the disease that robbed him -- and me, and our children -- of everything he once was. That turned his brain into mush, his zest for changing the world into pathetic paranoia, his commitment to helping the downtrodden and poor into self-pity. I hate that with every fiber of my being. I feel compassion for him. But none of that means I have to subject myself to being belittled, abused, raped, puked on.

Please don't read that and think "Oh wow -- at least my life isn't that bad!" as SoloMio said -- if nothing changes, it will get that bad. Maybe not in the same way my marriage did. But alcoholism is a progressive disease. As they say in Al-Anon: Alcoholism is an elevator that goes down to hell; it's up to you on what floor you want to get off.

I understand that you love your husband, as I loved mine. But his drinking is a problem for you. (And you're not wrong: If you think he's drinking, he is.) He's hit you and scared your son.

You carry NO responsibility for the choices he makes. You are, however, responsible for your own life. You have the absolute right to make choices that make your life better. And your son's life better. You have every right to walk away and say, "Your drinking is unacceptable to me. I deserve to live a life free of alcohol, and so does our son."

And you're also thinking -- I'm sure -- "what right do I have to take my son away from his father?" The answer to that -- as many, many children of alcoholics here will tell you -- is that it's better to have NO father than an alcoholic father.

You don't have to leave him. You don't have to do anything. But you owe it to yourself to educate yourself about what alcoholism is, what it does to the alcoholic, and what it does to the loved ones of the alcoholic. You owe it to yourself and your son to find a way to live without the specter of alcoholism hovering over your head.

And you don't have to fix it all today. You just have to take the first step. And then the next one. And just by posting here, you've already started. Lots of love to you.

StarCat

I'd just like to point out that I absolutely wouldn't consider it "taking a son away from his father" if the father is already choosing to be emotionally absent in favor of the alcohol, anyway.
The son's father isn't home right now, alcohol is doing all the thinking.