Angrymarble

My husband has started intense outpatient and is attending aa twice a week. I’d like to say he’s working the program but it’s too soon to know.

I love him but I’m not sure if I can get past the lies he told me or the times he was responsible for our kids and made poor choices.

I need some anecdotes for how people have rebuilt trust.

He’s apologized but it’s not enough for me. Will I ever get past this?

SparkleKitty

The onus for rebuilding trust is on him, not you, AM. Even if he does everything perfectly, it will take time.

Maybe focus instead on making sure you are seeing to your own self-care and recovery than pressuring yourself to trust before you are ready or before it's earned.

Maudcat

Hi, AM.
This issue comes up from time to time.
As sparkle said, rebuilding trust takes time, and I think it comes from the addicted partner’ s changed behavior and actions.
Recovery looks like recovery.
Get enough recovery time and trust can, hopefully, return to the relationship.
I would stay on my side of the street, be good to myself, and not feel i have a timeline for trust.

BriarSkye

Lies and dishonesty will jeopardize any relationship.
With the element of substance abuse issues,
it can become even more difficult to trust.
Just my opinion.

maia1234

What are you doing for your recovery? Are you attending meetings, seeing a therapist? You need to get help yourself as this is the family disease of alcoholism, not just him. It will not work if you don't get help.

We were sober, we remember everything. There is a lot of bent up anger that can not just be forgotten. Work on you and it will fall into place the way it's supposed too. Hugs

Angrymarble

I haven’t done much on my own yet. I have a therapist and I’m attending an al Anon like meeting gimorrow night. In all honesty, right now our focus is on my H getting to all his meetings.

Without constantly paying sitters it’s hard for me to get out, has anyone had luck here with online therapists that you Skype with?

Sleepyhollo

AM I can relate, a lot. Be ready for it to be a long road and not necessarily an easy one. My H went to rehab for 90 days. He was 10 days sober when he went in. It took a good 7 weeks of intense counseling and lots of meetings before he finally started making in dent in understanding his behaviors. I never would've thought he needed rehab, after all he could quit without a problem, but it became clear pretty quickly that he needed it very much. Not for the alcohol part but for the underlying issues and learning coping skills. We are a year out from him leaving rehab and even over the past year things have continued to evolve. I admit he has changed for the better, but I still have a lot of resentment. It is hard to let go of all those years of suffering. It is even harder to forget. He has apologized many times, mostly in marriage counseling because outside of that we still don't talk much (because of me) but he also follows that with that he knows apologies are not helpful, it is his actions and changes in behavior that will eventually show that he was sorry enough to change (or something like that).
Your h just started this. It is going to take a lot of time for him to change bit by bit. They always say don't make any life changing decisions for the first year of recovery. Assuming he stays sober he will change a lot in a year if he continues to to therapy and AA.
And you will likely also need to work on you and your recovery from this. I never realized all the issues I had prior to getting into a relationship with him but that were aomlified over the years of being with him. So I have a lot of changes to make as well, and since I'm going to therapy once a week and marriage counseling once a week it is at a much slower pace than my H who had several hours a day for 90 days in rehab and then many AA meeting since.
But I will admit that despite all these positive changes he has made I really don't know that I will ever get past this. I've been hurt too much and been through too many cycles of active use and the brief sobriety. Had he done what he did last year 3 years ago I think things would've gone much differently for us. Because by the time I got to confronting him a year ago I really was ready to walk out. But I felt like I owed it to him and my kid to give him one last chance of sobering up but with treatment this time. He did and I'm glad he did it for his sake of the sake of our kiddo but I have a hard time seeing myself come out of this and be in a normal married relationship. I've detached too much. Things are less strained (and that really only changed about 2 months ago -after he blew up at me) but I have very little desire to be around him. It is like we are both completely different people (which was necessary for both of us) and we've been put together for an arranged marriage. I feel like I want different things.,
So our story isn't finished obviously and who knows what will happen. I do trust him with our kid at least (even though I feel like he still treats her like a 3 year old in the way he interacts with her but I guess he is at least interacting ). I actually have very little concern that he will relapse at least for the foreseeable future (he is being followed very closely and his livelihood is at stake if he does relapse ). My therapist has said that I don't trust him with me because of everything I went through for the past 15 years and basically being second to the bottle. And he is probably right (he has never abused me, he was a happy drunk before he would passs out).
Anyway, give it time. My H was complaining at the end of rehab that I wasn't giving anything to our relationship. Very funny considering he'd basically been absent for many years and now that he was sober he expected me to just forgive and forget and welcome him home with open arms like nothing happened.
He has definitely changed his tune a bit. He was so dang impatient once he got out of rehab as far as us was concerned. He said this week in marriage counseling that he understand now that it has always been about him, first when he was drinking and then when he went to rehab and everyone was so proud of what he had done. In the mean time no one can really relate to what I have been through (because you can't unless you have been there ) and it is hard for them to understand why we can't just move on now that my H has done such a wonderful job of recovering (I admit there is a little sarcasm in that sentence ) and so he finally sort of gets that I need my own time to work on me and process stuff at my own pace and then see where it goes. I'm still not very optimistic. I will admit I'm still here because of our kid. Without her I would've been long gone. I do realize I can't just run away from it all because I have to work on changing me or else I'm likely to fall into another dysfunctional relationship. I'm a long ways away still from knowing who I really am and what I want for me. I've spent too many years caring about everyone else first.
Take care of you and your kids. Give your H time to work his recovery. It will not be an easy road for him either and there will likely be bumps in the road.. unlesss you're in an unsafe situation, don't make any life changing decisions in the first year ebcuse lots can change (and will if he sticks with it).
Once he has been sober for a bit and has had time to work on himself I would recommend counseling for the both of you together as well (even though I dread it every week it has been helpful since I don't really talk at home about anything that involves emotion with him). It will take time to rebuild trust and it will be actions not words that will start rebuilding that trust.
Also consider counseling for yourself. I'm really not a big fan of a lot of the psychobabble stuff from therapists but mine respects that and it has been a lifesaver. He does push and challenge me but does a great job not doing it in a crazy kumabya therapist way . I still feel like I have a ways to go but it has been very helpful. It also helps a lot if you can find someone that has a fair amount of addiction experience for both individual and marriage counseling because addiction complicates things a lot more and it helps if someone is very familiar with how addiction affects everything else.
Sorry for the long response. I hope some of that answered your question at least somewhat even though there isn't a straight forward answer obviously.
Good luck and take care of you !!

Angrymarble

@sleepyhollo, thanks for the response. I’ve been pushing for marriage counseling bc I am angry and I don’t trust him right now. But of course I found the counselor. He’s been trying to make an appointment but I need him to do the heavy lifting now if he wants to salvage us.

Sleepyhollo

Your H should be focusing on getting to all his meetings. I mean you need to be supportive but you need to work on yourself and take care of you. Otherwise you just continue the codependency IMO.
How old are you kid(s)? Are they in school? If so I would really make an effort to do therapy while they're in school and if you work I would see if you can take time each week for therapy. Because it is very important that you work on you at the same time (i would not have known that when my H went to rehab, I figured it was all his deal because it was his problem after all....found out that that's not how it works after all)
People take their kids to alanon all the time. A friend of mine had 4 y/o twins at the time and she would go to meetings with the both of them on her lap. I didn't find alanon all that helpful but I did go several times and a couple of times I took my kid. She also has come to therapy appt with me and just stays in the waiting area and watches her iPad.
And if your H is currently doing treatment do the kids know what is going on? If I remember right I think you were trying to not tell them yet but I think they really should not to a certain degree and then you can take them to appt. my kid always comes to marriage counseling with us. She doesn't really know what it is for other than I originally told her it was to help mommy and daddy deal with his alcohol disease. She sits in a different room with the iPad an headphones and is content.
It won't be easy but it can be done.
I have never done online counseling but I know people do it and some have found a good match. I think it is like with any therapist, it may take a couple of different people before you find a good match. I was lucky that I found a good one right away but he was recommended by my friend who is a shrink and refers to him, it is sometimes helpful to get recs from people.

Sleepyhollo

Honestly I think it might be better for both of you to do some work on yourself through individual therapy. We could've started marriage counseling during rehab (we did a couple of sessions at rehab a couple of weeks prior to him getting out mostly to help with that transition because I wasn't to happy about him coming home...). I think it was good for me to get some of that anger out in individual counseling. And it took my H a good 7 weeks in rehab before he finally started understanding his behaviors. And he needed to understand this before we could tackle stuff together. I think it would've been useless early on in his recovery to go to couples counseling. We both had some stuff we needed to work on for ourselves first.
His outpatient program should hopefully be able to recommend certified addition counselors for both individual and marriage counseling. And even though you're not an addict it would be helpful for you as well to find a CAC since they will need to be very familiar with addiction to better help you as well.
As a side note the marriage counselor that was recommended to us from rehab was supposed to be one of the best. Never mind that it would've been an hour drive each way and a huge hassle to do that each week during work. But my H felt that he wanted the best of the best because he wanted thighs fixed quickly and of course if you have a really good therapist then you're guaranteed that it is going to work.... luckily she didn't accept our insurance and couldn't get us in ina timely matter and we ended up finding a CAC close to home who does evening appt.

honeypig

This is what needs to change. Up until now, all the focus has been on your AH--has he been drinking? How much? What he might do next? How can you control the situation?

And now, all the focus is STILL on your AH--is he going to meetings? Is he drinking? Is it time to trust him again?

His recovery is his. Leave him to it. He was able to find a way to drink w/o any help from you; he certainly has the resources to find and work his own recovery, too.

Your recovery is your responsibility. Concentrate your efforts there, and you'll get a good return, regardless of what your AH does.

People told me this when I was new also, and like you, I didn't get it, thought it was all about getting XAH sober and then my life would be great. That turned out not to be the case, and what people here had told me was indeed the truth...

PrettyViolets

Trust is built by your spouse's actual actions, not just their words. When you have been in an environment where one day someone is sober and you can trust them and then the next moment they relapse and you cannot trust them, it is confusing. It was to the point when he was sober I would have nightmares that he was going to relapse and when he was relapsing I was in this other reality of hope trying to figure out how to fix all the chaos.

That hope and that trust was completely shattered when my husband got drunk the week of my birthday, did not go into work, got fired, and then got angry and told me that he was going to hit me (he actually did not hit me though). It was another rockbottom for me.

It actually took a couple of years to gain back the trust. It took a couple of birthdays where he was sober and a couple of years where he did keep his job. It took a couple of years to open up my heart and actually voice that I did truly love him again (not because of hope but because he was someone that had earned my trust).

Both of us did have to make good changes in our life. I had to be someone that he could trust that could set good boundaries with him. When we were dating we would go to a bar and hang out. We just could not do that anymore. I used to occasionally drink a glass of wine or I thought I was cool if I went to an Irish pub (I have Irish heritage). I really had to get over myself and be selfless. After what I went through with my husband's alcoholism, I had no desire to drink anything. In fact, his entire family does not drink around him. My side of the family has been courteous as well to not drink around my husband when they visit.

Done4today

Only time will tell if you will get past it. As other's have said, you need to work on yourself and let your husband work his program. Get to Al-anon and work the program. This will be for your sanity.

I am an alcoholic with 2 years of sobriety and have worked all 12 steps of the AA program. I have made amends (not apologies) to many people that I hurt in my past. Some of these people trust me fully and others don't care to ever hear from me again. But because of the AA program everyone I meet now trust me fully because I live honest, happy, and honorable.

Good luck

NYCDoglvr

An alcoholic must earn the right to be trusted. That means a great deal of hard work and time. You don't owe it to him just because he said "sorry". And if you find, after some time, that you still don't trust or respect him then take it from there.

Tillery

I’m going to try and simplify as best I can because like many of you, the history says a lot.

I met my SO over two years ago. We started as friends and things gradually progressed to relationship. Approx a year later, we decided to move in together. We were both “drinkers” but I never considered that either of us had a problem. After I moved into to his home (with my child), I realized he had a problem. For a short time, I indulged with him. Rewind. Shortly after I moved in, I realized he was having an affair with his ex gf and had been for, basically, our entire relationship. This quickly escalated drinking (on both our parts). Functional alcoholics, we were. Because we had been friends first, I felt the need to give him a chance (co dependency much?). He decided he was going to get on antidepressants to see if that would help with his demons, as we call them (he has a very horrible past). His dr prescribed Prozac because he said there was a possibility that it would curb his alcohol abuse. Quite the opposite. He went from being a sweet, caring, and doting man (minus the affair), to a man that would say anything to hurt me (Ugh. Just in writing this, I sound pathetic). After a horrible weekend, he came to me and said he needed to go to rehab (no legal reasons. He decided this on his own). The next day, he called and week later admitted himself. During the week of preparation, we had many conversations as to whether we should even consider continuing our relationship once he got out. While he would tell me he didn’t want me going anywhere. In the next breath, he would say he didn’t know if he was going to be with me or if he was going to decide to rekindle his es relationship. Or maybe decide to be alone. I point blank told him, “if you need me to care for your home while you are gone, just ask, but please don’t just use me.” Fast forward to two weeks later, he was diagnosed with sex addiction, alcoholism, and has a problem with being able to tell people no and/or is a care giver (I very much knew this about him and we had many of conversations regarding this issue prior to the “problem”, but it was nice for his counselors to be able to confirm this with him). We talked every few days and he truly seems like a different person. I quit drinking with him the day he left and spent this time working on myself. I felt like I was happier and stronger. I never asked him whether he was continuing to talk to “her”. I assumed his counselors would probably work through that with him. I still don’t know. A little over a week ago, he told me he was coming home. At first I was excited but that quickly changed to fear. I didn’t know if I was ready. He seemed excited to come home, so I hid my fear from him. He told me he was getting out on Saturday. Yesterday morning, I woke up straight out of bed, KNOWING he was out. I assumed that maybe he was going to surprise me with an early arrival, but he never showed. Today, I called the rehab and was informed that he had been discharged yesterday am. I wasn’t shocked at all. I did call him twice with no answer, but I knew that that would tip him off that I knew he was out. I have had every thought under the sun as to what he is doing and why he would keep it from me. I have thought that perhaps he wanted to end things with her so that he could start anew here. I have thought that maybe he has decided he had chose her. Basically every fear and insecurity I thought I had dealt with came crashing back on me and I was angry. I then received a text (not a phone call), saying that he was sorry, he didn’t want me to be upset or worry, but he needed to be selfish for “the day” and process this time away. My thoughts went to “selfish? What have you been for the last two years?” “How hard would it have been to say “hey, this is what I’m doing babe. I don’t want you to worry.” (Before I contacted him 24 hours after his discharge).

I don’t know. I’m feeling extremely betrayed and I feel like this is NOT the way to start your return to reality (he is supposed to be attending Intensive outpatient therapy). How am I supposed to respond appropriately? Am I supposed to let him come home and be patient? Am I supposed to voice my concerns and feelings? I don’t want to overwhelm him, but at the same time, I am feeling overwhelmed. He has had time and therapists around the clock and I have been dealing with a mess of emotions and my own sobriety on my own. I guess I am just looking for some healthy suggestions on how to handle the situation.

ScaryTime

Tillery,
You need to do what you want for yourself. You cannot control what he does/his actions. If you were feeling apprehensive, I would try to figure out why.
Take it one day/hour/minute at a time. Just because he is out of rehab doesn’t mean his alcoholic mindset has changed. Change is hard and takes time. It sounds to me like you are so focused on what your reaction should be to him; while your focus should be on doing what is right for you.
I am so sorry you are going through this. Sending hugs and prayers of peace to you...

Tillery

Thank you so much for your response. I have def taken it to heart. As an update, he came home and I felt like I had no choice but to lay down my limitations. I set my boundaries and he has since been staying with a family member so that he can focus on himself, as well as me being able to focus on my thoughts and my healing. I’m proud of him for so many reasons, but the underlying problems exist, and... he has decided that outpatient therapy isn’t what he needs. This is concerning to me. I guess one day at a time is the best I can do.

FireSprite

I'm going to continue to maintain that in all of my recovery work & while Yes, trust in another must be built over time based on their actions & accountability - it really STARTS inside one's Self.

Why? Because when you really trust Yourself internally, you make the right decisions about everything else externally surrounding you. It's not as easy to be blindsided when you've been trusting your gut instincts throughout the process:

https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...instincts.html (Listening to our gut instincts)

involved

There is a such thing as phonemeetings.org for Al-Anon phone meetings. If you have a hard time getting out or there are limited access to meetings! I have not done one of these personally but there are a few women in my in person. Eetings who have tried these phone meetings out and say they are fantastic!