The anger is getting to me. I know it, can feel it changing me and I don’t like it. Not one bit.

The vacilation of emotions isn’t right, I want to be free of it and don’t know how.

Acceptance my counselor said, this is my life right now. Accept it, be patient and let the anger go. If only I knew how to do that consistently.

I get that anger if directed toward something positive can be helpful, constructive. It’s not that kind of anger. I’m experiencing paralyzing anger, such a terrible and destructive force.

It’s like being encased in concrete and trying to redirect it is equivalent to trying to chip away at it from the outside, when what would be more effective is to emerge from it.

My heart and compassion are my strengths, my capacity to grow from pain, once I accept it, always leads me to a better life, throughout my life. Staying angry never works for me because I use it to punish.

Dandylion, I believe you whole heartedly and I’m considering it as an option. Funny thing is as a co-dep trying to change my ways I still worry about how far she has fallen, and the changes that are as someone else pointed out, scary. I also know people are more resilient than is apparent. Particularly high functioning addicts, their resourcefulness and craftiness are quite amazing, until of course they aren’t.

I’m gonna sit on it a few days as she puts her treatment plan together, and continue to focus on myself and the kids. I’m a firm believer that when people treat you poorly, rarely does it have anything to do with you, and everything to do with them.

A final thought before I take a break from thinking about all of this.

The underworld of addiction is an unpleasant and unpredictable place for non addicts. I see these people and their disease as threats to the very fabric of normal life. Destruction follows them, they create chaos wherever they go, are a danger to themselves, their families and society at large and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do.

Their far away eyes, pained and lined faces are the result of their lives and minds being hijacked by a substance, that in my wife’s case, you can run a car on, for others ease the pain of the dying or a cocktail of chemicals that can kill the manufacturer. Is it any wonder they act possessed, at times demonic? I want my children out of that world immediately.

What’s a stupid idea? Throwing them together as part of a rehabilitation program, with poor supervision, poor planning, and their own trashed executive functions. Allow them to romanticize about how great sex is on this drug, the “adventures” on this one. The effed up things they did, and laugh at the telling like it’s a scene from a comedy, that only the addicts find funny.

I recall being at an al anon meeting with an AA meeting going on in the room next door. Suddenly the A.A. room burst with laughter, at that moment all the people in the al anon room shrunk and the room grew quiet. They know that laugh, the one that recounts absurd and damaging behavior, yet the AAers laugh in convenient amnesia, forgetting someone paid in terrible ways for that “funny” memory. Such is the callousness of addiction. The remember when’s aren’t funny outside the dark world of addiction.

In rehab it seems some(most considering the relapse rate) are running from their guilt, shame and personal responsibility and they cling to one another looking for acceptance and understanding, probably even “love” because they hate themselves. Hate being locked up for their behavior. Because they are ultimately cowards. Cowards looking for an easy escape, like a drug, from their choices and so they create even more chaos. Holding each other back with distractions, and lies. Pretending to be “normal”

They are neck dip in sh_t and pushing each other’s heads into the honeypot for a new type of fix and still do not care about any one.

Hi everyone,

Didn’t want my last post on this forum to be a negative rant. Yes, my life has sucked because of alcoholism, but I enabled, allowed and accepted the bad behavior thinking there was some way I could wrestle control away from the vodka and return things to “normal”. Whatever that means.

Sitting around thinking about everything that has happened and worrying about what could happen is pointless.

I double checked and still have my balls, and I remember who I was before fixing this nightmare became more important than living. You can’t save an alcoholic, but you can save yourself.

You are sounding better

i know it's not a decision you want to make now, but being in your own place with the kids would be so much more peaceful IMO. Of course you are angry with all that has happened, but I think having it uncomfortably shoved in your face daily and trying to maintain composure around the kids is a difficult path to say the least

This entire situation is bizarre and complex, too much for my brain to process, I am apparently doing it in chunks which is the best I can do at the moment. Dissecting it with the mindset that alcoholism is the root doesn’t make it any easier.

Been married a long time, pre booze we were awesome and SOB if this disease didn’t pickle her brain. A 105 lb woman cannot consume 500ml of hardliquor everyday for 4 years and not emerge a train wreck.

As for rehabs, I personally have no faith in them as in her group of 10, 7 relapsed in a week, 1 died as a result. These places are a joke. Putting a bunch of immature, egomaniacs with low self esteem together and calling it treatment is absurd. I wouldn’t want to make a rehab friend, that sounds crazy to me. Like picking up a best bud from the psych ward.

The insanity of addiction, isn’t that how it’s described in al anon and A.A.yet they are encouraged to socialize outside with other newly released addicts for support. The doom and gloom of seeing others relapse and die from it ain’t so good for moral or recovery. I would think what’s the point of even trying if my peers are dropping off the wagon like flies.