Margareth

The most horrible thing happened to me and my husband yesterday.

And yes we drank.

But... and that is a big but, I'm not starting to count from day 1 again and I'll tell you why.

Almost five years ago I left Holland, my native country for a new one. That of my husband being New Zealand.

In order to keep it short and to the point (the story is long enough as it turns out) I will omit the various reasons as to why we did but for one; We ran into some unsavoury characters and it was considered wise to not be around them.

That in itself is bad enough but at the same time I decided after most of my life spend in agony over my relationships with my direct family that I had had enough and wanted to put as much distance between them and me in order to get on with my life in a more healthy and functional way.

To my heartfelt gratitude this turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life and I think honestly that I would have ended up in a very bad way if I had stayed in touch with them and the separation really did give me the new beginning I was looking for.

All this was hugely disturbed when I received an e-mail from my father yesterday and with an overwhelming wave of emotional turmoil I was pulled back into the abyss that was my family life until five years ago.

I had made the grave mistake of trying to contact a niece of mine who had grown up while I was incommunicado into a beautiful, independent and fearless young woman travelling alone around the world at the age of (According to my calculation) 17 or 18 and who made her presence known on facebook.

This apparently leaked back to my father who also got my e-mail address (From her?) and thought it was a good idea to contact me.

The mail was an expose of all the tricks my father has developed in order to pull the carpet from under whatever emotional stability I was able to muster over the years and while I know them all the effect was still devastating. (Trust me, he is a very smart master of emotional manipulation and a true narcissist who has absolutely no compunction about using whatever trick in the book to get what he wants and it took me years of torture and therapy to find out how he works and to be able to resist his machinations and see them for what they are)

I was so taken aback and surprised that there was no way I could protect myself from the instant and overwhelming emotions and even more so from the way they seemed to be connected with my craving of alcohol.

While the period of sobriety before had been mild and pleasantly cravings free the reaction to my fathers letter was horrific and unavoidable.

So, my husband who knows me well and who knows when he's beat having too been the subject of my parents narcissistic and dysfunctional behaviour stepped out into the cold and drove 10 km to get a litre of our once favourite poison and we drank it all with the dedication of two marathon runners set on running the best marathon ever.

And oh, how grateful I am that we did because if there was ever a moment when we knew that this behaviour is obsolete and past it's sell by date it was from the moment we started to drink until we stumbled to bed. The hangover is merely a bad joke and irrelevant compared to the realisation of how bad alcohol has become for us and how glad we are to not have to drink any more.

I wrote, before we got drunk because I'm a firm believer in keeping alcohol separate from dealing with issues concerning relationships, an email back reaffirming my wish to be left alone and told my father that his email address would be put in the straight to the bin folder so writing to me again would be pointless.

I now know that my relationship with alcohol is very closely linked to my very dysfunctional relationship with my family and that contact with them is extremely destructive for me and my new found sobriety and if I value both I have to stay well clear of them.

I still hope one day to be able to invite my niece over but for now that is not a very good idea. Sad but there you have it.

Because the situation was so extreme and our dedication to sobriety became if anything stronger I do not consider the event a failure and I know that it will only make us stronger in our pursuit of happiness and sobriety.

And while I don't encourage anybody to use anything like this as an excuse to drink I see it as a sobriety affirming event, a decision we made and followed through and not a failure of will power.

If anything it thought me about myself and the direction we need to grow in and as for my husband joining in and even aiding me in what happened yesterday, I'm grateful he did because it was something that happened to both of us and how we both used to deal with my family and we both had the same realisation so we hope we can be supportive to each other once again.

I will have to deal with the aftermath of this attempt of my father to haul me back to role I was designated to perform in our family (Black sheep)and with the information about the fact that my mother is ill (They have been divorced for more than 35 years and hate each others guts to this day and she has been a lifelong alcoholic and smoker and considering she is in her eighties has had a bloody goo run of it) soberly and it won't be easy but at least it has given me something to work with in new knowledge about myself.

I know also that I will have to check in here everyday for a long period of time again and if that is not enough I will seek help in a group over here. I do not want to go back to who I was in Holland ever.

Dee74

Hi Margareth

My family is dysfunctional too - I drank over them many many many times.

It didn't change them a bit and it only hurt me - a lot.

I hope you can make a positive from this and move on from this - and please - find better ways to deal with your past. This was not a win I'm afraid.

You deserve better.

D

Anna

I find this difficult to understand.

artsoul

Margareth - I am just glad that your husband and you are both continuing to want sobriety and that this didn't lead to alot more days of drinking. I'm sorry to hear that some of your family relationships aren't good (understatement apparently!)

I've had people who created chaos in my life, too. If you think it might be a perpetual problem, there's always counseling (people talk about how resentments/drama can really affect their sobriety). But it sounds like you're at least trying to remove yourself from any further contact. I'm proud of the sobriety you've put together so far.

Hang in there, girl......:ghug3

super71

I am glad that your decision to drink ended with you having even more resolve in continuing your quest for true sobriety. I am sorry for your situation with your family - it is healthiest for me to not be in contact with mine as well.

Margareth

I agree. And I have to it sober.

Margareth

Oh yes Artsoul, no doubt about it. Drinking did not help at all of course. I only used it as I have done so often to create a break between me and my families dysfunctionality but it doesn't work like that any more of course. I knew it in advance but was so overwhelmed by the invasiveness of my fathers e-mail. I would think that moving to the other side of the world and staying shtum for neigh on five years would be enough to make a point but no, and I just did what I always did and now I know how destructive that was. It is going to be strange for a while but I will get there in the end.

Margareth

Ann

What I meant to say is that while it was a decision to drink and not to drink after again it was of course not a sensible decision no matter how you look at it.

I don't expect you to understand but I learned right or wrong and not even in my youth (I was a fanatic teetotaller in reaction to my parents alcoholism until 21) how I used alcohol to make a distance between me and my family (I don't know how else to describe it and only now that I am away from my family (I left when I was 49) do I see a connection in reaction to my father's mail. It took decennia to get to where I am now and becoming an alcoholic took many many years and a lot of desperate horrible attempts of me trying to make the relationships with my family right.

Dee74

I hope you don't think anyone's beating you down, Margareth - a lot of us here know all about dysfunction in families.

I know how painful it is and I know how families can make you react instinctively - mine could make me revert to a 5 year old instantly -

but I also know drinking over it just makes the wounds deeper...

Not only didn't I allow myself the chance to grow past being hurt by my family...I actually inflicted more damage - physical and mental on myself...
and the real kicker was my family then turned around and used that as justification for the way they treated me. It's a no win.

I finally realised my family can say do or think what it likes.
I can't change that, but I can change how I react.

As a healthy adult I have the responsibility to myself to react in a positive life affirming way to whatever people might throw at me.

It's taken me a while to get here to this point but I'm so glad I tried something different than the bottle.

Our relationship is the best it's ever been since I got sober and quietly, but firmly, defined my boundaries.

D

Margareth

Hi Dee,

Don't worry. If people couldn't speak their minds to me there wouldn't be much use in coming here. I learned that much from the many years of therapy I had to help me break away from my narcissistic borderline family.

I gave up on my family (Took me a long time to think about and talk it over with my husband because I knew this was an irreversible decision and because I was planning on leaving Holland for good) when I was 49 and left for New Zealand.

In my family there was a role division for me and my sister.
I was the black sheep an my sister the white dove. It is a very common role division in dysfunctional families. I had many years in therapy to help me get to terms with this and my alcohol use was never such that it could be used as an argument (It was well within social acceptable amounts in my social circle). We did not start to drink to serious excess until last year when both my husband and I found ourselves in a situation we felt we had no control over and finally we gave in and started to drink huge amounts that were beyond reasonable and for purposes other then socialising with friends.

In fact we at one time considered suicide but intervention by my parents in-law and a group specialised in helping in these sorts of situations helped us through it all. We now live in a house we were able to buy with the help of my in-laws and the safety of the arrangement has made it possible for us to heal and deal with our alcoholic tendencies and we have come far if I say so myself.

The fact that my father's and my families drama's seemed to have continued after I left and my decision to withdraw from my family as the assigned scapegoat seems to have turned them on each other rather than given them peace, has made it easier for me because the pattern lays with them.

I'm glad I recognised the pattern and made an exit because it seems the only way they could interact halfway decently with each other was if I was around or on the periphery of my family as either banned or barely accepted so they had someone to dump on if they felt like it. Very unhealthy for me.

In the meantime I have been accepted by my teetotalling in-laws for who I am and it has made it that much easier to call it quits with the alcohol.

Why risk loosing this new, accepting family over something which in the end is just so unimportant when you think about it?

It's evening, were sober (Husband suffered a violent hangover and is asleep. LOL) and I'm going to turn in too. Life is good here in our own little paradise.
And sober it's just so much better again.

Sleep well y'all.

Kmber2010

You have plenty of support here with SR. I wish you well and hope you find peace.

I have learned that sobriety is far more then a clock and far more then will power. Getting into recovery is essential as all us will face problems now and years down the road and learning to deal without the aid of a bottle is key.

Just because we get sober does not take away the pain of situations we must deal with.

All the best and looking forward to your sober journey.

jmf7dd

My last break which involved no remembrance of the later part of my drinking binge was over my issues with my family, So I very much understand what made you need that night of drinking for you to feel like you could " move on". How ever, if you feel similar to me, it only reconfirmed that I am unable to drink, there is no moderation for me. Especially when emotions get involved, I become an every drop I can drinker at that point. But never again is my hope and goal everyday.

Lithobid

Although I understand your post, it seems to be that perhaps your husband and you could benefit from having a sponsor , someone to talk to instead of a bottle, for these rough times. Certainly in your sobriety, this will not be the last of a rough patch that warrants a bottle in your eyes. I don't mean to be harsh but it's true.

-Lith

SASA

I completly understand you, I moved across the ocean just to be away and every time I return home I am sucked up by the family (mainly my mother). and hey waht a good amnipulator she is. She always knows how to put me down tell me I am a loser. Once she has me down she makes me drink and offers me lots of wine, she like sit since then she has a buddy to drink with.
One fo the frequent problems is that I always drunk in the evening, exactly as hse does. And mostly after being on the phone with her. We all have the past to carry.... It is good though, once we understand the patterns we can change..

Margareth

I hear you and if it happens again I think I will, believe it or not, call my father in law. When he was an active Methodist minister he was also a counsellor and many alcoholics found the way to his door. He has been a rock and a most amazing non judgemental advisor over the past year which is funny now that I think about it because he can be pretty black and white sometimes in other situations. I am a non Christian and he is a devout one but over the years we have learned to recognise each others spirituality.

Other than that nothing warrants the bottle. I was just not prepared for the emotional onslaught and the kneejerk instantaneousness of my reaction. I'm glad I did what I did and recognised it for what it was and both me and my husband cherished our sobriety the rest of our weekend.

We both know what we are and were grateful for re-finding our need for sobriety again so quickly.

If anything I now know that contact with my family is still after all these years total poison for me and judging the hangover my husband was suffering and I thank god in a much lesser degree so is alcohol and funny enough the actual high we got of it was really not worth it. It felt chemical, constraining and it made us f(*ked up and obnoxious. That I will remember much more conscious if a "next" time were to present itself. LOL.

Thank you Kim, jmf and SASA for recognising how devastating family relationships can be in our quest for sobriety and giving me your support.

I know after many years of trying that whatever keeps my family in the unhappy bondage of their bad relationships, they are indeed never going to change. My conclusion had to be that in order to survive I had to separate myself from them and what happened this weekend and more precisely what my father wrote (Which proved nothing had changed) just confirmed that and I find that the most devastating part of it all.

It doesn't meant that it's so for all dysfunctional families. Dee seems to have been able to salvage his relationship with his family for example.
I hope that all of youse can do so too because having to cut your family off no matter how bad the relationships are is one of the hardest things a human can do. I only did it as a ultimate and last resort solution and the result is a hole in your soul that will never ever go away.