martina12

Hi I googled 'married to a narcissistic alcoholic' and so relieved to have found this site. I am new to this but was following a recent blog which sounded so much like what I am going through.
I have been married just a year. My husband moved into my home (with my 2 young children) 3 months after we married and it was then that I found out that my loving husband was a high functioning alcoholic in a highly paid job. I thought he was my knight in shining armour.

I discovered just how much he was drinking. He admitted that he had hidden this from me. I was thrown into a state of despair and felt that I couldn't have this with the children. Thankfully he did a spell in rehab and the next 6 months all was well. Until April when his behavior changed...black moods, picking fights, blaming me etc. Jekyll and Hyde appeared and I was walking on egg shells. I looked in his briefcase and sure enough there was a bottle of vodka.

My world fell apart. He started staying out at night and gradually I lost my trust in him. He became emotionally and verbally abusive. He then picked a fight and moved out. I have found out now that he has gone back to his vodka drinking ex. This is so very painful and I can't stop crying.

I am totally grief stricken. I am still in love with him but not when he is under the influence of drink. I am trying so hard to move on but it is constantly on my mind...any advice would be gratefully received? Many thanks.

hypochondriac

So sorry you are having to go through this Martina. But I am glad you have found SR. There is a lot of support here. You will find others who have been through a similar situation to yours in the friends and family forum too x

sugarbear1

Try attending Al Anon and work those steps of recovery for you.

GroundhogDay

I am so sorry for what you are going through, but move on is exactly what you need to do. If it were me, I'd take the bull by the horns and initiate the divorce. This was never a valid marriage since he made the commitment under false pretenses. If you think about his behavior towards you long enough, you will see that you are not in love with him. You were in love with a fantasy, a lie.

visch1

I'm so sorry for your situation. "Normal" marriages are difficult enough, add alcohol and usually a explosive situation develops. There is help for YOU at Al Anon and as pointed out above. HANG ON AND BE WELL.

Anna

I hope you can find a way to get through this situation for yourself and your children.

SnoozyQ

I feel for you , i really do.You have picked the right place to share your feelings ,I'm new here and people have been wonderful. You are not alone and I'm sure u will find someone who has a similar issue. You will get through this xxxx

martina12

Thank you so much for your replies....Hypochondriac it was your post that got me to register into this site as I identified so much with your situation. I am in the same position as you. I cannot say enough how much it helps me to know that I am not alone here.

I love my husband so very dearly but his first love is vodka. I am so very hurt and bitterly pained by it all...it almost stops me from from living. I have my children and that is what keeps me going I love them too much and they keep me going on the road to finding a new life. I don't know where that will be but I have to somehow stay strong and keep going in the right direction....I feel like I don't have a choice?

Nuudawn

Welcome martina. Glad you joined the site as there is just so much support here. I hope you understand that you too are now in "recovery". I don't want to throw you off but I must go to the "psychobabble" place. There are reasons why we resonate with those we resonate with...as in alcoholics. Mirror reflections are held up to us all the time. There is very low self worth at the heart of the alcoholic...where is yours at right now? I have also heard it said that at the heart of every alcoholic is co-dependency issues. You may already be aware that relationships with alcoholics are deemed "codependent"...something else you might want to google.

Consider you're "obsessive thinking" about the demise of your relationship...now equate that with the alcoholic's obsession with alcohol. My love affair with alcohol ended just over two months ago...it too was an abusive relationship.

Please seek answers more about you and your choices rather than why he is doing what he is doing. Although...finding similarities may also be informative.

Bright blessings to you in recovery.

honeypig

Hi, Martina, and sorry to hear about your situation...Welcome to SR! Glad you found us, but sorry that you had a need to seek this kind of help. Reading and posting here have been very useful for me, hope you find the same.

We have a "Family and Friends" section of the forum here Friends and Family of Alcoholics - SoberRecovery : Alcoholism Drug Addiction Help and Information where you might like to do some reading and posting also. Many of the folks there have been or are now in your shoes; you can learn a lot and get a lot of support. Don't miss the stickied threads at the top of that page, either, as there's a lot of good info there.

You also might find it really helpful to get to an Alanon meeting sooner rather than later--some in-person support is a good thing to have too.

Again, welcome to SR. Wishing you strength and clarity.

EndGameNYC

Great stuff.

It's not an easy thing to acknowledge that a loved one is not who we need or want them to be, even with a mountain of evidence. I'll wager that virtually everyone on this site, myself included, has been startled by what we've discovered about someone we thought we knew, and someone we've loved, at some time in our lives.

There are people, too, who are very good at camouflaging things they don't want the world to see. It's difficult to imagine that people can do such awful things, particularly when we've known them not to be that way.

On the other side of that coin, people who work on their sobriety often feel tremendous guilt and remorse following the end of a relationship due to our drinking. And then they act on it, and do what's right.

At around the same time I relapsed, I contacted a woman with whom I'd been good friends through graduate school. Our friendship petered out when she wanted to become lovers, and I didn't feel ready for that at the time. (This was while I was sober, but shortly after the end of a longterm relationship for me.) I missed her company and our friendship over time, so I took a shot in the dark. She was single when I called her, and was pleasantly surprised to know that I was too. We had a great time together, and I was able to control my drinking around her. She's also a drinker, but not an alcoholic, and never had problems with alcohol. What a great cover for me.

A couple of months in, she told me that she broke up with her last guy because he was an alcoholic. I had other opportunities to come clean with her, but drinking throttles down my honesty. And I wanted what I wanted.

After a time, we moved in together, and it wasn't long that she discovered that there was a problem. Yet she struggled with confronting me or with walking away from the relationship. All my apologies and promises meant nothing. I'm not an abusive person, verbally or physically, even when I'm drinking. But I carried a tremendous amount of guilt around and for a very long time after she found the courage to deposit my belongings on the wrong side of the front door, locks changed, with a request that I never contact her again, about twenty months after we hooked up. I only contacted her one time, via email, to make amends, and haven't heard from her since.

Some folks, drinking or not, just don't care about the hurt they cause, and seem happy just to move on to their next victim. I've known people with longterm sobriety who are like that. Putting down the drink doesn't automatically make us good and caring people. That comes with hard work. I can never undo what I did in that relationship, and I can't take away her pain. Very frustrating. Though I made amends, I can never fully make up for all the suffering I brought into our home.

I think of her often, and my only hope is that she found her way to a better place.

martina12

Wowzas Nuudawn you have really made me think about me and my self esteem and the damage that my husband was doing to me. I have had 6 sessions of counselling which so far have been all about me trying to salvage the marriage. I'm now going to think about me and how to recover and heal in the next sessions. Im also going to get the book 'Codependent no more'.

Thank you so much for this. It has helped me so much to recognize what was actually happening.

Good luck with your new beginnings too!

martina12

To all who helped me through this....Just felt the need to update and thank you all through my crisis...I looked through the thousands of loving texts and fb messages that my alcoholic husband sent me and found a very early one which said that he had ordered online 28 bottles of vodka to his bachelor flat... This was before he moved in with me and my children, and his response was that most of it was wasted!...I missed that big red flag! I thought he was my knight in shining armour. He was the love of my life but I want to give hope to those of you struggling to be free of an alcoholic...I have finally turned the corner after 4 months of grieving and getting free. I am no longer the martyr trying to help him. I have blocked him from fb, deleted him from my phone and email and getting off the downward escalator! I want to now give strength and hope to those in a similar position and thank wholeheartedly all of you who have helped me....what a great site this is!!

LightInside

Thank you, Martina for sharing your story. My son's father left me less than 2 months ago. I called him my "rock." I am in the middle of grieving right now. It's confusing, because he's trying to get sober on his own and I wanted to be able to enjoy the benefits of a sober partner. I hope to be like you in a couple our few months. This hurts so bad and the only things that keep me going are my son and the hope of healing that I get from people like you. Thank you.

Nattythreads

Well done. Until we clean up our acts we are addicts, drunks, cheats, liars, wasters, ego-driven, manipulating self-centered disaster zones. And that's just the good bits.

Alcohol and drugs are a poison for us and we are a poison to other peoples' lives.