Sobriety was Only the Start of our Marriage Problems

I remember thinking that if my husband just got sober, that everything would be ok. I know that’s why I stuck around for much longer than I normally would have. I kept giving him chance after chance to finally get it together.

But when I put my foot down for the last time, I wasn’t really prepared for the unravelling of our marraige - and the unravelling of my husband as well:

From my old journal:

He is so hurt and so lost. I love him so much and I feel so helpless watching him spiral out of control. He keeps looking to me to make him want to change – yet if he changes for me he will never address the internal challenges that make him drink in the first place. I have been building up my strength for nearly 2 years to get to this point.

But to be honest this just isn’t what I expected. I thought I would be angry and be tempted to become vindictive. I thought he would give up easier and just move out so that he could drink at will. He is caught in this internal fight in which he wants to be someone who he doesn’t feel he is capable of being. It tears me up inside because I have seen him be strong, generous and magnificent – but he has a negative self-identity that he goes to great lengths to “live up to”: sabotaging every healthy relationship he has in the process. Yet at the same time, he is being so persistent in pushing me away by threats, verbal abuse, attempted manipulation, and blame, that it is actually making it easier to continue to be strong and stick to my decision to leave him.

Then he finally agreed he needed help and would stop the drinking. I thought we had reached our goal. I was SO wrong.

I had just spent 2 years convincing myself to leave this man. I had questioned my love for him and knew my heart had told me to divorce him. I had fought tooth and nail for a sober marriage yet found all I had at this point was a ‘walking wounded’ husband and I didn’t know if I even wanted to be with him anymore.

I had his sobriety, yes. But I had no trust, no respect, no passion, no desire, and little compassion for him.

His willingness to seek help and counseling at this point was crucial. But remember, he had already made the decision to stop drinking, and he finally knew that he had no control over alcohol. He worked closely with our mentor/coach who helped him to craft a new identity.

But to be honest, it wasn’t his changes that I needed in order to save our marraige at this point. I was the one that needed to change, and that pissed me off.

Focusing on his drinking was really only focusing on the symptom. I needed to focus on the cause - in this case, I saw all the reasons why I couldn’t trust him, why I didn’t respect him, why I felt little love for him, and certainly no desire to put one more ounce of myself into this relationship.

I HAD to shift my focus, or walk away forever. I think the most difficult realization was that I felt so trapped. I knew that if I just walked away, I would leave behind unresolved issues. And that meant that those issues would have resurfaced in my next relationship unless I addressed them NOW. And I made the decision that I would NEVER put myself into a similar position in a relationship again - so I knew I had to bite the bullet and stay to face the music.

I needed to get clear on what I wanted. Not on what I didn’t want. So I put together a list of the things I would want in the ideal relationship, and also listed the qualities in the ideal husband. But that was only the first half of the equation - and certainly one that I couldn’t control. The key to this was to look to myself - if this ideal man showed up in my life, would he want to be with me? Hell, no. Not with the standards I was living my life by.

The difficult question I had to ask myself was, “Who do I need to become in order to be with this ideal partner in this ideal relationship?” It was in these answers that I would find what I was looking for.