Life after rehab: my husband, the alcoholic Family

So this Valentine’s Day, we’ll absolutely be celebrating — with our favorite non-alcoholic beverage. And you can bet that we’ll spending the money we save on the bottle of wine by splurging on all our favorite foods, because we still know how to indulge, after all. Sobriety and recovery is a process, one that takes time and commitment from both your loved one and yourself. Rebuilding a marriage through the process of addiction is also a process that will take time and perseverance. By removing self blame you can achieve greater clarity in your relationship with your spouse as well as better understand the ways in which you can support them in their recovery from addiction.

• Or the things that we share that whether it’s spiritual or whatever, does matter?
• Sarah Allen Benton, M.S., LMHC., LPC, is a licensed mental health counselor and author of Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic.
• Talk, enjoy each other’s company, and try to rekindle feelings of romance and joy.
• I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the challenges you may face as well as some tips for navigating marriage after sobriety with aftercare planning. Once we’ve achieved sobriety, we also often experience a level of self-love we’ve never felt before. We’re proud of ourselves for finally doing the work to get sober. We have newfound respect for ourselves and confidence in our abilities. We feel strong, brave and independent.

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And with my approach you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course. Some studies indicate that married partners of substance abusers have a 60% chance of getting divorced in five years after finding out about their spouse’s drug addiction.

The recovering addict needs to focus on sobriety and may not always be able to prioritize the relationship, and his or her spouse must understand this. Of course, the addict’s ability to maintain sobriety will be essential to your ability to maintain the marriage as well. After the addict has recovered, however, repairing the relationship is possible. Although rebuilding sober house trust and intimacy will be difficult, you can put your marriage back together using the tips below. Yeah, but it’s just it’s so hard to even know what the other person is thinking or if they are acting hurt, maybe they’re lonely or whatever it is, like it’s really difficult. And yeah, well, and in my family, like nobody ever got angry, like very waspy.

He thinks that I’m letting my sponsor and my AA come before him or our marriage.

Together, we were like the heaviest load of badly packed baggage. My husband had taken time out to get his section sorted, but I had been too busy stacking the dishwasher and breaking up my children’s fights to even look at mine. I sometimes joke that I should have gone into the Priory for my own treatment programme, simply labelled “Sorting my shit out”.

The term codependency is used often and colloquially. But originally, it was created to describe the romantic partners (usually women, although we now know that men can become codependent as well) of people with SUD. By setting the right expectations and considering treatment for yourself, you can overcome addiction together with your partner. If anyone will ask you about your drinking or push you into drinking, that is 100% about them, not you. People will either support you, cheer for you or distance themselves you from, and either way, you will be a-okay. Your former partner is saying that he feels trapped in the relationship, and that (in his opinion) it would be selfish of you to urge him to stay in a relationship that he no longer wants to be in.

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I think that was it and like asking questions. Yeah, being explicit about what you did and why. I’d really appreciate your support. Yeah, there’s not one ounce of criticism in that, here’s what I see. Yeah, a lot of lot of things I’ve noticed over the last I’ve been working in addictions, my goodness since 1987.

It doesn’t mean your partner doesn’t drink. So, if they’re not addicted partner might drink as long as it’s problematic. One of the things that that cracks me up and that I actually I remember two things from gotten in before I was reading, rereading this book for the interview.

Professional treatment can help you and your partner cope with the negative effects of substance use. Recovery can also sometimes uncover underlying mental health conditions that have contributed to substance use disorder. For example, up to half of people with substance use disorder have also experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

There, my focus shifted from him to us, to me. Without the studio, I wonder whether our marriage would have survived the turbulence of early recovery. I hired my own therapist, who accompanied me for almost five years.