Codependent No More Workbook (5 page)

“I HAD TO WORK THE FIRST FIVE STEPS before leaving treatment. But working the Steps turned from something I had to do into something I wanted to do. The Twelve Steps were God’s answer to my prayer. I quickly learned if I did the best I could to work each Step, that was good enough.

“Depression began to lift. When I saw that God heard and answered my prayer, it showed me that God cared, that I wasn’t alone like I’d always felt I was. I’d attended church until I became a junkie, but I’d never experienced what I found in treatment. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it
a personal relationship with God.
I call it a
spiritual experience.

“Twelve Step programs have many sayings and slogans that can be as helpful as the Steps, but some seem unrealistic. One says, ‘Don’t
have a relationship for the first one or two years of sobriety.’ But almost everyone breaks that rule, and then they feel guilty about it.

“I waited two years and then married a man also recovering from chemical dependency, only he’d been recovering a lot longer than me. He hadn’t used drugs. He preferred alcohol. He expressed concern about me using drugs again—having a slip. But then he said he loved me and would take a chance on me. I adored him. A mutual friend in recovery had introduced us. It became love at first sight. I didn’t know how to date. My experiences with the opposite sex consisted of older men sexually abusing me and relationships with drug addicts—relationships built around a common desire to get high.

“A month after we married, I became pregnant. I was thrilled. I’d lay awake at night, hardly able to take in how much God had blessed me. The one thing I wanted was a loving family. Now I had that. This made everything I’d gone through worthwhile. My husband and I had a slight problem on our honeymoon. His father had died. My husband went out and didn’t come home until six the next morning. I wanted to comfort him, but he wouldn’t let me. He didn’t even let me go to the funeral with him.

“I didn’t know what love and a good marriage looked like. My brother and sisters had a different biological father than I did. I came along late in my mother’s life, just when she got close to being free from raising children. Her first husband died. She raised us by herself. When the other kids left home, she was done being a parent. She left in the morning for work and didn’t return until late at night. Besides her day job, she usually ran a business on the side that kept her busy every evening. She could handle money, but she couldn’t handle me. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she said. ‘He’s a good-for-nothing alcoholic.’

“I didn’t know my dad. When I turned three, he said, ‘Okay for you.’ Then he left and remarried. I saw him only a few times after that. He had two more children. He loved his new family, but it didn’t include me.

“When I started drinking, I thought he’d be proud of me for taking after him. But when I became a teenager and stopped by his house
one day and asked him for a beer, he became angry. I left feeling confused. I didn’t know who to be or who I was. Nothing I did pleased my mother, and who I was didn’t please my father.

“After my husband stayed out all night during our honeymoon, things got worse instead of better. Frequently he’d disappear. I didn’t feel close to him. We rarely talked about anything important although we both felt excited that I’d become pregnant.

“Then on a Saturday, shortly after I gave birth to our daughter, the water in the toilet wouldn’t stop running. I tried to fix it by jiggling the handle, but that didn’t help. Finally I lifted up the tank cover. When I did, I discovered the problem with the toilet and our marriage. My husband had stashed a half-empty bottle of vodka in the tank.
Classic,
I thought, feeling shocked. Suddenly, everything made sense. All the times he disappeared and couldn’t be found, all the days he’d lay in bed claiming he didn’t sleep the night before, he’d really been drinking. More than anything, his drinking and lying about it explained the separation from him I’d felt since the day we married.

“When I confronted him about the vodka bottle, he said he had a slip. He asked for my forgiveness. This started a pattern that dominated our marriage. Only usually he’d drink and then lie about it. I’d try to catch him, playing the sobriety police.

“The night I found the vodka bottle in the toilet I grabbed our daughter and drove around town until the middle of the night. All I could do was cry. I didn’t understand how God could let this happen. I thought my marriage was a gift from God. Some gift! But if I admitted that I married an alcoholic, I’d have to get divorced; otherwise it could jeopardize my sobriety. The only answer I could see was to make him stop drinking. I didn’t know what felt worse, the betrayal I felt from my husband or the betrayal I felt from God. I felt totally abandoned by the God who had shown me so much love in treatment.

“I spent the next seven years doing everything I could think of—and more—to make my husband stop drinking. Besides the drinking, I knew in my gut that he’d become involved with another woman.
But I couldn’t catch him, and he denied cheating. I couldn’t validate my feelings, and that drove me crazy. Every Sunday he’d leave in the morning to get a newspaper, and he wouldn’t return until late that afternoon. When I asked him where he’d been, he said all the stores had sold out of the paper, and he had to drive all over town to find one. He said the same thing every week. We both knew that I knew he was lying. But if I accused him of drinking or having an affair, he called me suspicious and crazy. Sometimes I’d hear him bragging on the phone to his friends about how some things you had to take to the grave, but if you didn’t admit it, then nobody could prove it.

“I constantly felt this anxiety in the pit of my stomach. It drove me to dig through the pockets in his jackets, his pants. Constantly I searched for clues, for evidence, anything to confirm my suspicions. If I caught him in the act of adultery, I’d have the reason I needed to file for divorce. Before I found any evidence, I became pregnant again.

“Despite our marital problems, being pregnant thrilled me. But our home life got crazier. His alcoholism continued to progress and cause problems. I kept trying to deny that he was an alcoholic. He lost jobs, one after another. Then he began borrowing thousands of dollars to invest in ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes so he wouldn’t have to work. I lost all respect for him. He constantly bounced checks. He couldn’t handle money. I couldn’t leave him alone with the children for two hours. His touch made my skin crawl. I no longer felt blessed by this marriage. I felt trapped.

“I kept threatening to leave him, but he didn’t listen. Who could blame him? I didn’t listen to myself. He didn’t attend AA, except for one meeting he said he went to so I’d stop nagging. When he came home and I asked about the meeting, he said the focus had been on how a nagging wife could make her husband keep drinking. I felt guilty, but that was how I usually felt. Years later he admitted he hadn’t even gone to a meeting.

“He lied to me for seven years about his drinking. I spent seven years lying to myself.

“What made me think I could control him? As a recovering addict and alcoholic myself, I knew an alcoholic loses control. How could I possibly control someone who couldn’t control himself? Alcohol had gained control of me again, but this time it controlled me through someone else’s drinking.

“I spent hours complaining about my husband to my neighbor. I’d sit in her kitchen and obsess. Usually she listened. But one day when I told her about the latest stunt I’d done to show him how much his lying and drinking hurt me, she spoke up. ‘You’re acting crazy,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s an alcoholic, but your behavior is so out of control it’s scaring me more than his is. You need to go to Al-Anon meetings.’

“What I’d done this time had been so bizarre that to this day I haven’t told anyone about it, except in my Fifth Step. Still I became angry when she said I needed meetings. I’d stayed sober. I held the family together. Why should I be the one to get help when he had the problem?

“Finally, I became suicidal, so depressed and obsessed with my husband that I couldn’t even take the children to the park. I rarely left the house, afraid he might drink if I did. Anger controlled my every behavior, but I didn’t have any awareness of what I felt. Finally I gave in and went to my first Al-Anon meeting, but only because I had nowhere else to go. When I explained I was a recovering alcoholic and addict, a woman called me a Double Winner. That made me mad. I hadn’t won anything. I only saw what I’d lost: my dream of a loving family, my marriage, and my desire to live. I lost all trust in and respect for my husband. Most of all, somewhere along the line I’d lost myself.

“When the meeting started and people began talking about the pain they felt watching someone they love destroying themselves and their marriage by drinking, I started crying.

“Crying felt good. It was a legitimate feeling, something besides the bitterness, nagging, and anger. Spending seven years trying to do the impossible had left me exhausted, depleted, worn out. I didn’t want to be at that meeting. I thought Al-Anon was like a ladies’ aid society.
But these people who talked about their lives told my story too. Plus, they looked happy. Serene. They’d found a way to be at peace with themselves, the other person, and life, regardless of what the other person did.

“I surrendered. As tears ran down my face from feeling the first feeling besides rage that I’d felt in years, I admitted to myself and to everyone in that room that I was powerless over my husband’s drinking and my life had become unmanageable.

“At last I became ready to face the truth.”