Loving
Your Alcoholic Wife If anyone knows what it’s like to live with an
alcoholic wife it would be my husband, who for several years, battled
with my addiction with me. That’s right, he battled alcoholism with
me. Because I have been sober for fifteen years I can write about
addiction with confidence. Alcoholism is a family affair and without
knowing how to handle addiction, being married to an alcoholic is an
ongoing battle. It does not matter who is the alcoholic, wife or husband
– what matters is how you handle the affects. If your wife is an
alcoholic there is great hope in her recovery by how you manage the
addiction. Through Al-Anon my husband finally learned how to
stop enabling me and to move on with his life. “Moving on” with his
own life does not mean that he left me, but that he learned to detach
from my emotional outbursts brought on by alcoholism. We still lived in
the same home, its just now my husband was not allowing my verbal abuse
to affect him. It is not the end of your marriage because your wife is
an alcoholic; it is through your strength to overcome the insidiousness
of addiction that may bring the beginning of a new life for your wife
and yourself. It wasn’t always easy for my husband, but for him
just having the ability to understand that my condition was not a
reflection of him but a reflection of my own inner problems that needed
healing, made a big difference in his attitude towards my addiction.
What I’m saying is even though your wife may blame you for her
drinking, you don’t have to believe that nonsense. Anything that comes
out of a drinking alcoholics mouth is devoid of making much sense. The alcoholic will always need to find someone to
blame and you happen to be living with her. If she lived with her aunt
she would probably blame her aunt. Alcoholics are good at trying to find
someone or something to blame for their behavior. That’s because
anytime they can find justification for their drunken behavior they will
certainly jump on the chance to validate in their mind that it’s all
your fault. When she blames you, simply ignore it, don’t fuss or fight
with her because that makes you look like the one with the problem, and
not her. Your wife’s emotional problems do not have to be
your emotional problems. Be of support and encouragement to her when she
is NOT drinking but do not enable her negative emotions and verbal
spurts of abuse. Distance yourself from her mentally, emotionally, and
spiritually by telling yourself that your wife is sick and needs
healing. By walking away you don’t take the emotional abuse. Tell
yourself over and over again that by not arguing, blaming, yelling,
fighting, and being verbally abusive back at your wife you are actually
helping your wife to look at her drinking as a problem. When a husband carries the burden of the negative
emotions of his wife, the addiction will suck him in with it, and he
will become just as emotionally and mentally sick as his wife. The more
you allow the addiction to overshadow your own thought processes, the
least likely your wife will get better or want to get better. A spouse
can either be a detriment to the alcoholic or advantageous – it’s
all up to how you handle the alcoholic. A husband may love his wife with all of his heart
and feel it is his responsibility to help her, and that is mostly very
true, but it’s not a husband’s duty to help his wife to kill herself
by enabling and rescuing her addictive behaviors – there is a huge
difference here. He should not enable her antic behaviors or console her
emotional impulses. It is a husband’s job to love and care for his
wife, even when she is sick, but it is not his job to allow his wife to
drain him of his own life in the process. A husband must learn to detach with love before the
addiction strangles him too! This is the only way he will be helping his
wife to come to grips with her addiction and seek the inner healing she
needs. A husband surely does not have to feed into his wife’s guilt
trips – remember she will blame you for her problems. Be assertive
about your feelings and let her know that you love her but not the
addiction. Tell her you will not help her to kill herself. That means
don’t give her money to buy alcohol with. Don’t drive her anywhere,
even if she pleads with you. Do not carry her to bed, even if she passes
out on the living room floor – leave her where she passes out. Don’t allow emotional abuse to control what you
do, or how you feel. If your wife feels like arguing, blaming, or
screaming, simply walk away, or if that doesn’t work, take the
children out for ice cream. Don’t
stand around taking the abuse, do something about it, for your and the
children’s sake. The more garbage you take in by the alcoholic the
more you will begin to believe and even behave like the alcoholic. Do let your wife know that you are praying for her to seek the healing she needs. Do let her know that you love her but you don’t love what the addiction does to her. You can love your alcoholic wife when you separate the addiction from her. God did not create alcoholics – alcoholics chose addiction. Do let your wife know that you appreciate her and need her but also let her know that you will not help her to abuse her body and mind. Do let your wife know that when she is ready to get the help she needs you will be there to support her every step of the way. |