5 tips to staying sane when you love an alcoholic

5 tips to staying sane when you love an alcoholic

by | Nov 28, 2020 | Loving an alcoholic

 

For those of us who love an alcoholic, life can feel so out of control; so chaotic, that we wonder how we will ever make it through with our sanity intact. 

After loving an alcoholic for over 30 years, I can tell you that you can absolutely do this!  You can not only survive, but even find peace right in the middle of the chaos. 

Here is 5 tips to help you. 

If you would like to listen to the related podcast, there is a link at the end of this post.

1. Find a trusted friend or support group where you can talk openly
about how you feel

Often this is the hardest step, because we feel very loyal to our alcoholic loved one and we know that they would feel that we had betrayed them by telling someone else that ‘they have a problem’.

They may have even forbidden us from telling anyone and you know they may grow angry if they know you have talked to someone else.

But for your own sanity, you need to reach out to someone you trust.

The old saying ‘a burden shared is a burden halved’ is really true.

Having a loved one who drinks too much is a very lonely existence, if you have no-one to talk to.

I remember being in this exact position.

After 10 years of being an alcoholic, my husband finally took some action and booked himself into a rehab clinic, but he made me swear not to tell anyone.

We made up what we thought was a plausible story – that the kidney problems he’d had as a teenager has returned and he had gone interstate to see a specialist.  We knew if we told our friends that he was in a local hospital, they would come and visit and then they would know the truth.

Our ‘secret’ would be out.

But after two weeks, my kind, supportive friends from church decided they would pay for me to fly interstate to be with him.  I knew I couldn’t take their money for a lie!!!

I panicked and told them that he was doing much better and would be home in a few days.

I hated lying to these kind, wonderful people, but I felt I had no choice.  I didn’t want to betray my husband by telling our friends the truth.

But it was so lonely keeping his secret.

After rehab, he stayed sober for about 2 months, then went back to drinking again.

You don’t need to suffer alone.  For your own sanity, you need to reach out for support.  It may be a group like Al-Anon or another kind of group, or it may just be a trusted friend.

It’s up to you whether you tell your alcoholic loved one that you have reached out for support.  You certainly don’t have to.  But if you do, even if they get angry, let them own their own response to the situation.

It’s time for you to take care of your own needblos – and you need support.

 

There is a link at the end of this blog post to listen to the podcast.

2. Stop trying to control them

Most of us who love an alcoholic spend most of our lives trying to control them:

  • Controlling their alcohol use
  • Controlling their money
  • Controlling their whereabouts
  • Controlling if they get to work on time (or if they went to work at all!)

After years and years of trying this, you finally come to realise that it simply doesn’t work.

All it does is alienate them and push them away.  It may even lead to them drinking even more.

They will always find a way to drink. 

Instead, invest your time and energy into looking after yourself.

 

3. Increase your Self-care

One day, when you have a few minutes of quiet time, make a list of the things that you enjoy; things that nurture you and recharge your batteries.

  • What do you enjoy?
  • Do you have any hobbies or sports or social groups?
  • What makes you feel refreshed and recharged?
  • What helps you to feel calm?
  • What helps you to feel stronger?
  • When do you feel most rested?

Only when you are taking really good care of yourself, will you be in the right space, emotionally, physically and spiritually, to deal with your alcoholic loved one.

If possible, try and do something to nurture yourself for 15 to 30 minutes per day.

Here are some examples:

  • Putting on your favorite music (have a play list ready to go)
  • Having a swim or spa
  • Talking to a trusted friend
  • Going to see a Counsellor or Psychologist
  • Having a mani/pedi
  • Spending time in nature (beach, forest etc)
  • Spending time with animals
  • Having a 10 or 20 minute power nap
  • Read a good book
  • Doing some meditation or yoga
  • Painting, pottery, photography, scrap booking, gardening, cooking
  • Just sitting in the sun and closing your eyes
  • Doing some deep breathing
  • Attending a support group such as Al-Anon
  • Watching a favorite TV program
  • Organising part of your house
  • Writing in a journal
  • Reading a book or listening to an audio book. One book I really enjoyed listening to on Audible was called “Codependent No More” by Melody Beattie
  • Having a cup of your favorite herbal tea and drinking it in a quiet space
  • Going to a garden center and buying a plant
  • Reading a spiritual book, such as The Bible or other spiritual text
  • Writing a list of things you are grateful for
  • Getting to bed early or maybe waking up before the kids to fit in a little ‘me time’

It can be hard making time for self-care when you are dealing with the fallout from loving an alcoholic and particularly if you have young children at the same time.  It’s a lot.

Life is just crazy-busy.  How can you possibly find time for yourself?

We all get the same 24 hours a day.  Look carefully.  There will be some space that you can fit in some time for yourself. 

Do you really need to be on the ‘parent committee’ at school and volunteering for the food drive at church?  Do your kids really need to be doing three out of school hours activities each week?

Look hard.  You will find some time somewhere.

If you have small children that need to have a baby sitter and you don’t have the money to pay for one, try and make an arrangement with another mum you know and trust to take turns minding each other’s children.  You will both benefit from some much needed ‘time out’.

You will be a far better mum, partner, sister or friend by making self-care one of your highest priorities.

4. Learn to say ‘NO’

Most of us who are in a relationship with an alcoholic are people-pleases.  This means we naturally hate to say ‘no’ to people.

There are many reasons for this:

  • we genuinely care about people and want to help them
  • we don’t want others to think badly of us
  • we are afraid of other people’s anger or disappointment if we say ‘no’
  • we don’t want to be rejected
  • we don’t want to be unkind or rude when someone else has a need
  • we think it is ‘un-Christian’ or selfish to say ‘no’
  • we care what others think of us more than what we think of ourselves
  • it boosts our self-esteem when we are viewed as ‘dependable’
  • we want people to like us (again trying to boost our self-esteem)

Saying ‘no’ is closely linked to our ‘self-care’.

When you love an alcoholic, life is very chaotic and it can take considerable time and energy dealing with the fallout of our loved ones latest drinking episode.

This is made all the worse when we have kept our loved one’s drinking a secret.  To the outside world, it may even look like we have the perfect marriage or family. 

When you look at the situation honestly, you know that you can’t cope with any more on your plate, but when others don’t know the chaos and pain that we have to face on a daily basis.  They may be less ‘understanding’ about why we simply don’t have to strength to do one more thing. 

The bottom line is, it simply doesn’t matter of what other people think of us.  Only we know what we can cope with and it is better to say a polite ‘no’ than to get ourselves in a position where we can’t cope; have too much on our plate and crash with exhaustion and depression.

Just a polite, yet firm ‘no, I’m sorry I won’t be able to do that’ is enough.  If they are your true friends or colleagues, they will respect your ‘no’. 

Regardless of their response, you will have the relief of knowing that you are putting your needs and the needs of your family first.

5. Try trusting in God

I don’t know whether you believe in a God – a Creator – a supreme being – that is in control of the world. 

Even if you are not sure if God exists or if you believe He does exist, but that He wouldn’t be interested in you personally – I really recommend just giving trust in God a try.

I find that when I truly decide to trust in God and give Him all my worries and all my fears, it brings incredible peace.  The Bible calls it “peace beyond our understanding”, meaning that you can be at peace, even in the middle of the chaos and drama of loving an alcoholic.  You can read about one of my personal stories on this topic here.

If you don’t feel comfortable trying to read the Bible, just start with the Bible verses below.  Slowly read each one, think about what it says, try to think of each one as being personally for you.

God’s kindness to each one of us is amazing.  He wants us to take all our insecurities, worries and fears. Imagine yourself putting them in a big brown sack, giving it to God and walking away feeling light and free, leaving everything in God’s hands.  It’s such a relief!  Try it!

God loves you completely, just as you are. 

Psalm 32:10 The Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in Him.

Psalm 62:8 Trust in God at all times, pour out your hearts to Him, for He is our safe place.”

Psalm 112:7 There is no need to be afraid of bad news.  When you put your trust in the Lord, your heart will be steady and calm, not anxious and afraid.

Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart.  Don’t rely on your own understanding.  Give your heart fully to Him and He will show you what to do.

1 Peter 5:7 Give all your anxiety and worry to God because He cares for you.

Isaiah 26:3 When I put my trust in God, He will keep me in perfect peace.

I hope that this information has been helpful to you.  I always believe that even if just one thing makes your life a little better, it’s been worth the read.

Take care, Darlene

 

What is ‘Detachment with love’?

What is ‘Detachment with love’?

by | Oct 11, 2020 | Loving an alcoholic, Relationships

One of the most important lessons I ever learned from Al-Anon, is a concept called ‘Detachment with Love’.  (Al-Anon is a support group for people with family or friends who are alcoholics). 

At its heart, ‘detachment with love’ means allowing someone to learn from their own mistakes – to experience the natural consequences of their own choices and behavior. 

The trouble is, that many of us who love an alcoholic, are in a co-dependent relationship with them – that means that our identify, our happiness and our general emotions are entwined with the other person.  It’s hard to know where the other person ends and you start – your emotions are enmeshed together.

So what we think of as ‘love’ is often an unhealthy love.  It is not the mature love that people are meant to have with each other, where each person takes responsibility for their own decisions, actions and happiness.

So if our loved one makes a poor choice eg. getting drunk and falling down, because of our
co-dependency, we tend to rush in and try to ‘rescue’ them.

We don’t want them to feel any pain or discomfort. 

We want to make everything smooth and easy for them.  This is partly because of our unhealthy ‘love’ for them, but it’s also because we believe that if they are stressed, unhappy or in pain, they will drink more.  This is the last thing that we want. 

So we try to control the situation.

This is why the first step in the 12 step process is “we admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable” – meaning, that we are unable to control it, no matter how hard we try.

When we rush in and ‘rescue’ our loved one, they do not have the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes.

We think we are ‘loving’ our spouse, child or other family member, but actually our behaviour is allowing them to remain comfortable drinking.

Only when we allow the alcoholic to experience the natural consequences of their drinking, is there any hope of them making a decision to stop.

I remember one night, my husband stumbled to bed, drunk as usual, and when he tried to get up to go to the bathroom, he fell out of bed with a tremendous crash and with the sound of breaking glass.

I got up in a panic, to see what on earth had happened.  My husband had fallen out of bed onto a large picture frame and it had smashed to pieces.  The picture frame had been sitting next to his side of the bed, waiting for him to put it up on the wall.

There was glass everywhere.  He was so drunk that he could not get up.  Every time he tried to get up, he would fall back down and smash more glass. 

It got to the place where he was lying on a pile of broken glass and he was also covered with broken glass.  He was rolling around in it and every time he moved, he cut himself more and made it worse.

I got up and desperately tried to lift him up, but he was too heavy.  He is a big guy, and I just didn’t have the strength to hold up his body weight.  After about 5 or 6 attempts, with no success, I just had to let him stay on the floor, on the glass.  I didn’t know what to do.

Then I remembered what I have been learning in Al-Anon about ‘Detachment with Love’.

I realised that, while I loved my husband, there was nothing I could do to help him, so I just had to go back to bed and go to sleep, leaving him on the floor, rolling around in the glass, cutting himself more and more. 

Does this mean I didn’t care about him?  Not at all! 

I cared about him deeply and was very sad to see the mess he had got himself into, but there was nothing more I could do but go back to sleep and wait for the morning.

After trying over and over to get up, he finally collapsed and went to asleep on the floor.

At that moment, I finally, truly understood the meaning of the term ‘detachment with love’. 

I loved my husband with all my heart and I wanted to help him, but at the end of the day, it was his choice to get drunk and this is why he ended up in the mess he was in.

Even though I knew his body was cut and was getting worse every time he moved, I had to be at peace with this and allow myself to go back to sleep.

‘Detachment with love’ is actually a tool that we can use with many people, not just a loved one who is an alcoholic.  Anyone who is making unwise choices and doesn’t like the natural consequences and expects us to bail them out, needs a good dose of ‘Detachment with love’.

We see this when we raise children and why we have to discipline them when they misbehave.  When our child experiences our discipline, they may react with tears or anger.  They may scream ‘you don’t love me’.

But you know that you love them deeply and you need to allow them to their mistakes.  This can either be learning by experiencing the natural consequences of their choices or it can be experiencing consequences that you decide are appropriate to the situation.

Your motivation is love. 

You want them to mature and grow up responsible citizens. 

If we continually come to their rescue, they will never feel the consequences of their bad choices. 

   In the Bible, in Hebrews 12:11, it says “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

And in Proverbs 3:12 “because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.”

And in Galatians 6:5 “each one should carry their own load”. 

As adults, each one of us has “our own load” of responsibilities to carry.  When we ‘rescue’ our alcoholic loved one, we are trying to carry “their load” of responsibilities as well as our own.  This is exhausting for us can soon lead to burn out, and it does not actually help the alcoholic.  We need to allow them to learn to carry their own responsibilities.

So ‘Detachment with love’ is two-fold:

1. We lovingly allow the alcoholic to carry their own responsibilities; and

2. We lovingly allow them to learn from their own mistakes and to experience the consequences of their own choices and actions.

You can have peace despite the most stressful circumstances

You can have peace despite the most stressful circumstances

by | Jul 7, 2020 | Faith and Spirituality, Loving an alcoholic

I want to say up front that I am not telling this story to put my husband down in any way.  Rather, I want to glorify God who restores marriages, even when it looks like it would be impossible.

I am married to a great guy, who was an alcoholic for over 30 years.

He stopped drinking 3 years ago – something I never thought would happen.  God’s restoration of our marriage is truly a miracle, given all that we have been through together.

One cold, dark night, about 11.30pm, my daughter, who was 4 years old, came rushing into our bedroom choking and struggling to breathe.  I had to get her to a doctor or hospital – and quickly!

I looked over at my husband, who was passed out drunk as usual and I knew I couldn’t leave my 2 year old son home while I sought medical assistance for my daughter, because if he needed any help, my husband would be too drunk to get up and help him.

So I woke my son up out of a sound sleep and bundled both the children into the car.

I knew that there was an after hours doctor’s clinic about half an hour and way, so I drove straight there.

When we got there, we found that it had closed for the night just 5 minutes earlier.  I was gutted – and worried.

I knew that there was a hospital about 10 minutes away, so I went to re-start the car, but it wouldn’t start.  The battery had died!

I checked my mobile phone – the battery was flat.  I couldn’t believe it!

How could all this be happening when I was in the middle of a medical emergency?

I had to get to a telephone so I could ring roadside assistance to get the car going.

I remembered that there was a Nursing Home just a few doors up, but it was a bitterly cold night and pouring in rain and I knew I couldn’t take the children with me.  It would only make my daughter sicker.  But I didn’t want to leave them alone in the car either.  I didn’t know what to do.

I turned to my daughter and said ‘can you be a really brave little girl and look after your baby brother? Mummy has to go and find someone with a phone.  She bravely nodded ‘yes’.

I locked the car and prayed that no-one would find the children in the car.

I went a few doors up to the Nursing Home and told them I needed to use their phone to ring roadside assistance.  They wouldn’t even let me come inside the building!  But they passed me a phone through the window so I could make the phone call.  I thanked them and ran back to my car, hoping that the kids were fine.  They were.

The operator at roadside assistance said that someone would be there within about 45 minutes.

We would just have to wait.

It was freezing cold in the car, but I put both kids on my lap, covered us all with a big jacket and waited for help to come.

It was during this 45 minutes wait that I realised that I had a choice about how I could respond here.  I absolutely love the preacher, Joyce Meyer, and in the past week, she had preached about how God would give us His peace despite our circumstances.  God reminded me of these timely messages.

I chose to be at peace – despite my daughter still struggling to breathe, despite the fact that our car had broken down, despite the fact that my husband was passed out drunk when I really needed him.

I could choose how to respond – and I chose peace.

I cuddled the children and helped them get back to sleep while I calmly waited for roadside assistance.

I prayed and prayed, but I continued to choose to be at peace and calm.

The level of peace I felt was unbelievable.  That’s why the Bible calls God’s peace “the peace that passes understanding”.  It is a peace that looks to be impossible given the situation.

God is faithful.

Approximately 45 minutes later, the roadside assistance man came and jump-started my car.

I quickly drove to the hospital and just as I got to the main emergency entrance, where the ambulances drive in and my car died again in the middle of the emergency drive way.  No ambulances or other vehicles could get in or out because my car was in the way.

I just left the car in the middle of the driveway and took the children into the emergency room.

To my surprise, my daughter had actually improved while all this was going on.  Her breathing was much better.  By the time we got to see a doctor, they gave her some oxygen but said that she should be fine.  They said that with things like this, the cold night air can actually help!

Meanwhile, some staff from the hospital came and pushed my car off the driveway so that ambulances could still get in and out.

It was about 2.00am by now.  I knew I would have to get roadside assistance out again to get my car started again, so I used a public phone at the hospital to call for them to come out again. 

I then tried to ring my husband.  I rang and rang and rang, trying to get hold of him to let him know what was happening and that I could use his help.  He didn’t answer – no doubt he was too drunk to get to the phone.

Another hour later, roadside assistance came again, but the technician was a horrible man and he started yelling at me for not ‘servicing’ my battery.  Apparently, with these kinds of batteries, you had to regularly top them up with water.  I had never heard of such a thing.  Plus it was a really, really old, bomb of a car.  I had endless battery problems and breakdowns, but couldn’t afford to buy anything better.  I told the technician that I didn’t know I had to put water in the battery regularly.  He kept yelling at me.

I knew I just had to stay calm and ‘hold my tongue’, even though he was behaving like a bully.  Here I was, stuck in the driveway of a hospital at 2.00am in the morning, with two small children and this was the second break down I’d had for the night.

He should have had empathy for the plight I was in – but he didn’t.  I kept my mouth shut, while he replaced the battery.  I thanked him very much for his help and began driving home.

It was now that I started feeling angry at my husband.  He didn’t have to work the next day – but I did!  I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier, but once again, I remembered that I could choose to hold my temper and stay at peace.

We finally got home about 2.30am in the morning.  I woke my husband up to tell him what had happened, but he couldn’t care less.  He was just annoyed that I had woken him up.  All I had wanted was a little bit of empathy – just an arm around me telling me he was sorry for what I’d been through, but I didn’t get that.  He went straight back to sleep.  I tucked the kids back in bed and they went back to sleep.  I went to bed and contemplated the night’s events.

It was truly miraculous that God had kept me at peace in the most stressful of circumstances.

I thanked God for this peace and his strength and went to sleep.

“And the peace of God which is beyond our understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”  Phillipians 4:7 (The Bible)

You can have peace despite the most stressful circumstances