I knew almost nothing about how to make a relationship work well when I finally got clean and sober in 1984. I had been divorced since 1975. My first post-divorce relationship (which, of course, began before my divorce) ended abruptly and painfully after four years. I made several more attempts to establish a new relationship, but they went nowhere as my addiction to pot and booze came to dominate my life.
By the end of 1982 I had decided I was going to be single the rest of my life. I stopped my desperate search for a mate. I would let my old friends, pot and booze, numb the lonely feelings, and I would get by.
When my post-divorce relationship had ended so painfully three years earlier, I had stumbled onto a book about Buddhism that seemed to make a lot of sense. On my own I began to meditate 30-40 minutes every morning, and that seemed to help with the empty, often hung-over state in which I would find myself upon awakening. So I had meditating in the morning and pot/booze in the evening to keep the loneliness at bay.
I continued meditating after I decided I was a confirmed bachelor. But as I did so, I began to be aware of this deep longing to return to P where I had grown up. The longing wouldn't go away, so I did the geographic and moved "home" six months later.
3 weeks after I arrived, I met S. Within 9 months, I was clean and sober. Six months later, we and our children were living together. We got married 2 years after that. 21 years later, we are still married, and I'm still clean and sober.
I read a book many years ago about a long-term study of alcoholic men which began when they were teen-agers and followed them until they were in their fifties. Many of them died or were still drinking at the end of the study. But a number of them got sober and stayed sober. The author of the study found three common elements to their sobriety. They got involved in AA and stayed involved. They had a spiritual awakening. And many of them found a new love relationship that sustained their sobriety.
That has been true for me. Yet so often I hear in meetings about failed or unhappy marriages in sobriety. The struggle to find and sustain a relationship while in recovery comes up over and over again in the program. I have gotten so many calls from clean and sober clients who are desperate for a counseling session as soon as possible because their spouse/partner/significant other has announced they are leaving.
So what makes the difference? Why so some relationships thrive in recovery, while others wither and die? What makes for a happy relationship during sobriety and what destroys that happiness? These are some of the questions I will be addressing in this blog.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
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1 comment:
Getting divorced might be painful to some, especially if you're really attached to your partner even though there's an inner turmoil in your relationship. But in my case, it is justified to break-up with my ex-husband due to his possessive and violent nature. Being sick and tired on the pain and suffering I've experienced, I employed the services of the divorce lawyers in Jacksonville, FL to get it all done for good.
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