My story

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.