To leave if DH won’t get help

Please find an al anon and a counsellor to help you work through your feelings on this. Your responsibility has to be to yourself and your children at this time. It’s not your responsibility to fix your dh and even with the best will in the world you couldn’t do it. He needs to take responsibility and make the changes, contact people for help etc.

He's an addict, you can't make him quit, it has to come from him.
Leave now and you have time to be happy; don't waste your life with an alcoholic who will always prioritise his addiction over you and the kids.
Also- do you want your kids growing up with an alcoholic?

Please get out, this is no way to live and you shouldn’t have to resign yourself to being his carer

There are 4 of you in the household suffering from his addiction.
You can’t save him but you can save 3/4 of you.
Saving 3/4 of you is better than all of you drowning.

If you and the children are safe, stable with the potential to build up again from what his addiction has taken away, he should be happy that he isn’t the cause of your misery any more and there’s even a chance it might prompt him to get help.

In a situation like this, where addiction is a downward spiral, it’s your obligation to recognise that you can’t help him but you can save yourself and your children. And that you must act on that realisation as best you can, to free yourselves from further harm.

It’s not your fault OP, that he got to this stage with his drinking. It’s a failed marriage already from your own account. Terribly hard and very sad to have to do on your own, but he can’t help you, so please start to act positively, leaving as much guilt behind as possible - start to act on a plan to better the future lives for the three of you. Good luck !

YABU for not leaving before now, when you have DC to consider.

Leave OP. I've lived through this with all those same feelings of love and guilt and resentment. It won't get better it will get worse. To add insult to injury you'll be the one blamed for the break up. Leave but do so in as low key way as you can for the children. Keep it all matter of fact, no heart to heart conversations, no blame. It's hard but he doesn't want to hear it and he won't say the words you need to hear.

NRTFT

My ex was an alcoholic

Recently died, not even 50 yrs old

IME it doesn't get better

OP you are getting lots of good advice here and I would encourage you to find support for YOU at this stage rather than strategizing/speculating about your husband, who is not showing signs of wanting to stop drinking. It is a LONG process - imagine climbing a mountain - and he is nowhere near the starting line. You need to work on strengthening yourself, your body/mind/spirit and addressing the misplaced guilt - you have done nothing wrong here. It is sad and allow yourself to be sad but please don't blame yourself!

OP can’t love the alcoholism out of him, or be put in the position where he might stop if only she love him more (I.e. sacrifice more of her life in the altar of his addiction)

Such wise words. @MissisK the feeling I get from your first post is that you want/are ready to leave and that's OK. You don't owe his addiction the sacrifice of you and your children's happiness. Yes alcoholism is an illness but refusing to try to recover is akin to refusing treatment for any other illness and expecting you to pick up ALL of the pieces.

Consider that if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you have been.

Finally, I heard a great podcast recently about boundaries. The idea being that you can't tell someone else what to do, but you can tell them what you will do if they behave a certain way. You can't tell, plead or beg your husband into stopping, but you can remove yourself from the situation if he doesn't.

I have done this for too many years to remember.

My husband went in to a rehab centre for 4 weeks and he hasn’t had a drink for 9 months now. He also hid his drinking when it was at its worst.

One thing, when he was in rehab part of the treatment was to write an impact statement which would be read out to them in a group setting.

You were asked to write down how their drinking made you feel, different events that were spoilt by the drinking, impact on family and to be very specific in detail.

I did question the reasoning behind doing this as over the years had got used to protecting HIS feelings about drinking. Like you I always believed he would sort it out himself, an intelligent guy - he was a high functioning alcoholic I guess the term is.

It was read out to him, by a woman, and he was Genuinely shocked at the affect it had had on me, he knew it affected me but had no idea to what extent.

Just wondering if you did something similar would be helpful for your husband to hear and may nudge him towards getting some help.

I wish you all the very best and hope he can turn it around, he does need to properly realise he does have a problem to move forward.

You didn't cause this and you can't stop him drinking.
I would suggest finding a support group (like alanon) for yourself and your children.
I would also suggest talking to them honestly when he's not around and decide together what you are going to do. Also talk about it honestly to wider family and friends.
But get your support in place first, and decide what you want to do.
Personally I would confront him and do my best to get him to leave at least until he has sorted himself out.
An alcoholic I knew, his best wife was the one who told him (and everyone) if he drank again she would kick him out, and followed through when he started drinking again.

https://www.oneyearnobeer.com/

My husband was exactly the same for years.

The turning point was when he blacked out in the front garden and our 10 year old had to help me carry him inside.

I filmed the whole thing and showed it to him the next day. Up until that point, he thought I had been exaggerating everything because he couldn’t remember what had happened.

he started following ‘one year, no beer’. It’s a podcast and a journalling thing where you get a daily email with a pep talk and something to journal about. It really helped him.

another good thing for me was watching some videos by Russel Brand - I know he’s a bit of a knob but he has great insight into how to support people with alcohol and drug problems.

one thing that really stuck with me was this:

”I will help you to change, but I will not help you to stay the same”.

it really helped me to articulate how I felt and it was something that my husband could understand too.

good luck, I know how horrible this situation is.

to give you hope, my husband and I are very happy together and he’s never got black out drunk again. He now drinks in a much more sensible way and we are all much happier.

it can be done but it needs a rock bottom turning point and you need to set your demands and mean them.

why grateful?
Even if he purposefully gave you the gift of “more years of his life given to someone else’s addiction” that’s not a present anyone should want to receive. And presumably not one you yourself would ever be giving to another?

No relationship should be “what you can cope with”, and looking to frame OP as someone who just needs to up her coping skills is disgusting. As ever, it’s an alcoholic presuming to put themselves as the central character in other people’s lives.
She is the important one in this thread, not the alcoholic.

I was widowed with 3 young children by the age of 31 by my alcoholic ex. I had just made the decision to leave and was setting myself and the children up when he drank so much that he ended up in a coma and never woke up. Alcoholism is a supremely selfish disease, you need to leave and hopefully he will get help. The kids will know far more than you think.

Change is rarely successful if your not ready to accept situation and what is needed to move forward for yourself as we only tend to resist more if feel it's being imposed. It doesn't sound like he's ready to want to seek help as theres other options to GP he could try first if he was embarrassed over doing nothing but tbh if he's 'functional' perhaps he's actually worried about it then being on his medical record.

Change can be difficult for anyone but he's an addict so it will be harder for him to stay on that path and the fallout potentially worse for those closest. It's sad but you should focus your energy on what you can change to improve yours & kids lives separately. Raising the issue and being there to provide love and support hasn't made a difference to his drinking over the years so far.

100% ageee. Awful and not helpful advice at all.

your home is not a rehab centre.

you do not have to sacrifice your well-being for an addict.

This is an awful, emotionally manipulative thing to say. It doesn't depend how much she loves him at all. Women and children should not be sacrificed to a man's addiction because of 'love'.

I don't mean this as harshly as it may well sound, but I would feel far more guilty about making my children continue to endure living with an addict than splitting up their family.

you have choices, currently they don't.

to be blunt, currently one member of your family is totally fucked up. Do you want to add your kids to that number?

I get it. I really do. I split with my alcohol ex when DD was 4. Ex was dead by the time DD was 6. Bloody tragic situation and I'm happy if you want to private message. I understand how hard it is but can also assure you that it is 100% the right choice and the sense of relief you will get once you're not tiptoeing around an addict

Your kids deserve so much better.

Please leave and teach them about respecting themselves and others.

Just wanted to add that I’m rather shocked he said he didn’t feel comfortable approaching his doctor.

However is he comfortable making your life and that of his dcs miserable?

I’d assumed he tried to give up with the help of the gp before!

Tbh it indicates that he is very far from being in a place where he is fully acknowledging to himself what is going on.

So, @MissisK, I can see your head is all over the place.

To prepare to leave, you need to decide who does the leaving? Him or you and the kids?

How do you support yourself and the kids? Is there a joint account? Open a new account and transfer at least 50% to yourself. If you have it, he can’t drink it.

Paperwork. Birth and marriage certs, passports, school records, health records, house paperwork, wills, pensions - his too, pay slips - his too. Insurances - his too. If you start removing it all now to a safe place, will he notice?

Clothes etc - everything that makes up a life. Where does it go and how does it get there? Would it all happen quietly or will you likely need support from someone who takes no shit?

Talking to the children. Someone on here will signpost somewhere to get support and reassurance.

You say you feel guilty for leaving. Well, he left first. And he doesn’t look like he is coming back.

I hope this all helps you clarify your thinking. Don’t be overwhelmed. One step at a time.

I wish you luck.

My dad was 32 when I was born.
I grew up thinking it was normal to come home from work and drink for 6 hours until you went to bed.
Once, only once, my dad was really being unreasonable with me. and I calmly asked him if he was hung over. I was 15 or 16. In return, I was grounded for two weeks. That’s right - I got punished because I recognized the obvious.

When Dad turned 60, he stopped. He stopped drinking and smoking. He never cheated or anything. It was a sight to see.

Not everyone is lucky enough to make it to 60. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you can stomach watching your husband slowly kill himself - remember: your kids don’t get a vote.
My siblings and I didn’t get a vote and my mother was a martyr, bless her. Poor, put upon mum. Let’s all feel sorry for mum because she decided to stay with a drunk.

Sending love and strength from the child of an alcoholic

Google adult children of alcoholics to see what your kids are in for. You need to leave.

It definitely affects home life. We’re walking on eggshells. He gets sulky and grumpy and the mood swings are awful. It doesn’t affect work as far as I can see. He does hide alcohol cans in the shed and car and thinks I don’t know.

Ask yourself what is stopping YOU from leaving him? Fear of being lonely?

You are lonely already in this situation, find your inner woman warrior and leave him.

Your future self and your kids will thank you. Or they will repeat the pattern they grew up with.

Wishing you strength.