There is something truly comforting about everyone relating to my post - it makes me feel like I wasn’t insane and wasn’t me. Thank you. I know it, but it gives me so much strength to hear it.
There is a huge amount of something similar to ‘sunk costs fallacy’ isn’t there @HowardTJMoon in those years where you stay. As a non addict, you feel sheer disbelief that this really could be ‘it’, that they may never get into sustainable recovery. It feels unimaginable - how on earth could you be prepared to put up with this life of chaos and conflict rather than give up the substance and return to what we had before/ move onto the really good life we could have together/ as a family. I also had an amount of - he has to recover and I can’t walk away or all the hell I have gone through to this point will have been for nothing. Then as you said, at some point there is the realisation that ‘nothing changes if nothing changes’ - and it’s give up hope and save yourself. You can’t save them. You can save yourself and any children. It’s a realisation so shocking akin to a gut punch I think.
My Ex also doesn’t really want to stop drinking for good @HowardTJMoon. He says it in rehab, or in the immediate days post rehab, but faced with a choice between surfing the waves of cravings and doing the hard work daily of a life without the crutch of alcohol? No. He wants the substance. Or he wants the substance when he wants it without physical dependency (so drinking ‘normally’ I guess - lots of poor me about how everyone else is allowed to drink with their mates or to celebrate or when stressed. True, but none of those people are dependent on it and withdraw by 2am are they)/ Or perhaps more accurately, he wants us all to let him continue to rely on the crutch of alcohol to celebrate and numb and function without losing anything. The boundaries make him furious. How dare we (ex wife, ex partner me, siblings, social services, friends, business contacts) expect him to give up his alcohol for good. We should unconditionally support him because he is a person in need. Don’t we realise how hard his life is and how special a case he is? I mean this seriously as well - Ex is constantly telling me how out of everyone in whatever rehab/ support group/ AA meeting it is way harder for him to give up because of ND/ mental health/ childhood trauma/ and then of course everything he has lost from addiction - family, wife, me, children, business. I spent days of my life trying to argue that point - that he lost those things because of addiction, that he relapsed twice before losing overnight contact (and eventually all contact), that his business failed because clients couldn’t trust him anymore because he was under the influence or lazy and unreliable, of people who he had mentioned who had just as much to overcome as him. Crucially, trying to persuade him that he had to put in the daily hard work now to get all of those things back in the future. It’s so freeing not to ever have to have those conversations anymore. I can read all the emails, tick off which mood in Ex it is this month, but ultimately live my life.