I love my new life.
Two years ago I ran away from my abusive alcoholic. My two children and I hid from him for eight days. On New Year’s Eve of that year we were finally able to go back home thanks to a court order. It was a long slow climb out of that pit.
The hardest part was detaching. When you live with someone like that for seventeen years you…wait, I (trying to only speak for myself) became so enmeshed in the dysfunctional web there was nothing to me but that life. I thought about, worried about, felt guilty about, obsessed about my alcoholic all the time. I cannot overstate how much I obsessed. The word obsessed does not even begin to describe what I did. But I went to Al-Anon, and I heard that I needed to detach. I had no idea how to do so and the idea terrified me. If I was not attached to that life…? Then what?
But the best thing was detachment. I tried to detach with love. I think I did. He does not agree, but that is OK. I no longer obsess. My mind and my life are full of peace and happiness and smiling and laughter and thoughts of how incredible life is. I appreciate everything so much more than I ever did. I love every day even if it is not the best day. The fact that I am safe and my children are safe and I only deal with issues I create myself makes it the best day.
It was time, too. Time healed. No denying that. And friends. And treatment for PTSD. It all came together when I stepped away from the alcoholic and allowed him to travel his own path, without my meddling or my judgement or my intervention. When I wasn’t trying to hold onto him with a white knuckled grip I could move through life so easily.

Life with an addict and other abusive people taught me that feeling good meant drama. The higher the drama, the higher I felt emotionally. This is something that very few people understand, unless they have been in this type of relationship. To me, those crazy, drunken nights were a blessing and a curse. I hated dealing with the idiotic drunken behavior, but I relished the moments of feeling alive in the moment of danger. I relished the morning after when I could be “right” and “good.” Few people can understand the duality of that life. I wish to God I didn’t. I just pray and pray every day for that feeling that I NEED that drama to go away and never terrorize me again. I think it’s an addiction just as toxic and dangerous as any drug.

Someday I hope that I will learn to quit repeating the same old patterns over and over again.  Just when I think I might be able to feel happy again, I stop and look around and realize that I am about to find myself in the same terrible place. It is so easy to see other people’s mistakes and so impossible to recognize my own, especially before I make them.

Life is complicated.  Especially when you love (or think you love) an addict or an alcoholic.  They are, for many of us, the most irresistible people.  They are fun where we think we are boring.  They are sexy where we feel unattractive.  They are popular where we feel like wallflowers.  Recipe for disaster.

After the initial courtship, when real life set in, I kept trying to logic my way out of situations.  Such as: well, he wouldn’t have grabbed me by the throat and slammed my head against the wall if I hadn’t been so mouthy.  He wouldn’t have blacked out and pissed himself if his friends weren’t such degenerates.  All just lies I told myself to explain why I was staying in a place that I had no business being.  It goes back to that magnetic personality.  He was so good at helping me to understand that he was the one who was normal.  People drink to have a good time.  It’s fun.  People love it.  Why can’t you just drink more and enjoy it?  So, I, a fairly sane person, became a fully insane person who believed that right was wrong and wrong was right.

But luckily that has changed.  I haven’t seen him in a year and a half.  I am safe and my family is safe.  I am starting to see how things got so bad and how the choices I made impacted my situation.  I know he had a hand in this, but I also realize that there were thousands of stops along the road where I could have gotten out and chose not to.  My goal is to continue to reflect on this and add mortar to my boundaries so that if I ever am with someone again I will recognize when my boundaries have been crashed.