7 Tips to Help You Deal with an Alcoholic Spouse
When someone you love suffers from an addiction, it can tear you apart. What’s more, the mere presence of the addiction completely removes your ability to communicate honestly. In marriage, it’s even worse. There are so many feelings involved, and the people you love have the power to hurt you more than anyone else in your life.
Living with an alcoholic is traumatic. You’re affected from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night. Still, when you know how to deal with your alcoholic spouse, life can become better. In fact, it can even lead to your spouse getting the help that’s needed to recover. With that in mind, here are seven tips that you must read, review, and remember to help you cope with your alcoholic spouse.
1. Remember that alcoholism is a disease
It is very hard to believe that your spouse is no longer making an active choice to drink. However, when someone is an alcoholic, the choice to drink is no longer within their control, at least to some extent. Alcoholism is a disease. And in order to fully understand it, it can be helpful to think of it the way you think of any other disease, such as cancer or heart disease. It is possible to make a choice to recover from alcoholism. But until the individual makes that decision, the disease remains in place.
Approximately 40% of those who enter an alcohol addiction treatment facility opt to begin recovering from alcoholism each year. So, recovery is possible as long as your spouse is willing, and that may eventually be the case, even if it isn’t right now.