How Do Our Relationships Change with Sobriety? Riverside Recovery of Tampa

Working through the trauma of addiction will most likely require help from a professional. Seek couples counseling to learn communication strategies, address underlying issues in the relationship, and begin to heal your marriage. It can also be challenging to deal with the negative impact addiction has on your relationship. Addiction often leads to financial problems, communication difficulties, and even infidelity. If you’re marriage after sobriety dealing with addiction in your marriage, it’s important to seek help from a therapist or counselor who can help you navigate these challenges. One of the biggest challenges of having a spouse who is not sober is that you may feel like you’re always walking on eggshells. It can be hard to relax and enjoy your life when you’re constantly worried about what your spouse is doing or whether they will make it home safe.

And my husband would say to me often, we talked about this. And I would be incredibly defensive about that. I would be like, God, I work so hard, and I do so much. And of course, you know, or I would pretend that I remembered, which I totally did, and be like, oh, yeah, of course. And either way, the part of me was like, I don’t remember this at all.

There is a learning curve to making marriage work after quitting drinking.

And it actually really resonated with us after four moves. And all those years, it’s still in my office, the pages are yellow, and we still make jokes and what you’ll hear about which are repair attempts, referencing stuff from the Gottman book. And it’s really sort of impacted how I relate to him and what I think about. Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. Your partner might not understand why you are taking a break from alcohol or how to support you.

• Journaling can help you process your emotions without hurting your spouse or causing an unnecessary argument.
• Together, the addict/ alcoholic and the partner follow an unwritten law, which tells them not to talk about anything that might be difficult or might feel uncomfortable.
• This eventually led him back to school for a degree in psychology.
• The most challenging part here is letting go of what you hoped your relationship would be, rather than facing that it’s time to let go of what once was.
• Deeper and more personal things are kept at this layer, and we are more selective about who we let in.
• It is common to have many acquaintances, several friends, and only a few real intimates.

Yeah, the antidote really is expressing your thoughts, your feelings and your needs, it gets right back to it. That concept of interdependency. The original antidote was described as creating a culture of appreciation. So, what you’re trying to do is build a degree of positivity which sort of insulates against those thoughts or feelings, even a person makes a mistake.

Discreet and Effective Addiction Treatment for Midlife Adults

And it does impact all aspects of your life. And part of it is how we sort of the terms we use to describe problematic behaviors. So how we define terms really makes a difference. I don’t know if it’s still a character defect that I want to hang onto him. I’m 52 years old, and we’ve already been through a lot.