Most of us know that there are 5 stages of grief. Well there are 6 stages of dealing with an alcoholic.
I will try to explain them, but they are sometimes elusive, sometimes crisscrossing and borrowed deep, these emotions. They don't happen in a specific order, but they do happen! Maybe you will be able to agree with them, maybe not. Maybe you will be able to tell me there are more stages to it. I don't know when co-dependency happens, but I know it's not the end of the line. It's not a terminal illness, unless you let it be, and you sink with that alcoholic as they drowned in whatever poison they use.
That is not to say that there aren't strong people out there who beat the alcoholism. I have seen it done and I have seen some go gladly with it, on a quickly spiraling stairway to a Hell of their own. My father chose to give it up at the end of his life. But the damage had already been done. To all of his organs, to his brain cells, to his family, to his right to a longer healthier and happier life. I know not what demons he felt he had to fight, but once he let the alcohol in, he was lost for many years in it's grip.
My father was born to an alcoholic father and a co-dependent mother. From what I understand during conversations with him about his parents, they weren't abusive or neglectful in anyway. He told me his mother could sing like an angel and in his fathers eyes he could do no wrong. They had a strong marriage and weathered the storm together. That storm being the demonic alcohol.
My father came from a very musically talented back ground. Once my parents married at the age of 21, he began playing in a band in night clubs and bars. My mother told me he began to drink about the age of 26. I remember my mother telling me that the patrons were always buying the band players drinks, and I remember feeling angry at these anonymous people for building the bridge that took my father away from us.
By the time I was born, he was 34 and already in the grip of alcohol. It was the beginning of the end for my parents marriage. I remember him being a mean drunk, and my mother always being angry and on edge. Then I noticed how she would completely ignore him, which in turn made him resentful and angrier with us, his kids. She may not have gone through the denial stage or the pleading/bargaining stage. If she had, I was not yet born or far to young to remember. I do remember from a very early age feeling the unease and tension once he came home from work. If he was already drunk, my brother, sister and I would quickly go to our rooms and be quiet, so he wouldn't notice us. If he went down to the basement there was a hope that he would drink himself unconscious down there. But if he didn't, if my mother was working, he'd come upstairs to bully us or knock my brother around. When I was 5, my father moved out. My mother at this point was in the Anger/Apathy stage. She didn't care if he lived or died. But she was glad he had moved out. We all were.
Even though he had moved out and my parents divorced, the damage to me had been done. I know our fathers drinking at effected all of us, but I can only talk about exactly what it did to me.
I needed constant reassurance that I was a good girl. That I was loved and wanted. I made a world of my own where I was the center of attention, where I was the golden child and the world was a wonderful and secure place, because in my home, it was not.
So I grew up and started dating the wrong kind of guys. Guys I thought I could "fix" if I just showed them the love that I had craved from my father. The "I would do anything for you" from a man that I hadn't gotten from my father.
And as the years went by, I married an alcoholic. Something I swore up and down I would never EVER do.
And this is where the co-dependency comes in.
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