Marriage After Sobriety: What to Expect

You can persevere through anything together if you are on the same page and know that relapse is possible without a solid recovery. Your marriage will undoubtedly be different, but just know that all marriages evolve as the years continue to progress. Couples who have one person who heavily uses alcohol and another who does not are more likely to divorce than couples who both heavily use alcohol. Compare these numbers to the number of married couples in the United States during the same time period. There were 59.2 million married couples in 2013. If your partner has an addiction, it can be difficult to know exactly what to do. If you or someone you know is experiencing distress, therapy with a marriage and family therapist can help. Kristie Mays serves as Financial Assistance Coordinator for Burning Tree Ranch.

Tools and skills to be able to transition to a life of sobriety. While other treatment centers track days, we track progress. It is critical to address addiction and co-occurring disorders concurrently. Learn more about the many types of disorders we treat, including addiction.

How To Handle Loved Ones Who Don’t Support Your Sobriety

Drugs smoothed over difficult feelings and situations that now must be faced “on the natch.” Anxiety may be covering deeper feelings of depression, shame, and emptiness. Childhood trauma can drive these feelings, but early sobriety is not the time to address it. Moreover, if substance abuse started before the addict was an independent, self-sustaining adult, then new skills need to be learned. It’s said that maturity stops when addiction begins. Hopefully, the addict is getting support from a 12-Step program and an experienced sponsor or counselor. CAP, ICADC, CHC CEO and President at The Shores Treatment & Recovery of Florida. He is an ordained pastor and International Crisis Response Chaplain, is certified in CISM.

It’s heart-wrenching to leave behind someone who is sick. Yet in order to maintain your own sanity and to protect those you love, you may need to pack your bags and go. Drugs and alcohol can cause people’s personalities to change drastically. While under the influence or while experiencing cravings, they may say or do things they wouldn’t normally do. It’s as if the person you married has disappeared, replaced by a monster named Addiction.

How to Deal with an Addicted Spouse

As a person in addiction recovery, your priority must be your own sobriety. Focusing on the other person’s behavior takes away from that, and you cannot change that person in any case. Successful marriage changes after sobriety partnerships do not require that both parties are perfect, but that they are whole and unique individuals. You cannot will that for your partner, but you can work on that for yourself.

Divorce or separation among couples struggling with addiction issues may be common, but it’s not inevitable. If your partner suffers from an addiction, there are specific do’s and don’ts experts recommend you put into place to help your addicted spouse. Angie Buja serves as the Family Program Facilitator for Burning Tree Ranch. Responsible for co-creating Burning Tree’s nationally recognized family program, Angie is a practiced therapist who believes in treating addiction as a family disease, not an individual disease. By helping families navigate through the repeating patterns of relapse, Angie guides families in identifying how they can contribute differently to help achieve better, more meaningful results. Her presentations include humor, education, experiential exercises as well as sharing about her own “growth opportunities”.

Trying to pretend that you do not notice the truth does not save the situation. Giving up false hopes that things get better by themselves is a crucial step to take to improve your own life and the lives of those around you. After multiple treatment centers, I entered Casa and feel like a switch clicked. Casa Palmera has an amazing staff and really turned my life around. My sponsor, all of my friends, and everyone says I just need to let it go and go through with the divorce.

Alcoholism and marriage is a complicated pairing that can be incredibly challenging to handle without professional guidance. Addiction harms relationships in a variety of ways due to the fact it makes the sufferer prioritize alcohol higher than anything else. Lastly, if you are bored and sobriety, I want you to look at the facts that boredom and alcohol don’t go together; they are separate. If you are bored because you’re not drinking alcohol, there is something else going on, and typically, boredom is an excuse.

Many of the staff have recovered from addiction themselves, so they know what your spouse is going through. The ratio of clients to staff is kept low so clients can always find someone to talk to or help them over a rough patch. First, addiction took away a lot of family time, and now it seems as though recovery takes the same or more time away. If it becomes problematic for you, ask your partner if you can attend open meetings together where family attendance is encouraged. Another helpful way to build a strong recovery is to create a set schedule for family time when your partner can commit to spending time together to balance time spent in recovery. Some people may not face frightening situations such as the ones listed above.

• We understand that everyone’s situation is unique, and this content is to provide an overall understanding of substance use disorders.
• Many spouses say they feel like a single parent when their partner turns to drugs or alcohol.
• Spouses will likely experience moments that will have them wondering how their marriage can survive sobriety.
• However, it’s not a cliché to say that our journey was far from linear.
• Alcohol is incredibly damaging to your ability to conceive children, which can be hugely painful for a partner who’s keen to start a family.

It may be difficult or impossible for partnerships like this to survive one partner achieving and sustaining sobriety when the other does not. Whether or not both partners choose addiction recovery, even the recovery of one partner is in many ways a joint process. In partnerships where one partner reaches sobriety, but the other, non-addicted partner chooses to continue low-risk alcohol consumption, resentment can build in both directions. You can also attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings together or go to Al- Anon. It’s important for the recovering addict that his or her spouse be involved in the recovery process. Attending support groups like these can help build an understanding of what addiction is and how to deal with an alcoholic or other recovering addict in a healthy and supportive manner. With Bill’s sobriety, the quality of our relationship improved enough for us to marry. However, it’s not a cliché to say that our journey was far from linear. We both did a lot of work to disentangle, develop clear communication, and become mindful of ourselves and each other. Today, with 12 years of recovery, we have created a strong bond that respects our individuality, challenges us to grow, and supports our human fragility.

All questions seemed to be loaded, and even compliments seemed to carry an air of disapproval. How do you love someone you don’t like to be around? That question without an answer was paralyzing for a long time. There are so many things wrong with that declaration and question I shouted at my wife on several sober occasions before I relapsed and returned to active alcoholism. I knew AA had a higher success rate ending marriages than it did keeping its members sober. I knew this early on and so I fought, determined not to become another statistic. I read every bit of AA-related literature I could. I tried to be active in his life, but not pushy. I tried to take control of my life, but not too much (turning most stuff toward a God I didn’t believe in).

She may later bemoan the fact that he has failed in his role as head of the house, not aware that it was she who took the reins and did all the managing. And while she is managing him, the children, the household, and the finances, she’s awash with self‑pity because of the big load she has to carry. The quality of human relationships depends largely upon the way we communicate with each other. It depends not only on what we say, but how we say it; not only on what we do, but our motives for doing it. Our tone of voice and even our smallest actions are elements of communication; many of us are hardly aware of these. As you develop this new relationship, take time to date one another.

As I saw him pour an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s down the drain, my lungs were able to expand, and with each breath my body became lighter and my mind clearer. As he asked me to toss the still closed Coors banquet cans I knew we were going to make it; we were going to be okay. We would save our marriage because he was getting sober. We would save our marriage because he finally had a desire to save himself. If you were to get back together, for it to work, it would need to come after time and space and spiritual, emotional growth for both of you. I think you know all this; it’s why you wrote to me. 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. You’ve shifted the dynamics, and your new, more lucid behavior doesn’t fit with the old dysfunctional relationship patterns you two had established.

Colleen’s goal is to help others discover what is not working in their lives and make lasting changes. Sober since 2017, Colleen is an alumnus of Burning Tree Ranch. She lives in Dallas TX where she participates in a vibrant women’s recovery community. Shelley Long serves as Operations Manager for Burning Tree Ranch. Responsible for upholding Sober Home the core principles of the organization, Shelley utilizes a combination of efficiency and attentiveness to create a safe place for our clients to recover. Shelley has worked for Burning Tree for more than a decade. Shelley’s strengths are strong organization skills, taking initiative, and using her sense of humor in her day-to-day job.