I admire your courage.  Good for you. I had to finally set a strong boundary and come to a decision this summer about my relationship with my A.  I was able to detach with love and grieve knowing that I was truly powerless over this terrible disease.  All I could do was take care of me and move forward. 

When I started getting healthy and taking positive action for me, the A got worse.  Much much worse and drank himself day and night nonstop for a month.  But I held true to me and kept my boundaries,decisions and detachment clear. He eventually found his way to treatment by himself and he has fully embraced AA - he's been going 4-5 times a week on his own.  I'm happy for him and he seems like a new person.  Had I not left, who knows where we both would've ended up.  And who knows if my leaving did anything too. He did it on his time in his way and with his Higher Power's assistance.  All I know is that by my getting healthy, it helped me gain perspective and recovery and peace of mind again.

  We are now working on a friendship and have little dates here and there, but mainly we are both focused on our recovery and regaining our emotional balance.  I  know that I was not helping the situation any by staying and being miserable and making him feeling guilty and ashamed. 

Your taking the steps to keep yourself healthy are rays of hope. If you stayed with him and things continued on the course you've been, is that love or is it enabling? 
 I wish you the best of luck -  Take care of yourself and miracles can and do happen!  Keep writing we are always here for you

Aloha Shadow!

It's amazing how miracles like Twinkie's unfold.  I have seen it many times while hanging around the program.  The program doesn't give advise or suggestions on divorce or separation.  It doesn't support or reject a members decision to make the changes they see fit.  It has suggested that I wait for two years while working the program before making major decisions in my life and that is what worked for me.

Alcoholics are sick...not stupid or unfeeling.  They have fears and imaginings and guilt and shame along with the whole range of human emotions.  They are humans with a life threatening disease.  If they don't arrest the disease they go crazy and/or die.  We get the same consequences if we don't arrest our participation and often are seen as more crazy than the alcoholic.  In short I'll bet that your alcoholic all ready knew what you were going to say and do before you mentioned it.  Probably a long time before you mentioned it. 
His drinking the way he is drinking also bothers him.  He is fearful of it but not fearful enough to over come the compulsion to drink.  That's the insanity of this disease...there is no just thinking our way out of it or going "cold" turkey for solid sobriety.  An science hasn't come up with a workable alternative.  Social model recovery; one recovering drunk helping another drunk to get sober and then help another one and so on...is what works best.  This most closely describes AA and in order for that to work the alcoholic must get deeply honest that he/she is alcoholic...and...then get willing to do whatever it takes to recover from it.  

That's just some recovery information.  Some people keep coming back and never leave before the miracle happens and then there are others who just leave.  One thing that helped me stay was finding out that I was prone to picking addicted women as partners (more than several) and that unless I had a solid recovery myself I would continue to do that expecting different results every time. (the definition of insanity for me is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.)

Keep coming back. This program works if you work it.

((((hugs)))) 

((()) Shadow,

Try and get out of the house on your anniversary.  Don't look at this as an ending but a new beginning for you to get some joy back in your life.  Live in the now.  The past has gone we can't change it, we know not what is in the future but we do have now.  Live it the way you would wish. You deserve to be happy.  Luv Leo x