Post by TimM on Dec 15, 2006 7:33:47 GMT -7
Josh,
I have told my wife, so I'm not the person you're looking for who recovered without that step. That said, may I offer my own opinions on this question?
I think we often make three mistakes when we think about disclosure to our spouses.
(1) We think we don't have to disclose.
But I have met many spouses of addicts, and I have never met one who said, "I wish my spouse had just kept me in the dark." Addiction is a disease of isolation, a disease in which we wall ourselves into a prison where we are separated from other people, from God, and from ourselves. What I think, and what everything I read about addiction seems to say, is that we have to connect with other people in order to heal. The walls of isolation and shame have to come down.
Can we really say, "Yes, I need to build emotional honesty with the people around me, but just not with my wife"? We are called to be one flesh with our spouses. Can we really do that while withholding from them the central emotional and spiritual sruggle of our lives? Doesn't that just maintain the structure of isolation and shame from which our addiction grows?
I think we do have to disclose.
(2) We think we have to disclose instantly.
But I'm not so sure about this. In some way, disclosure and repentance and making amends for our behavior happens at step 9 of the 12 steps, not at step 1. Further, disclosure is hard and scary, and it can be done in ways that harm either or both parties. It's important to do it right. I didn't talk to my wife until I had been attending 12 step meetings for 3 months and had some sobriety, until I had a sponsor and was working the steps, until I was ready to start counseling once I had her approval to spend the money, until I had read the book "Disclosing Secrets" and had talked with my sponsor at length about how to proceed. This gave me the confidence that I was doing things in the least painful possible way, and that I could demonstrate that I was serious about recovery.
To be fair, some people disagree with my answer here, and think that disclosure has to happen at once. They may be right. My willingness to postpone disclosure could be used to rationalize delaying years in order first to get sober, which seems clearly unacceptable to me. At the same time, I still think that early in recovery, we often need a little time to understand ourselves well enough and to have enough support in place that we do not cause even more damage by a bungled confession.
I think some delay, measured in months but not years, is OK.
(3) We think that confessing to our wives will transform us utterly.
But it's not so. I have read people saying that they have confessed to their wives and made their wives accountability partners and that now they are certain they cannot slip again, that slipping would be too unspeakable even to consider. Most of those people then proceed to slip. We addicts seem quite capable of causing pain in order to get our fix, quite capable of behaving irrationally in order to get our fix, quite capable of doing whatever it takes in order to get our fix.
Becoming honest with our spouses is part of learning a new way to live. We also have to learn to make friends, to learn to trust God, to learn to understand our own feelings, to figure out who we are, to discover intimacy and trust, to maintain honesty and connection with ourselves, our spouses, our friends, our God. Addiction recovery is about becoming a new human being, about being born anew. That birth is a long, hard, painful process for most of us. Just telling our wives won't do it, and it is grossly inappropriate to create a plan of recovery that makes our wives responsable for our sobriety.
We need to do a lot of things in order to recover.
That's my take, anyway. Not everyone agrees, especially on point (2). It's what I've done, and it's sure working for me, though.
I hope some part of that helps, even if it doesn't directly answer your question about recovery alone, which I haven't succeeded at and which I think never or almost never succeeds. Of course, I may be biased, since the recovering addicts I meet are by definition not trying to recover alone; the same bias may affect the psychologists I read about this stuff, too. I'd be surprised, though.
Tim M.
I have told my wife, so I'm not the person you're looking for who recovered without that step. That said, may I offer my own opinions on this question?
I think we often make three mistakes when we think about disclosure to our spouses.
(1) We think we don't have to disclose.
But I have met many spouses of addicts, and I have never met one who said, "I wish my spouse had just kept me in the dark." Addiction is a disease of isolation, a disease in which we wall ourselves into a prison where we are separated from other people, from God, and from ourselves. What I think, and what everything I read about addiction seems to say, is that we have to connect with other people in order to heal. The walls of isolation and shame have to come down.
Can we really say, "Yes, I need to build emotional honesty with the people around me, but just not with my wife"? We are called to be one flesh with our spouses. Can we really do that while withholding from them the central emotional and spiritual sruggle of our lives? Doesn't that just maintain the structure of isolation and shame from which our addiction grows?
I think we do have to disclose.
(2) We think we have to disclose instantly.
But I'm not so sure about this. In some way, disclosure and repentance and making amends for our behavior happens at step 9 of the 12 steps, not at step 1. Further, disclosure is hard and scary, and it can be done in ways that harm either or both parties. It's important to do it right. I didn't talk to my wife until I had been attending 12 step meetings for 3 months and had some sobriety, until I had a sponsor and was working the steps, until I was ready to start counseling once I had her approval to spend the money, until I had read the book "Disclosing Secrets" and had talked with my sponsor at length about how to proceed. This gave me the confidence that I was doing things in the least painful possible way, and that I could demonstrate that I was serious about recovery.
To be fair, some people disagree with my answer here, and think that disclosure has to happen at once. They may be right. My willingness to postpone disclosure could be used to rationalize delaying years in order first to get sober, which seems clearly unacceptable to me. At the same time, I still think that early in recovery, we often need a little time to understand ourselves well enough and to have enough support in place that we do not cause even more damage by a bungled confession.
I think some delay, measured in months but not years, is OK.
(3) We think that confessing to our wives will transform us utterly.
But it's not so. I have read people saying that they have confessed to their wives and made their wives accountability partners and that now they are certain they cannot slip again, that slipping would be too unspeakable even to consider. Most of those people then proceed to slip. We addicts seem quite capable of causing pain in order to get our fix, quite capable of behaving irrationally in order to get our fix, quite capable of doing whatever it takes in order to get our fix.
Becoming honest with our spouses is part of learning a new way to live. We also have to learn to make friends, to learn to trust God, to learn to understand our own feelings, to figure out who we are, to discover intimacy and trust, to maintain honesty and connection with ourselves, our spouses, our friends, our God. Addiction recovery is about becoming a new human being, about being born anew. That birth is a long, hard, painful process for most of us. Just telling our wives won't do it, and it is grossly inappropriate to create a plan of recovery that makes our wives responsable for our sobriety.
We need to do a lot of things in order to recover.
That's my take, anyway. Not everyone agrees, especially on point (2). It's what I've done, and it's sure working for me, though.
I hope some part of that helps, even if it doesn't directly answer your question about recovery alone, which I haven't succeeded at and which I think never or almost never succeeds. Of course, I may be biased, since the recovering addicts I meet are by definition not trying to recover alone; the same bias may affect the psychologists I read about this stuff, too. I'd be surprised, though.
Tim M.