Here's my original post: http://www.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2110817#Post2110817

My husband is a highly functioning alcoholic. He's moved out of the house and I returned home. His stuff is still here. He's planning on getting an apt with the OW whom I believe he's only be seriously seeing since July 29th. He came over for his first "visitation" today. He first texted me saying he was nervous and afraid I hated him. I quoted the scripture about how hating your brother makes you a murderer and I don't want to be one. He came over and I tried to keep myself busy and ignore him while he played with the kids. He cornered me in the kitchen and hugged me and said he reallh missed me and still cares about me but he just needs to do this for himself right now and that it has nothing to do with the OW and that he rarely sees her anyway. LIES. I said you have a funny way of showing you care.

A little while later he could tell I was getting really tense and he asked me not to talk to him about us now and to just be civil around the kids. I agreed. Then he asked me to recarpet a speaker cabinet for him and I just stared at him. Then he went outside and had a chat with the neighbor. I don't think it went well. The OW was his friend and he's feeling betrayed by both of them. When he came back in he was blank. He stared at the wall for an hour and didn't interact with the kids. Then he left.

I have been very cold and unresponsive to his constant text messaging about how my days have been going. I had planned to just hide away while he was here but it didn't work. I think I need to write a letter, could someone point me to some good examples? The search function doesn't seem to be working.

I want him back, but I don't want the selfish sob that I am married to. I started drafting a letter, but it sounded like a bunch of demands. Is plan b the way to go right now? How in the heck do you cut off contact with someone whom you don't want to send your kids with? I have forbidden that they spend time with the OW.

I had the Surving an Affair book from last summer but I lost it. I just ordered a new one. Any advice will help. I don't know what to do or how to act!

Help please I'm so confused and I don't want to make a wrong move. Should I be plan a'ing right now? I'm waiting for my grandmother's land deal to close and considering moving about 5 hours from DH so that I can be with family and save money. Should I wait for plan b until that's finalized?

He has this idea in his head that separation/divorce will be friendly and wonderful like it was during his childhood where they got together and did family stuff all the time, celebrated holidays and remained friends, etc. I won't be like that.

stormy,

Look here in GQII, there are several posts of people who are in Plan B or have done a Plan B.

Below is an EXCELLENT post from walkingthefield to sickwithworry regarding Plan B.

ok, that makes sense. So for now I'll just try to be nice as pie while I get these other details in order. It could be months before I'm able to move. Maybe I should try to implement it before then.

We have 5 kids and he drives a little truck. Any suggestions for how to accomodate visitations without letting him in my house?

Send the kids outside when he arrives for pickup...

Most people try to arrange the pickup / drop off at a "neutral" location. Like a local park or shopping mall.

Some will arrange this through their intermediary.

Stay Strong!

Stormy! My heart aches for you!! You are dealing with so much right now!

Just a few thoughts that popped into my head while I read through your posts:
1. Your WH is being a selfish brat, and you really need to seperate yourself from his horrible behavior for a while. As another poster said earlier - NONE of us get to have time to just check out of our family,andour obligations. The time for that, was before he got married, before you had children.

2. It is very hard to use plan A and B with active alchoholics. He really needs to deal with his alchohol addiction, and his OW addiction. (this jerk is spending more and more money on beer while you sruggle to pay the bills. That is horrible. You have every right to be angry about this)


3. the goal of either plan B or A, is not to be cold or unresposnive. IF you have the desire to someday reconcile with him AFTER he gets serious help for his addictions, then you would not want to be remeberd as cold and unresponsive. You would want to be remembered as warm and loving, but totally unwilling to tolerate has crap any longer.

4. I am not sure you are ready to move 5 hours away. This is not a bad idea for sometime later, but there are still too many unresolved issues to deal with right now.

Start going to Al-Anon. You need to get all the support you can get.
Get your finances in order. You need to file some sort of paperwork - legal seperation, D, whatever it takes to get your support amount in writing. His crap about "Dump the kdis with a friend and get a job" is a load of crap. You have 5 kids. I suppose he expects you to "dump the kids" with a friend and not pay them for child care, but that would never work. No one is going to take on 5 kids for free. You would just end up quitting the job when the child care falls through.

Do not worry about HOW he will pay your support. Just get it in writing now so it can be enforced, and let him worry about how to pay for it. He wants his freedom, he wants to screw some young girl? Fine. he needs to take care of business first.

Quit blaming the OW. She is stupid, selfish, and wrong. But this is not her fault. Your WH is misleading a young, stupid, selfish gill. Heck, she is barely out of her teen years. Shame on him.

This little girl could end up pregnant - either by mistake or on purpose. You need to protect yourself by filing for support NOW, before she does.

I know you love him. I understand that. you have loved him for many years, and you can not just turn that off now. But, you need to quit wasting so much of your time worrying about whether or not he is going to live with this little Ho. he is screwing her, no matter where he lives. You are worried about being alone - but you are alone all ready!! Even when he is with you physically, he is not there mentally.

You really need to start taking care of yourself.

No kidding. If he needs a break so bad, why does he think it's fair for me to NEVER have one. This was a problem before the girl. He refused to help me with anything. Even getting him to sit with the babies long enough to take a shower was a rare occurence and he was always rude about it.

Al-Anon sounds like a good idea. When we had our first child we made an agreement that one of us would always be home with him because we didn't want anyone else to raise our children. For the first 3 1/2 years, I was the one that worked, and he stayed home. Now that I am home, I feel like its my job and I'm not about to quit. Telling me to get a job just seems like a way to transfer blame and responsibility.

We had the vasectomy argument for many years. It turns out his mama was driving force behind his refusal to do it. It was the one thing I asked he do when I first found out. He agreed. When I told his mom about the affair her main response was to ask how I could ask him do such a thing knowing that it can cause prostate cancer and there is a family history of cancer. I didn't want to get my tubes tied, he forced me to do it, knowing that eptopic pregnancy is a very real risk. While I was in the operating room, he was surfing myspace leaving comments on a 19year old girl's profile about how gorgeous she was and how they had so much in common, they should have been married.


You are right about that.

So....forgive me if I'm being repetitive or dense, but could someone give me an example of how I should behave right now? Should I wait until his next visit and bake banana bread or should I send him a letter tomorrow saying don't talk to me until you are ready to meet some demands?

Stormy, womanoffaith is right about plan A. Plan A is NOT to be used with an active alcoholic. It is impossible to meet the needs of an alcoholic and he will just use it as an opportunity to exploit and use you. Plan B is warranted, however, but you will want to make it a condition of his return that he STOP DRINKING and join a program of recovery.

I would go completely dark and change the locks on the house so he doesn't barge in. Alanon is a great suggestion too.

p.s. most alcoholics ARE highly functioning, that is the rule rather than the exception.

He's a smart guy, he will have to figure it out.

I guess I'm just worried that my plan a was terrible. The night I found out, I basically got kicked out of my house and he's been free to do whatever he wants since then. Now that I'm back, he's living with her at her mom's house. I haven't had the opportunity to be anything other than emotional or distant. I'm struggling right now just trying not to call him and beg him to come home. I'm just lonely.

Don't worry because Plan A is impossible with an alcoholic.

Could anyone point me to explantion for why that is? I know I let that go for too long because he was just a nicer person with a beer in his hand.

All the tears in my house is almost too much to bear. My kids are all very young and they don't understand. They are feeling very abandoned too.

The reason is because an alcoholic's first and only love is alcohol. It is impossible to meet the needs of an alcoholic.

Is there any hope in trying with an alcoholic?

Stormy
I always put up a question mark when I hear or read "Highly functioning" alcoholic.. To me, that like saying a "loving responsible cheater". Does he just drink too much for you, or has he had accidents, been fired from work, drinking related health problems, missing work, drunk in the morning etc?

I'm sorry he chose to do this to you. The pain must be indescribable. I hope things work out the way you want them

The night you found out - he treated you like crap .HE kicked YOU out of your own house. That is ridiculous. No wonder why you were emotional. you should be.

Adultery is a horrible thing to suffer through. When your H cheats on you, it destroys your self esteem. it makes you feel like you were such a horrible wife, mother, woman, that you could not even keep your man from cheating.

In my case, I have suffered through several losses in a short amount of time. First, my darling mother died after a long illness. the next year, my WH left me for the OW. And the very next year my only sisiter died in her sleep, at age 43. Of those 3 things - the adultery was the worst.

It makes you feel like hiding. You can't eat, you can't sleep. I couldn't go to the grocery store because there were happy couples there - real families with good wives who kept their H's happy so they would not cheat.
My sister in law went to the store for me and bought Mac and cheese so I would have something in the house that the kids could fix for themsleves.

Does this sound familiar?

For me, I finally realized that I needed help. My sister was still alive at that time, so I called her, and through my sobbing, asked her to help me go to the Dr. she took me in that same day and I started on anti depressants. For me, that helped. It took about a week, but I was fianlly able to get my crying under control. I did not appear "happy" but at least I was no longer laying on the couch crying in front of my kids. My kids were suffering enough! Their dad had left them and was out with a two-bit Ho! My boys needed me to pull myself together, so I did.

and in time, I was able to think more clearly again.And I started to realize that I wanted him back because I did not want to be alone. But having a sick man around the house, with his addictions (my ex has a porn addiction) was not healthy for me, or my boys. In time I realized that there are things in this life that are worse than being alone. Being with him was worse than being alone. it took awhile, but I realized that being alone was not that horrible after all. I began to realize that I was not really "alone". I had my children. My friends. My family. I began to spend time with other people - friends I had not seen in a while, other single women from church, that sort of thing.

Your M can recover. Your H can stop drinking, and your M can recover. But he will have to stop drinking on his own. you can not do that for him. The reason you can not plan A him, is because frankly he does not even know what is happening most of the time. His vision is clouded by the beer. If you spent the next 2 weeks doing a solid plan A every single day, without a single mistake, he will still get drunk on day 15 and blame you for it. He will say something like "one time, my W did ___ to me, and I did not deserve it! And another time, I asked her for a simple favor. I asked her to do ___ and she wouldn't even do it! That is just proof that she doesn't love me!!"
and all of his drinking buddies will agree with him, that he is right, you are wrong, and no one can blame him for drinking.

He is a sick man. And he is hanging out with other sick people, to make him feel better about himself.

By the way - you have to laugh with me about one thing: He is living with the OW and her mother!?! Are you kidding me!?!

Sister - THAT will not last!! Your biggest worry is not about whether or not he will try to come home. He will defiantely try. Your biggest problem will be telling him that he AIN'T coming home as the self absorbed drunk he is right now.

Have you found an all anon meeting yet?

Your best hope is REMOVING yourself from the situation. You cannot change an alcoholic. Only 10% of alcoholics die sober, so you are dealing with low odds.

When I say high functioning, I mean never obviously drunk. Just generally nicer with beer than without and after 4pm has a beer in his hand. Only the past few months have any signs of drunkeness begun to surface like slurred speach, stumbling, etc.

My sister and grandma came to keep me company for a couple of days and let me get out of the house without kids and accomplish some things. No alanon yet but what I did do was:
Get tested for STD's and doc gave me some anti-depressants
Sign up for a family fitness club membership (and went this morning)
Got myself off of WH's bank account and opened a new one.
Went Tanning
School shopping
Grocery Shopping (we have been eating top ramen and taco bell for weeks).

I'm starting to feel a little better.

WH has been texting me and coming over quite a bit to see the kids. He's spent more quality time with them since all this happened than he did the 6 months prior to it. I've been playing nice. I think he thinks that this divorce deal is going to be pretty sweet. In the mean time, I'm trying to get myself organized for plan b. The worst part of that is thinking that I won't have any control over whether or not he takes the kids home to his hooker. Which by the way he still adamantly denies sleeping with her more than once and they are still "just friends".

sure does My grandmother, bless her heart, rented P.S. I love you last night. Good choice grandma.

I'm starting to realize that I'm feeling ripped off more than anything. Like my whole life to this date has been a huge waste of time. But...I can think of a lot of reasons why not having him here is a very good thing for the kids and I. I even let myself daydream a little bit about what it would be like to have a man around the house who really loved us and knew how to show it.


This is true too. He has a lot of really awesome friends and has pretty much dissed every last one of them over the course of the last 2 years in favor of these new no moral standard buddies.

Lol, I know. It's pretty lame. I keep wanting to ask him "So... are you happy now?" "Feeling good about yourself?". He had to sell one of his guitars yesterday. He only got $600 for it and we bought it in March for $2200. I'm a little irritated about that because I feel like it was at least half mine, but you know what, the guitars are a major source of grief for me so good riddens. Maybe he'll be so broke he'll have to sell the other 2. I've always felt jealous of them because its obvious he loves them more than me. They are still apartment hunting. I'm praying for road blocks. I know he hasn't been paying his bills because I haven't done it for him so he's going to have a whole bunch of brand new 30/60 day lates on his CR.

Hope you will get help from Alanon. That will be your very best support.

Also, what have you done to secure the family finances? You need to seek legal aid or an attorney to be sure that hubby pays child support.