After 2 years of sobriety my boyfriend and I relapsed together. It didn't take long before our active addiction split us up. After the breakup we went our separate ways and my alcoholism took on an entity of its own in a way I had never experienced.
Having lost the love of my life and a place to live I moved in with family members and tried to focus on school during the day and drinking myself into oblivion every night. Eventually drinking became more of a priority than school and I left college one semester away from completing my program. The next year was spent drinking and living off unemployment. Initially I would make myself not take my first drink until 5 p.m., telling myself it wasn't a problem if I just had a few drinks at night like "normal" people. Every week that time seemed to move up by an hour or so and soon I was drinking by noon every day.
I finally got a part-time job that almost immediately became full time and I took a lot of pride in my work. I used the responsibility of my job to try and cut down on my drinking. This worked for about 3 months and soon I was drinking every night again. Almost exactly 1 and 1/2 years after our break-up my boyfriend contacted me and we were immediately back together. He (to my dismay) had also began to use meth again but in my drunken stupor and my love for him I figured we could make it work as long as we made a commitment to get sober. He proposed to me last Christmas and we moved into a house together.
This was the beggining of the most hellish experience of my life. I began to drink 24/7, even drinking at work to deal with the trauma of living with my fiance, who was in the depths of his addiction. Our active addictions tore our worlds apart. Lying, secrecy, the craziness of our reality, the violent fighting, paranoia, all of it was killing us both. On May 11, 2011, the police were called to our home on a domestic assault. He was arrested and I was taken to detox and put on a 72-hour hold. I am 120 lbs. and my BAC was .375. This was a normal night for me but as I later learned I was drinking amounts of alcohol that could have and probably should have killed me. That was the last night I drank.
My fiance also checked himself into treatment and I stayed home, maintaining abstinence from alcohol and trying to put our home back together. However, I was doing nothing to work on my recovering (meetings, sponsor, etc.) When my fiance returned home after a month and then attended 2 months of intensive outpatient and 12 weeks of aftercare he became a completely different person. It was as if the man I had loved many years ago had returned. I, however, had not even begun to deal with my feelings about the entire situation. At about 4-1/2 months of sobriety, I had a complete nervous breakdown, quit my job and enrolled in an outpatient treatment program that also addresses my co-occurring illnesses.
I now attend 4 meetings per week, meditation, group therapy and individual therapy. My fiance and I also attend family therapy. It has been the most traumatic, hardest experience of my life and I still work daily to control my anxiety, work on my co-dependency and self-esteem building. When I initially got sober I made a deal with my HP that I would give it 6 months before taking Step 3. That I would give up my will for 6 months, take it a day at a time and trust my HP and if everything worked out that when I reached my 6 months I would fully commit to Step 3. Well, 6 months came on 11/12/11 and I had no choice but to fufil my commitment.
The blessings and miracles that have occurred since I got sober have been pouring down all around us. Sometimes I wonder if I am going to wake up and have imagined all of this. But it is real. I can't explain what my HP is, but I can say that I know, with every cell in my body that there is something that is taking care of us. There are still struggles, I still deal with the trauma of the past, daily anxiety and my need to control everything. But each day I wake up with a commitment to do 3 things. 1. Take it one hour at a time, 2. Ask for and trust the advice of my support system in almost every decision I make, 3. Let go. As long as I do the right thing with the right intentions I know I have done my part and I can't control the results or the outcome. I can only accept them.