Hi Caroline
I will try and answer your question but I hope you will pop back into the group next Tuesday because another member will probably be there and can tell you the reaction she has had from her CG when she began looking after herself.
The person we love, our CG as we call them, gets used to us behaving in a certain way – you will have cried, pleaded, threatened, demanded, raged and your partner’s addiction will have thrived while you wept. What you will probably not have done is laughed, seen friends, relaxed, put yourself first, said ‘no’ and felt strong enough to carry it through. You have probably become the enabling part of the cycle of the addiction and if nothing you have done so far has stopped that cycle, it seems to make sense to try something different.
As you are the closest person to your CG you will almost certainly be the person he can blame most for his poor behaviour, the person responsible for all his misery and things that are going wrong all around him, the reason the children didn’t behave well or why he mislaid his wallet. He will not want to lose the ability to blame you because he will not want to accept that he is responsibility for the problems surrounding him.
It is important not to put on an act of being in control to get him to react – his addiction will get round that but if you have been doing things that give you pleasure, the things you have denied yourself because of his addiction, you will begin to glow again and it is that which changes your behaviour and makes you stronger and less fearful. Enjoy doing things with the children but don’t expect him to join in because when you do that it opens the door for poor behaviour when he doesn’t want to play which in turn gives him an excuse to gamble because your expectations (in his mind) were unreasonable. I believe it is best not to soothe a CG when he loses but on the other hand it is a waste of breath yelling too – your peace of mind is all important and conserving your energy for yourself is better than blowing it over an addiction that makes no sense.
The other thing that happens when the addiction is in control of your life is that you show the hurt in your expressions, your voice, your appearance – doing things for ourselves means you make an effort to look better and eat better in order to feel better – you give yourself a make-over, a personality/health boost.
I told you on Tuesday that I was a blob; well blobs don’t have personality because they don’t have joy in their hearts. It is really difficult at first to change and I cannot tell you what to do. For the record, I hasten to add, I don’t think you are a blob – I just think you probably don’t feel like ‘you’ anymore. Most F&F find their social lives diminishing as the addiction grows; friends stop enjoying them as much because social events are spoilt with the worry of the addiction; there are too many tears causing too many wrinkles, there isn’t a lot of fun anymore and children looking on feeling left out and insecure.
This is why, I believe it is so important to not only confuse the addiction but strengthen yourself. The cycle has to be broken if decent lives are to be lived. The beauty about learning to love yourself is that you will find you will laugh and dance and sing again – the tears will flow less often and ultimately dry up completely.
I don’t believe in looking after oneself as a means to make a CG change; I don’t believe in looking after oneself as a means of punishing CG. I don’t believe in saying ‘no you can’t join in’ – I just don’t think that forcing things on a CG works.
I believe that the non-CGs can make a difference to their own life and hopefully, maybe, it will show the CG that there is another way, a better way and the person they love is finding it. I believe that when you are strong there is more hope for the CG you love to change because you are not part of the wreckage of the addiction but a rock on which he can, if he determines to stop gambling, lean on.
I hope some of this helps – there are so many different words and it is not always possible the right ones are used. If there is anything you don’t understand come back at me. I will always do my best to answer.
We are all individuals with a common goal but there will always be different outcomes and some may not be the one we hoped for. However, in my opinion, being in control of your own life must be the best outcome for all who come on this site.
I know I have said it before but:- – I would not be writing you to you if I didn’t know that the addiction to gamble can be controlled and fantastic lives lived as a result. To turn this terrible experience into something good is possible – but there is no denying it does take a lot of work.
Speak soon
V
