Part 1: Denial
de·ni·al
(noun): “the action of declaring something to be untrue.”
“Denial is the fertile breeding ground for the behaviors we call codependent: controlling, focusing on others, and neglecting ourselves.” – Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go
I met my husband in the spring of 2010 when we were juniors at Texas A&M University. We fell in love at the ripe ol’ age of 22, graduated college that following May, and off to Wyoming we went!
It was a magical time.
We started work together that summer at an oil field about an hour away and spent pretty much every waking minute together from the time we got up until the time we went to bed. I loved it. We were young, oil price was great, we had just bought a house, a brand-new truck, and a dog; we were truly living the American Dream. We rocked on like that as newlyweds for the next year or so and wondered how things could be better.
Sometime in 2012, though, things started to change. Subtly at first, but things were definitely shifting in our marriage and in our home. We didn’t know it yet, but The Family Disease of Alcoholism had slithered its way in and had no intentions of leaving for the next 6 years.
But let’s rewind the clock to the spring of 2013, when we were down in Denver for a work conference. We had gone to a Rockies game with some of our coworkers and decided to go to a bar since the game had been rained out. Pretty normal stuff for a group of kids in their twenties.
Well, that night would later become the first night that clued me in to the fact that something wasn’t normal. Back at the hotel, in the early hours of the morning, my husband drunkenly confessed to me that he had been hiding his drinking from me for the last 6 months. He told me that he would wait until I went to sleep and drink anywhere from 6-12 beers every night. I didn’t believe him.
There was no way that could be true. We lived together. We worked together. He was my husband. I knew him better than anyone. We spent all day every day together and I’d never even seen him even buy beer, so how could this be true? It didn’t add up in my mind. Could I really not have noticed that he was hungover every morning on the way to work? Could I really have been that naïve for so long? Surely I would have seen it or noticed it, not been oblivious to it for months. I couldn’t accept what I was hearing as the truth, so I went to bed puzzled, still in disbelief, telling myself he was drunk and he didn’t know what he was saying.
But I soon came to believe that he was telling the truth. Fast-forward through the next 6 years and they pretty much look like this: I find empty beer cans hidden in a cabinet…in a backpack…in a coffee cup. I storm over to my husband and confront him about it. I scream, stomp, shout at him for lying to me again. Full of rage, anger and betrayal, I wonder out loud HOW HE COULD DO THIS TO ME AGAIN?! I stand there feeling victimized and enraged. He stands there silently, guilt and shame thick across his face promising me it won’t happen again.
He’s done drinking for real this time. So many times I heard those words. And so many times we both fully believed them. Every time, we both believed this would be the last time.
Sometimes I would pour out the beer, sometimes he would pour it out himself, but the end result stayed the same: both of us fully believed this would be the last time that he would drink and this would be the end of it. We could put it behind us and never have to talk about it again. It wasn’t the last time, of course, there were countless other times to come before it would be the last time, but we were so deep in our denial — and I was so fixated on his behavior instead of my own — that we couldn’t see this was indicative of an alcohol problem. We stayed on that merry-go-round for several more years, and watched as our marriage slowly eroded away.
The problem with alcoholism is it’s a progressive disease; it never stays the same. It only gets worse. And it drowns its victims slowly with each new drink. So for the next six years, we watched it take over and begin to drown both of us. But the problem is, two drowning people can’t save each other. All they can do is drag each other down, and that’s exactly what was happening. In lifeguarding they teach you to asses the situation fully before you jump in an attempt to save someone if you don’t think that you can both make it back out of the water. In the process of trying to save them, you might both drown. I tried for a very long time to “save” my husband from his drinking because of the pain it was causing me, but I never was able to, and all I did was begin to drown myself.
Depsite all of this, we stayed in denial for a few more years, oblivious to the fact that the disease of alcoholism was beginning to drown us. For years we splashed around up on the surface, with smiles on our faces, acting as if everything was fine; pretending we weren’t kicking our feet down below at the grip around our ankles, trying to drag us under.
By 2018, the family disease had taken a toll on me, though, and I was shopping online nearly every day to numb the emptiness and chaos I felt inside. I was trying so hard to keep up the image that we were a perfect little family. But I spent 90% of the day with headphones in my ears to block out my real life. My kids would try to talk to me and I would pretend that I didn’t hear them and stay lost in whatever I was listening to. I couldn’t deal with my own emotions so there was absolutely no way I going to be able to deal with theirs. I posted only the best photos online, smiling as if we were always this happy family on our fabulous mountain vacations.
But inside I was dying. I had migraines every single day. I couldn’t sleep well. I was always suspicious of my husband and I felt like a crazy person searching his backpack and sniffing coffee cups or his breath to see if he was lying.
I started signing us up for every marriage course, counseling session, and couples therapy out there that I could find. I dug deep into personality tests, the Enneagram…anything that I could look to as a result for our problems. I drug my husband to counseling with me and thought that would fix our problems.
One day in October of 2018 I met our counselor for coffee, alone. Off handedly, I mentioned something about his drinking. She waited until I was done venting, wrote down the word ‘Al-Anon’ on a piece of paper, slid it back across the table and sweetly suggested that I go. What was Al-Anon? I knew about A.A., but this I had never heard of. I remember thinking that I didn’t need it…HE was the one with the problem, not me! I was fine. I was the one holding it all together here, didn’t she just hear what I said?? Clearly, I wasn’t fine, and she could see that, but I couldn’t yet. Denial had it’s fingers wrapped so tightly around my distorted reality that even as I described our home life and the drinking patterns: the hiding in the backyard, the secrecy, the lies, the manipulation and lengths he went to keep it hidden, that didn’t strike me as a problem with alcohol. All this time, I thought the problem was with him, with me, with us, or all three.
Denial still kept its hold on me that entire holiday season until January of 2019 when I finally got desperate enough to walk into my first Al-Anon meeting. I was at the beginning of my end, and I thank God that He led me there, because the next year would become the most intense, emotionally draining year of my life and I would be asked to do and trust in a Plan I never imagined would become part of our narrative. But God knew what was to come and He slowly prepared me for what lie ahead. Step by step. One day at a time.
Go to Part 2