It’s Not Her Fault | Sober and Unashamed

The most temporarily effective thing my wife and I tried to help us get along during my alcoholism was simple: Be nice. I describe this plan as temporarily effective because while it created moments of peace in our house more successfully than anything else we tried for the ten years of my active addiction, it ultimately didn’t work. So it was the most effective ineffective path we went down to fix our marriage.

Here are the details. Before we said to each other, we were to run it through this filter: Is it nice? Yep, we banked our marriage on the childhood mantra, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Have you spotted the issue? If you have to think before you speak to your trusted ally and life partner, there’s a problem. Period. Temporarily successful relationship management that involves a communication filter is doomed because it is exhausting. If you are filtering what you say to your spouse, you are ignoring the problem. In our case, the problem was alcohol. If you are reading this, there’s a good chance your communication is jammed up by alcohol, too.

I’ve written extensively about the rules I put around my drinking to try to control that, which for me, was uncontrollable. At various times during my addiction, I only drank on the weekends or only drank beer or only drank a certain number of…