He learned the hard way... like I did.

Last night the addict in my husband was on top of his game- the blame game to be exact.

I couldn't do anything the right way, and because of it I was walking on egg shells around him- which really started to piss me off, haha! So I took a deep breath, did a little self care by playing with my little, and simply started doing my own thing, while he sulked and looked at ski gear.

So I started decorating my parent's house for christmas with my sister, and it was awesome! A few hours later, it was time to go pick up his car. So we hopped in my car and it was back to the blame game, and it got pretty tense. But all along, I had it in the back of my mind that this is what they call addict mode. "None of this is necessarily my fault," I thought, "Because I am being blamed for everything that could go wrong in his life, my husband is definitely using blame as a deflection tool."

During a lull in the conversation I said this "J, I feel a lot of blame coming my way, and I can't help but feel like it's covering a bigger issue here. Can we please cut through all of this and just talk about the bigger issue?" And after a little bit of a surprised silence, he came right out and told me that he had acted out earlier that day while I was in church.

Silence.

 What is a good thing to say at that point? Up until then, I was able to let all the blame roll off my back, but then it all comes rushing back when it comes to acting out. Maybe if I hadn't stressed him out this way or that it wouldn't have come to this.... but that was briefly lived. I have been doing this long enough for me to know that it is not my job to make his life less stressful so he won't act out.

It is my job to do my work, and it is his job to do his. Fortunately he called a group member and came to the same conclusion. 

It wasn't until this morning that I was able to look at this situation with new eyes- I had my incredible "AHAH" moment last week, when I caught myself going back into co-dependent mode, and realized that my recovery has to be an every day thing... and J had the same realization last night. I am not grateful for the kind of wake up call it is, but I am grateful that we are at least on the same page recovery wise again (hopefully), and I am grateful that we both took away from our individual recovery pitfalls the same lesson.

There is a bigger plan out there for each of us people, and a master planner, and he knows what he is doing.