EP 284: Reader Question - How can I support a spouse who's trying to live alcohol free?
This Naked Mind Podcast
Annie Grace
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment, |
| 0:16.0 | pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture. |
| 0:20.2 | This is Annie Grace. I hope everyone is doing great. I have a question this morning that I wanted to |
| 0:32.6 | answer. I wanted to even answer it in a bit of a broader way than just to this specific question, |
| 0:37.4 | but I'm going to read the question. It says, good morning. I'm on the reach out today and |
| 0:41.5 | that's where soon advice on supporting a spouse who's trying to look at alcohol for you. Both my husband |
| 0:46.4 | and I read and loved your book. He said a goal I'm being sober for one year. Well, I thought that's |
| 0:51.1 | ambitious. I want to support him in whatever he wants to do. One of the many things I asked him was |
| 0:56.0 | what he planned to do. If he did it, at any point, have any drinks. He didn't really have a game |
| 0:59.5 | plan and that made me a bit nervous due to his history of being quite hard on himself. So it's been |
| 1:04.7 | close to two months of no alcohol and I came home yesterday and he'd been drinking and he admitted |
| 1:10.0 | it immediately and felt less than and instead of seeing it as a learning experience, he only saw |
| 1:14.2 | himself as weak. I'm wondering what to do to support him right now. Do I give him tough love? Do I |
| 1:18.3 | remind him that nobody's a failure? Do I encourage him to talk about it or just let it be? I thought |
| 1:23.2 | your book was so amazing and I wonder if you had any advice. So here's the truth. Okay, and I'm going |
| 1:28.4 | to go on a bit of a rant, but here's the truth. We don't look, I cannot think of anything and put it |
| 1:34.4 | in the comments if you can think of anything that we look at as 100%. If we decide we're going to be |
| 1:39.4 | a runner and then we don't run for 365 days of the next year, we don't consider ourselves a failure. |
| 1:45.6 | If we decide that we are going to try to eat less sugar and then we consume some sugar because |
| 1:51.9 | it happened to be a little bit in that ketchup we ate, we don't look at it the same way. But with |
| 1:57.2 | alcohol, we have developed this idea that it's like black and white, that it's all or nothing. Okay, |
| 2:02.6 | and I've been doing a lot of research on this because I think it's really important to go back to |
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