Understanding Ourselves

While our alcoholic partners were still drinking, and before we knew anything about alcoholism, we were acutely sensitive to the hurt they caused us. In the privacy of our own thoughts—sometimes not too privately—we had a number of ways of describing the men and women who alternately seemed so dear and so strange to us.

We oftentimes said they were selfish, arrogant, irresponsible and lacking in appreciation of us. We reproached them for the time they spent away from home. We accused them of failing in their duties and privileges as partners, fathers, mothers, or children. We railed at them for their failure to handle money wisely and their unconcern for the future. Humanly speaking, there was usually plenty of justification for these attitudes. Our blame of them was natural for we did not know that our partners were very sick people.

Often enough, we wrapped a mantle of complete self‑righteousness about our own thoughts and actions. Occasionally, in desperation and bitterness, we tried to retaliate in various ways. Sometimes we even got drunk ourselves.

But after our partners joined Alcoholics Anonymous and we ourselves attended open meetings, we began to benefit greatly. We noted, first of all, that the AA program usually resulted in a profound change in the thinking and everyday behavior of sober alcoholics. This change, affecting the entire personality of the alcoholic, seemed to come about as a result of an honest and searching personal inventory of his own faults.

Another thing we especially noticed was that when we non-alcoholics began to talk with one another and exchange ideas, we frequently were able to apply another’s experience to our own particular problems.

As non‑alcoholic partners, we discovered we had as much to gain through AA’s “Suggested Twelve Steps of Recovery” as the alcoholics did. We found that alcoholism had made us sick, too.