This way, I didn’t have to see it every day AND my spouse could still have a drink when he wanted. I took all the beer out of our main refrigerator and put it in the mini fridge. After a few weeks of being triggered every time I wanted to grab a snack or a juice box for one of the kids, I drove myself to Costco and bought a mini fridge for our garage. I almost always started my nightly drinking in the kitchen, so when I got sober, I hated opening my fridge and seeing beer there. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t remove the alcohol from spaces that I found triggering. Wait, didn’t I just say we still had alcohol in my house? Yes, I did.
Well, what do you do when those “people, places and things” aren’t something you can just leave behind? How can you cope when your partner continues to make alcohol a part of their life? Here are a few ways that I’ve made it work: Almost every traditional recovery path will tell you it’s nearly impossible to stay sober unless you remove yourself from the “people, places and things” that led you to drink. I get asked all the time how I stay sober with alcohol in my home. However, there is one thing that has not changed-he still drinks alcohol. It took a lot of work on both of our parts to get to this point.
He is one of my biggest cheerleaders and brags to his friends and colleagues about the work I do in the world. He is incredibly proud of me and the work I’ve done to become the very best version of myself. In the past five and a half years, my partner’s stance on my sobriety has completely changed. What I didn’t find was straightforward support for women whose partners had zero interest in sobriety and continued to drink. I had been experimenting with short stretches of sobriety for a few months and had started participating in online sober communities, where I’d see so many posts and comments about how elated people’s partners/families/kids were when they quit drinking. In fact, he was defensive, telling me that I shouldn’t expect him to quit just because I did. I remember being crushed that he wasn’t immediately supportive and proud of me. He told me that I was overreacting and being dramatic. When I came to him and said, “I’m quitting drinking for a while,” he was shocked. night sweats or how I’d run out to buy a bottle of wine before he got home so he wouldn’t know that I’d already finished the one in the kitchen. Of course, he saw the fun times-the nights out at parties and the cool evenings with a beer around a fire pit. Honestly, my drinking had been problematic for a while, but I had done a great job of hiding it from my family. Until that point, most of my decisions were made with his input, but this time, I knew what I needed to do regardless of how he felt. When I decided to eliminate alcohol from my life, it had a bigger impact on him than I could have ever imagined. By the time we settled into married life, most of our social engagements revolved around dinner parties with endless wine or nights out at a local bar. We began dating in college, where binge drinking was a weekly occurrence. We met when we were still teenagers, and we both grew up in environments where drinking was the norm. My partner and I had been together for 11 years and had been married for eight. Until then, much of our relationship revolved around alcohol. At the time, it felt like anxiety, but looking back, I know I was worried about judgement. When I first quit drinking alcohol, I remember being terrified to tell my partner.
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