Paula Ganzi Licata is an award-winning journalist and essayist. When she began writing about surviving an addict, many family and friends who didn’t realize her husband was a “high-functioning” alcoholic reached out to her.
One of their most common questions was, “Why did you stay?”
In her article in Next Avenue, she talks about still loving her husband, focusing on those parts of their 23 years together that weren’t marred by alcoholism. She was reluctant to “turn her back on a lifetime, a life partner.”
“I was determined to find the joy in each day despite my husband’s alcoholism. I refused to let his drinking define me. I’d eked out a life for myself—around his drinking. It was as if Robert’s alcoholism was an aggressive tumor and my life the adjacent healthy tissue, moving and reshaping to accommodate the tumor’s growth.”
Nevertheless, divorce was on her mind.
To find an Al-Anon group in your part of Ontario, go to thehealthline.ca and look under Health Topics / Addictions / Addiction Support Groups or simply type "Al Anon" in the search box.
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