Well, this is the first official blog post for UnchainedRecovery.com. I’m incredibly nervous and uncertain of where this will lead and unsure if anyone will find it helpful.  However, my hope is that this site will help someone find their way out of what seems to be a hopeless situation.  As a survivor of addiction, I have come to learn that there are hundreds of millions of people in the United States living the life I was living and wondering why they feel so crazy and alone in the midst of extreme chaos.  Confusion abounds and no answers are forthcoming, right?  Well, it is my personal opinion that our society as a whole simply does not understand exactly how active addiction affects those of us who love an addict or alcoholic.  As a result, our society reacts to our illness (the family disease of addiction/alcoholism) in a manner that only perpetuates our inability to cope appropriately with our circumstance.  For example, the addict in my life was my husband.  There were many people, on many occasions that advised me to simply remove myself from the situation.  That is, leave him and seek a divorce.  In fact, many of these folks, including my own family couldn’t understand why I didn’t simply remove the problem from my daily life.  In return, I also couldn’t understand why I didn’t just leave him and file for divorce.  I mean, I certainly had grounds as he wasn’t supporting our family in any sense of the word.  He was missing in action for days at a time and causing turmoil in our lives.  He was jeopardizing my ability to work and pay the bills.  Yet, even though this was the reality of my life, I was unable to leave the man I loved.  I believed that my love for him would be enough to fix the growing problem.  If you are living the life I’m describing, you know what I’m talking about.  Somewhere inside I knew that I needed to make some drastic changes and yet I couldn’t let go of the belief that I could make this marriage work.  And since how I felt inside did not match up with the logical and rational advice I was receiving, I began to believe that I was crazy.  I believed that no one could understand my life and what I was living through.  So what did I do?  I isolated myself from the world where no one could judge my choices.  I lied and covered up the truths of my life because “no one could possibly understand” what I was experiencing.  Because I got tired of always hearing what I “should” do from people who had absolutely no idea what my life really entailed let alone how I felt about it!