A brief personal reflection (YouTube video) by Nick Stumbo about his early recovery. The speaker admits that his initial motivation to change was to make his wife happy after repeated relapses, and that this external motivation led to losing focus on his recovery once the immediate conflict subsided.
It was humbling for me early in our journey to realize that my motivation for change was to make my wife happy, you know, because we'd gone through 10 years of me confessing a relapse and her getting upset. And I would stay really focused on change for as long as she was upset. And then once, kind of, we'd get through that, maybe a few weeks or a month, and things seem better. It wouldn't take long before I'd forget my boundaries. I'd kind of lose sight of what I was practicing. And I had to acknowledge early in recovery, like, oh, that's because my primary goal had been making her happy, not actual change.
