All Is Well That Ends Well or NOT

I have been brainstorming about how to close out this blog and thankfully when I looked at my blog I had several insightful comments to address and an issue that I had not addressed surfaced. I had a widower in group that had treated his wife horribly and openly admitted to this in several group sessions. Once he stopped avoiding his guilt with the use of alcohol and cocaine he was open to the idea of concentrating on being a good grandfather, father, and productive member of society. Since his graduation over a year ago he has become a sponsor in AA and a jailhouse minister. He also reports an improved relationship with his daughter and grandchildren. He was recently a guest speaker in group and I feel he really helped my current widowers. I always tell clients that our secrets keep us sick which means that a problem cannot be addressed nor solved if the client does not identify the problem. The problem in substance abuse treatment is that the problem also cannot be addressed until the client is operating with a drug and alcohol free brain. Sara inquired about women who treat their husbands poorly before losing their husband. Oddly, I only have one widow in my group but she does however have much guilt. Her husband died of an overdose when the two of them were getting high together. She has never taken anything less than 100 percent responsibility but the fact of the matter is that his death is not wholly her fault. She has realized this more in treatment as she has discovered that only she can control or not control her drug use. The comments given have been great and I hope that I have addressed them clearly.
The reason I titled this last blog 'All Is Well That Ends Well or Not' is because I was reading over the ethical will information and I thought about how hard it would be for someone to write about what they have learned from life when what they have learned was learned through such painful circumstances. If my widowers were to write an ethical will, and I hope that they would, they would have to address what they learned from being a poor spouse and what they have learned from using drugs and alcohol to cope. Therapeutically I must say that I think it would be a healing experience for them and although they had to endure such tragedy to learn, at least they did learn and now they can pass what they learned onto the next generation. So much can be learned from a life well lived and perhaps even more can be learned from a life of trouble and tragedy.

Update on My Group Widows

My blog readers may not remember why I chose widowhood as my topic, as it seems like we have been blogging for months now; oh yeah, we have been! I chose this topic because I had, and still have, several widowed persons in my substance abuse treatment group. My widowed clients are actually doing very well. In fact, one of them visited his wife's grave for the first time just two weeks ago. This client is in middle adulthood so I will concentrate on my two clients that are in late adulthood. We learned from our Hutchison text that alcohol is the most commonly abused mind-altering chemical in late adulthood and that alcohol abuse is more common amongst late adulthood males than females. Both of my late adulthood widowed clients are males with alcohol use histories that entered the alcohol abuse stage after they became widowers. These two clients also have another thing in common and that is they both have strong feelings of guilt and shame about how they treated their wives before losing them. It appears that they turned to alcohol to dampen their grief and guilt. The question posed in this blog is how do you think guilt affects widowhood? I have talked about how whidowhood is affected when you lose a spouse that treated you poorly but what about when you were the lousy spouse that lost a great spouse. In my opinion, which is biased as I am very familiar with my clients, I think that you would not only be dealing with the grief of losing your spouse but you would have the added emotional drag of dealing with guilt and shame. Also, these alcohol abusers often alienate themselves from their family and so they have also lost family support that they need so much when dealing with widowhood. They are also more likely to face legal problems which just adds to the stress in their widowhood.