307 How to Find Hope and Healing When Alcohol Addiction Affects Your Family

Episode Summary:

When alcohol addiction enters a family, it can bring heartache, uncertainty, and difficult choices. Sonja Meyrer shares her deeply personal journey of navigating her husband’s battle with alcohol addiction and his tragic loss. Through grief and unanswered questions, she discovered God’s presence in the midst of pain.

Now, she helps others find healing, set healthy boundaries, and move forward with faith. If you're struggling with the effects of addiction in your family, this conversation offers encouragement and practical wisdom.

Quotables from the episode:

• The word redemption really resonates because I believe that as Christ followers, nothing is wasted.
• Jesus had to have his scars in his resurrected body to prove that he was who he said he was and that he had done what he said he would do. So his scars are beautiful, and so are ours.
• Frequently our greatest areas of ministry come out of our greatest pain and woundedness.
• About twenty years into our marriage, the disease of alcohol addiction showed up. It wasn’t something I was familiar with—it was not present in my family growing up.
• Anyone who has suffered the effects of addiction can tell you that there is a day when “something is different.” On that day when something changed, I realized I was really in over my head.
• Especially as a spouse, who was raising children, I had to ask how do I fit into this. We say “in sickness and in health,” and that is true, but how do I protect myself and my kids?
• I didn’t start my career thinking, “I’d love to be an addiction specialist!” I don’t think anyone starts off that way. But it is my greatest honor and joy to sit with other people as a coach to find their own God-given hope and peace regardless of the choices of other people.
• Now I get to share out of my own experience how I navigated that time.
• When we will change the verbiage from “I have to” to “I get to,” first, that puts more control back into our hands in otherwise powerless situations, and, it gives us a more hope-filled perspective.
• So often, the ministries that many of us have are not ministries we would have asked for or signed up for but that is the goodness of God to bring you to the place where you can say “it’s my honor and privilege to walk with others.”
• The difference between those who stay angry and disgruntled versus those who say, “okay God, what do you have for me?” is operating from a place of surrender. Along the way, I had to learn to let go.
• I learned to say, “Even if, God, this all falls apart, you are still good, and I will still find my way forward.” I no longer hold onto what I think the future should look like. Instead, I say, “wherever you lead me is a good place to go.”
• In the letting go, it gives God the freedom to work his will, his way, and his timing.
• Unfortunately, my spouse fell into a deep depression and after a few years made the regretful decision to end his life. As a Christian spouse, I had to navigate the questions, “God why didn’t you heal him?” and at the same time, wondering, did I do everything well? Did I do it all right?
• The process of trying to learn how to honor the dignity of his suffering and yet still finding joy and happiness in my own life, was a process that takes some time. But I do believe that God can give us true joy from knowing He’s on our side if we’re willing to let go of our expectations of what we think life is supposed to be like.
• Some of us fall under faulty theology and think that if we’re doing the right things, we won’t experience suffering but that isn’t at all what Jesus told us. He said “in this world, you will experience trouble/suffering/pain, BUT take heart, I have overcome the world.” He also said, “If you’re going to follow me, you are going to suffer.”
• When I can get to the place that I can say, “This is for you to handle, God” it goes so much better.
• We say in the recovery community that “expectation is the root of all suffering.”
• Where we can live a life where are hands are truly open and we can say to God, “This is what I want…however, make me an instrument” and not be disgruntled and not get discouraged, it goes so much better.
• I’m grateful for Jesus’s example. In the garden before His death, Jesus cried out to God, “I don’t want to do this…if there is any other way please show me” but then he came back to the point of submission and surrender where he said “but I want your will more than I want min