Josette... you'd be surprised on just what an impact you are making...... you have most likely started a "domino effect". But that doesn't matter to you... and it shouldn't.
You sound like a very strong person. This pain you are feeling is growth and you know that it is yourself that you can only control.
I too didn't enable my guy financially or materially - but what I did do was DISable myself. Which actually hurt me the most. It was me, getting into my own codie recovery - and having the support to detach - that helped the most.
Addiction is progressive and it only gets worse - it doesn't get better on it's own. By you "erasing" yourself out of his life is actually helping him. I felt so selfish being involved with my abf while he was actively using - it pained me to know that I was actually contributing to him killing himself. I too used to think that my leaving wouldn't make a difference - (I had already lost so many times to pills) - so why would I make a difference now? Well - it wasn't until it came to me - that I had to leave because of ME..... not him!
I too write and talk things out to process.
It takes 3 weeks to form a habit. You are nearly a 1/3 of the way there! Your son is right when he says that you abf is going to think you will "get over it". That is how drug addicts think. Something explosive or dramatic happens one day and the next it's as if nothing happened.... and then they wonder why we would hold onto it! It can spin us right round - like a record baby!
I love my guy, but I despise active addiction MORE. When I made the decision to move out of the darkness, I begun to see things more clearly. You are further along than you give yourself credit for. You are not so spiraled in... you will spiral out of this. If you set your mind to it.
Check out this article:
Addiction, Lies and Relationships
"The addict’s Dilemna, then, comes down in the end to this: what he feels like doing is seldom good for him, while what he doesn’t feel like doing, e.g. stopping his addiction, getting treatment, engaging in healthy behaviors &etc. often is. In most cases of well-established addiction the emphasis has long since switched from the so-called "positive reinforcement" paradigm in which the addictive behavior is primarily motivated by a search for pleasure or good feelings, to a "negative reinforcement" model in which the goal is mainly to avoid the bad feelings that the addict knows are in store if he fails to perform his accustomed hedonic manipulations by means of his substance or process of choice.
Such considerations help to explain the fact, well-known to professionals who deal with individuals suffering from serious addictions, that lasting recovery, when it begins, quite often begins in the context of a crisis of sufficient magnitude to overwhelm the addict’s natural and well-entrenched aversion to recovery
by an even greater fear such as the loss of an important relationship, a job, health or freedom(the threat of jail for addiction-related offenses).
It is therefore not at all the case that alcoholics and addicts "have to want to get better" before recovery can commence, much less that they must "want to get better for themselves and not for someone else." For the addict’s double-mindedness makes such "pure" motivation all but impossible for the vast majority of addicts. Luckily for the addict, recovery is just as likely, perhaps even more likely if he is in effect marched at bayonet point in the direction of behaviors that are good for him and which he would therefore, owing to his addictive hedonic disorientation, normally avoid like the plague if only he were not afraid that by so doing he would incur an even more unpleasant consequence. For it is one of the many curious paradoxes of addiction and recovery that genuine and sincere motivation for recovery is a result of and not a prerequisite for recovery."
The Addict's Dilemna