Originally Posted by
Zak68 
I know I might get some resentment from my kids. If this is the end I do plan on filing for full custody. IL law states one of the reasons is 2+ years of continued substance abuse. I told her once before if it came to it I would file for full custody. Her reply, "She would see me in hell before I took her babies." I told her the courts would find it hard to rule in her favor with her addiction. She retorted the only reason I hadn't left was she was the big bread winner in the family and I would be living in a trailer without her.
Just another reason I need to break free. Lack of respect. I pull my weight. She makes about $20k more than me. I do dishes. I clean house. I do the laundry. I mow. I do house repairs. I cook... not a deadbeat dad by any means.
Honey, she's quacking. Quack quack quack. Another thing they ALL do.
Sigh. She'll say anything to tear you down, because in tearing you down she thinks she builds herself up. It helps me to look at the alcoholic and see them as sick, and they are. Would you argue with an insane person? Would you take what they say about you seriously? I
know it's easy to say, and that what our loved ones say to us cuts deep deep, but you have got to let it go, for your own sanity.
If I believed what my AH says about me, well - let's just say it's amazing I've managed to survive as long as I have seeing how messed up he says I am.
Some reading for you.
Addiction protects and augments itself by means of a bodyguard of lies, distortions and evasions that taken together amount to a full scale assault upon consensual reality. Because addiction involves irrational and unhealthy thinking and behavior, its presence results in cognitive dissonance both within the addict himself and in the intersubjective realm of ongoing personal relationships.
In order for the addiction to continue it requires an increasingly idiosyncratic private reality subject to the needs of the addictive process and indifferent or even actively hostile to the healthy needs of the addict and those around him. This encroachment of the fundamentally autistic, even insane private reality of the addict upon the reality of his family and close associates inevitably causes friction and churn as natural corrective feedback mechanisms come into usually futile play in an effort to restore the addict's increasingly deviant reality towards normal. Questions, discussions, presentations of facts, confrontations, pleas, threats, ultimatums and arguments are characteristic of this process, which in more fortunate and less severe cases of addiction may sometimes actually succeed in its aim of arresting the addiction. But in the more serious or advanced cases all such human counter-attacks upon the addiction, even, indeed especially when they come from those closest and dearest to the addict, fall upon deaf ears and a hardened heart. The addict's obsession-driven, monomaniacal private reality prevents him from being able to hear and assimilate anything that would if acknowledged pose a threat to the continuance of his addiction.
At this stage of addiction the addict is in fact functionally insane.