Originally Posted by EnglishGarden

I understand, too.

I once read that children are much more traumatized when they are hurt by someone they know and trust and whose role in the child's life is to love and protect the child, than when the child is injured by a person he knows is "bad" and expects to be "mean" or "dangerous." I have forgotten the name of the psychologist who wrote of this, but she particularly studied Jewish children who survived World War Two and the manner in which they recovered from their trauma. The children understood that the men in the uniforms were bad people. The bad people were easily identified. And this understanding enabled the children to better recover from their traumatic experience.

I think we here experience a level of suffering that few others can understand because we are psychologically assaulted not by identifiably bad people, but by our spouses or our lovers or our grown children who are addicts, and for the longest time we just cannot process this.

They still look so normal. Some addicts reach a point of a degraded life in a literal gutter. But most do not. They dress fine, they get promotions, they take classes, they go to soccer games and dance recitals, they make a lot of money sometimes, they are often extremely well-spoken and intelligent. They are our husbands, or our wives, or our grown children. They are supposed to love us. We transferred to them all the trust of a child's heart when we married them or birthed them.

So it is a pain beyond describing, when a spouse's or a grown child's personality and heart are removed and are replaced by an entirely new personality and an entirely new heart, and that new person, looking just like the old one, behaves toward us--often without remorse--in the most personally cruel or degrading manner. He or she seems to resent us to the core, and we cannot believe it. We are, for a long time, just unable to process what has happened when an addict turns on us, especially if we knew that person in a time of health.

It just flattens us. We are exhausted from trying to navigate an uncharted and unchartable sea. We cannot control what happens next. We try. But the power of addiction is beyond our ability to manage or to overcome. And it hurts us so much when we have to let go. We have to look up to the heavens and just let go.

I completely understand your exhaustion. It has been a terrible storm at sea for you.

What I do know is that with help (and it will come from unexpected places and through many synchronicities), you will make land. Life does not abandon us. And our greatest trials often reveal our own unknown strength of character.

So stay connected to recovering people who have made land. You are going to be all right. Learn from others, help anyone you can, and let the wheel of life turn.