We're not trying to scare you. As you can probably guess, the kids strike a close, personal trigger for a lot of us. Many of us have been the child of an active addict, many have watched our own children suffer & fought hellfire to change it. Many of us feel that we contributed to our kid's damage & want to yell out, "Don't do what I did!!"
I know this is all VERY overwhelming. It's really hard for us to condense our (sometimes years of) recoveries into the right words, right sentences, right way to connect with the experience you're having. Just like we keep telling you that your husband can't hear you when you're trying to talk to him about all of this, you can't "hear" all of what we have to say right now either. And that's OK. We all get there in our own time, it's not a race.
The one constant is that we all DO have empathy for where you are right now & we all remember being blinded & paralyzed by ALL of it.... never mind feeling Judged, Ashamed, Ignorant. It is no lie that in the beginning, just thinking about all that I was reading about overwhelmed me so much that I just sobbed. I just shut. down. I was so physically exhausted, so mentally dull, so spiritually adrift. I was putting one foot in front of the other but it was getting harder & harder every day. And this is AFTER we both started recovery, not before.
When I arrived at SR I was a broken person. The glimmer of hope I had at AH getting sober & attending AA flashed & burned & moved quickly into confusion & feeling MORE out of control & less understanding of my life than ever before. Neither of us got the instant gratification we expected when he got sober. I struggled to understand why as much as he did, all the while having entirely different triggers, emotions, meltdowns, etc. We were facing the same problem but found that we couldn't treat it with the same solution.
When I started reading SR I wasn't a stranger to message boards & I could tell immediately that this wasn't a fool's playground. These people are here to hurt & heal & help. The wealth of information about the biology of addiction, the varying views & supporting info about the different approaches to the roots of & solutions for it, the honest shares of emotional destruction showing how it wreaks havoc on all sides & often spans generations in families is simply incredible & BRAVE of so many nameless, faceless people.
I read about newly recovering addicts in their own words & watched their struggles in early recovery & thought about how what I was seeing in them resonated with what I saw in RAH. NOT because I was trying to do anything for him but because it helped me to understand confusing behaviors or mood shifts or whatever. It helped ME to not take his recovery personally, lol.
I spent 8 months reading before even registering a username because I was THAT overwhelmed. EIGHT months because I had so many layers of my own damage that I couldn't even separate it enough to know what questions I wanted to ask. I found pieces in the responses I read every day between other members. I started to find understanding of things like detachment, boundaries, control, etc. I felt like a baby learning to walk despite having dealt with addiction my entire life & having what I considered a moderate understanding of it. Ha!
I understood it so long as I was hovering above it - seeing it from waaaaay back here. When I was living it? Dancing that dysfunction every day about schedules, miscommunications, finances, etc? I was just seeing every little thing separated from the whole picture & not grasping how it was all related.
You'll hear us talk about baby steps over & over & over again. It's also why it's so hard to describe to a newcomer how to get from there to here - it isn't a linear path where you follow checkpoints A-Z. You'll backtrack, get lost, have a point where you sit right down & refuse to move any further. Ok, maybe that's just me having the toddler-like meltdown.
So try something small but significant - talk way less, observe way more. Try not talking to him about anything of importance - not forever, just right now. Observe, listen, try to see it as though you're in the 3rd person so that you're truly observing & not judging. When you tune in like that & take away all of your own external noise, what will you see? How does the rest of your family react when you, well, DON'T react any longer? Does he try to engage you? Do you find a lot of uncomfortable internal noise? When you're REALLY honest with just yourself, what do you see?
I hope you stick around. I hope you've taken time to read all the sticky threads at the top of the forum & dig into some of those amazing historical shares. It will change everything when you start finding 1, 10, 50, 1000 things that resonate with your life. I promise.
