drainedwife

my ah tells me he has stopped using. He has stopped now because he wants to. In the past when i asked him to stop he just didnt want to. He wasnt or isnt "addicted" he can stop whenever he wants...he says he has stopped and I know that he has for a while now. That is a bunch of you know what...i dont think he can stop on his own. He pulled up statistics on the internet that read how many people stop on thier own without any help...no 12 step, no recovery, no therapy, nothing.
i will say ""so maybe you stopped for a week or two, that is not stopping"..and he says well how long does it have to be...i know he truly believes he can stop and he thinks he is only using because he wants to..not because it is an addiction.

How do i argue with his logic..or do i even try??
Also, it is very hard for me to detach with love..i have alot of anger, and not a lot of compassion for someone who "couldnt deal" with the normal stresses of life and decided he didnt care anymore, and took the easy way outm without thinking how it would affect his wife and kids.....i can detach, but then i ignore him to a point and then he gets angry and he makes it very uncomfortable for me....
any insight??.

BigSis

I was at an Alanon meeting, talking to the woman who ended up being my sponsor. I told her it was so CLEAR to me the type of program my kid needed:

AA/NA meeting - every day
Get a sponsor
Work the steps
Read the literature
Have a telephone list


She smiled and asked me how many of those things *I* was doing in MY recovery?

To be honest, it sort of pissed me off... so I retaliated by being determined to do EACH AND EVERY ONE... to show my kid and to "show her" that I was perfectly capable of working a recovery program in Alanon.

huh. I got better.

Today, neither of my kids works a recovery program. Daughter has be clean for 2 years. I am an alcoholic, and I got sober in 1983 without a program, my mom got sober in 1980 without a program and my sis in 2003 without a program.

I will tell you, however, that although I didn't need a 12-step program to stay sober, I DID need it to live better.

So he's right - folks can quit with out a program. But I am proof that life can be BETTER with one.

I hope you can find one for you, Drained Wife. ((hugs))

drainedwife

so your telling me that he can quit using drugs..not alcohol, but cocaine, on his own without any help ?? cocaine is VERY addicting, and very hard to get off of....i think maybe there could be a chance that he could stop on his own, but why would be want to if he hasnt hit a bottom yet??? does he not need to hit a bottom??? i dont think he has hit his....things arent that bad yet..he has a good job, i am still around....why would be just stop. he tells me he doesnt want it in our lives and that it is never ok to do it....but i told him to stop over a year ago,,,and he kept using.he said he didnt want to stop then and by me telling him to stop made him want to more,..why should he stop using just because i am telling him too....gee, maybe because we will go broke, its illegal, you could get arrested, you could die, you are frying your brain!!! WE have kids that you are responsible for....because addictions destroy everything in their path...but any of these things did not make him stop!!

so i am confused...is he telling me the truth when he says he has stopped and that he can stop whenever HE wants to....???? do i just say ok, you've stopped and then just wait and see, because eventually something will happen that will prove that he hsnt stopped if in fact he has not..and at that point do i then say, see, you cant stop on your own, you need help?????

drainedwife

please clarify because i am sooooo confused right now...am i being to hard on him, telling him he needs outside help????
he went from oxycontin to cocaine, and has been using for quite some time now..it seems to me, that it would be quite difficult just to wake up one day and decide to stop....does it matter how long or how deep you are in, you can still quit on your own at any time as long as you want it bad enough?? and then isnt it a choice not necessarily a disease...because you can choose to stop and do it on your own??? if it is a disease why does it matter to hit bottom most of the time, before you realize what you are doing???

BigSis

What I think is that yes, many people need a program to help them stay quit... but the DESIRE to quit... is all on him. All. None of it is on you. None.

A boundary is not telling someone "you can't do drugs". A boundary is saying, "I will not allow drugs or certain behaviors in my house".

The difference meaning - that he can use them all he wants, but you will take an action (leave or have him leave) if he violates your boundary.

I used to test my kid's uring to "prove" she was using... but that made me the jailer, the doctor, the prison warden. It came down to .. it does not MATTER if my kid is using drugs or not... it was the behavior I could not stand.

So my rules were - must work or go to school. No raging. No sleeping all day. No weirdo friends at the house. No phone calls after 9 p.m. Those were rules *I* could live with... she could not. So she had to leave. It didn't matter if she was high "at the time" or whether she had "just quit".

Snooping and searching and sneaking around and spending EVERY MINUTE OF MY LIFE trying to figure out if she was using... was a waste of my life... it made me want to get off the planet.

I had to get better. I did not get better until I started to change MY behavior. And that changed after I started MY recovery. And I chose Alanon meetings.

The 3Cs...

I cannot CAUSE addiction - nothing I did or said created the addiction in my loved one.

I cannot CONTROL addiction - nothing I can say or do will make it better, or worse, or mitigate it in any way.

I cannot CURE addiction - there is no magic potion, pill, word, phrase, timing or any thing that I can do to "fix" this.

I guess what I am saying is it doesn't matter if you are "too hard on him"... because that implies that being less hard... or more hard... will somehow affect when or if he gets sober or uses again. And it won't.

Elana

Hi!
My XABF stopped using Cocaine but continued to use pot continuously as a replacement. I believe he occaisionally does a line of Cocaine as well. he is not in recovery and ALL the addict behavior is there.

Recovery is as much about the addict behavior as with the drug. Most people will say, "I can stop any time I want to." Most can for awhile.

However, the dead give away in this is that he cannot see himself stopping forever.. and that is exactly what stopping means. It means none today, each and every today, forever.
However, most addicts cannot face forever, so they do it one day at a time.. or one hour at a time until the hours stretch to a day and the day stretches to a month and the months to yearsetc.

People do stop on their own, but most are not successful. They need to replace the drug with another behavior (or, more common, a different drug). That is where recovery comes in.. the 12 steps replace the drug and the behavior associated with the drug.

Recovery, believe it or not, is more than removing the drug or the alcohol (for most people).

You cannot make him stop.. and you cannot make that a boundary. You can make him stop using around you and your kds as a boundary with consequences if he does use.
He is the ONLY one who can choose to stop using drugs and work some sort of recovery.

chess

Thanks bigSis for helping me realize what keeps me confused. After readin your comments I finally understood that setting limits to those close to me is in my mind the same as not loving them. I finally caught on to this thought and unconditional love to me seems to mean expecting everyone as they are. I think there are huge holes in my way of thinking.

It's the person we love and the behaviour we hate, right?
How do I make myself understand this? I think deep down I still think that if I make any kind of demands at all or do not accept all of the behaviour then I must not love the person. This gets me stuck every time....and it keeps the problem at my hands even though I cannot be responsible for other's behaviour....

Help!!!!

Later,

Chess

drainedwife

my ah says he wants to stop and has stop..trouble is..i dont think he has because he still doesnt go to bed at a normal hour..things still to me arent quite normal...and to me not only the behavior, but the drug use is what i cant stand. I cant stand that it is illegal and he could get arrested, and it makes me sick to my stomach thinking about him snorting coccaine... The drug itself to me is disgusting and horrible and against everything i believe in and value in life.

So when he says he has stopped, what do i do?? If i call him on it, he just tells me im wrong, that he has stopped..tht he is not going ot bed because he cant sleep because of me and the friction between us. There is always an excuse for the behavior.

I am really confused..unconditional love is about accepting someone for who they are, but does that mean you have to accept someone using drugs when it is something you do not want in your marriage?? Over the past year and a half, when i told him i didnt want drugs in our marriage he told me he thought to himslef, why should i stop because she tells me too...i think he resented the fact that i was telling him what to do and he doesnt seem to grasp the concept of boundaries....that its not that i dont love him, i just dont love or want the drugs in my life and that is my right...just as i didnt want to have sex the other night, i was totally not into it and he took that as total rejection and i dont think he could deal with it..sex has been an issue in our marriage being that i just dont want it as much as he does and that i have a low sex drive...but i never rejected him before in that way...so then a few hours later, while i was sleeping, he told me i was i dont know how to say this on here, so ill just say he thought i was satisfying myself....and he got disgusted that i didnt want to be with him and wanted to do that so he got up and packed his bags and left....first of all IT DIDNT HAPPEN!! i was sleeping!!!! so either he made it up, or he was halllucinating or maybe i was moving around in my sleep and he thought i was...but whatever the case,,,,it didnt happen....and so he keeps bringin it up telling me i was doing this when i really wasnt. Also he says he was looking at the "porn" on his computer because "he doesnt get enough from me,and why should i care and how can i tell him what to do in that respect?"
Am i wrong that i dont like that kind of behavior, even if he isnt getting enough sex from me??? I feel like he is driving me insane....please help!!

Truffles

I will say my AH did stop on his own. Last June he got into an accident and got a DUI, he was drinking and drugs. It was the day I was throwing him out. He told me that was his rock bottom. He didn't completely stop at that point, I think he was using every once in awhile.

But he did stop completely, the last time he used I think was in November. I mentioned to him the other day that I don't understand how he can just stop on his own. No meetings, nothing. I don't know if something happened to make him stop, but he did.

I will say I have a lot of resentment towards him. I don't know if too much has happen for me to get past, drugs, cheating, all the money we lost. He just wasn't there for his son or me. He will get mad sometimes when I do things myself and act like I don't need him. He doesn't realize that he made that happen. I had to act like a single parent with him disappearing all the time.

There were so many times I wish he did get arrested, but it never happen. I think sometimes it would have been best if we did separate back then. I sit here now and think back and how stupid I was for everything I put up with.

If I ever find out he uses again - I am done. My RAH also used coke, I never could understand how he missed so much of his son's life and it didn't bother him. He use to say the same stuff to me about stress and that is why he used.

When he would get mad he would call me a "loser" - No I wasn't, I had more stress in my life and I didn't turn to drugs to make it disappear. I was the responsible one, the one with a job, benefits, paying the bills, taking care of our son.

Do what is best for you - you need to be happy with your life. Sorry for rambling -

oneeyeopen

wow drained wife, so much to deal with...I feel for you.

here is my understanding of quitting on your own -- yes it can happen, but it is a small minority. my abf went to rehab when he was young, he quit drugs but still drank for a couple of years, when he did quit drinking he did that on his own. I would argue he learned the tools for quitting at rehab and that if he hadn't been to rehab in the first place he couldn't have stopped drinking on his own later on. BUT now, relapse all around and he is working on quitting on his own and is not doing such a great job of it. So perhaps the important difference is one's mental state at the time.

But, I personally see treatment as the most effective way of quitting. on your own really is ON YOUR OWN, with no support except from us non-addicts who can not ever understand what the addicts are going through, and I think it really helps them to be with other recovered addicts. Did you know that ALL the employees at Betty Ford are former addicts -- yup, even the kitchen staff. the idea is that the addicts will be surrounded by people who GET IT.

Sex, always a tricky issue in any relationship -- first off, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a person satisfying themselves even if they are in a marriage. I know that isn't what you were doing, but hey, if you ever do, don't let your husband make you feel bad about it.

coke does something screwy with people's sex drives, they often get this hyper sex thing going which is why sitting around watching porn, and/or having sex in the crack houses is so prevalent. At the same time there are men who can't get it up because of their drug use, so it is a quandary for them -- want sex, but can't perform, and as we all know with men, they get really embarrassed when that happens.

I think you have every right to tell your husband that it makes you uncomfortable that he is looking at porn,and that you would rather he didn't, but at the end of the day he has every right to do it if he wants to.

I look at these things like this -- I can't control what the abf does, but I can control how I am going to deal with it, the part I am going to play in it, etc. but we don't live together, so it is easy for me to separate myself from it.

the other thing I have learned -- there is no logic to drug addiction, we can sit and say "why why why" and we will never get an answer, It took me a long time to accept that I just can not apply my logic to it. once I stopped trying to figure out the reasons behind it -- and I figured if I could then I could fix it--I was able to let go and detach a whole lot more.

Hey, no human ever gives another unconditional love -- you want unconditional love, you get a cat or a dog,

BigSis

I don't know one, not one addict that will "give me permission" to have a boundary. Not one. A boundary is something I set around me and enforce myself. It is not something I ask others to please obey.

This is the really hard part, Drainedwife. And we often can't do it until we've had so much pain that we become willing to do almost anything. And this is why we start with SMALL boundaries - because they are hard to enforce and if we don't enforce them, all we have is words.

No porn in your home is a good boundary (and the oneeyeopen is right - coke is a BIG sex drug... many coke users have multiple partners). But that means you have to think about what you will do if he starts looking at it again. Get rid of the computer service? Get rid of the computer? Go to a motel so you won't have to be there when he is watching it? There is no way you should accept his bs that you are not satisfying him... that is just his addiction talking.

Are you attending any Alanon or Naranon meetings yet? They helped me get clear about what I could and could not control in my life and WHAT that control looks like. It isn't standing in the middle of the living room screaming that I wanted my boundaries respected (which is what *I* did... and was ignored, by the way). It was me deciding I can't take the drug using behavior any more and asking the addict to leave (and then having to actually threaten to call the police when they didn't).

But since yours is a marriage, you may not be able to get him to go... in which case you might start thinking about what YOU need if you need to leave. Maybe not today... but at some point. Things like thinking how to get some money... where to find a safe place to stay... and how to get your stuff out, if a temporary sepeartion becomes necessary.

Just having a plan can help you feel better.

But right now, I would suggest you consider some meetings. They can really help with the pain you are feeling today.