Krl015

My fiancé was arrested today for buying heroin and happened to be the day we are moving. He was in the hospital 2 weeks ago for 8 days and was really sick but we also put him in detox at the hospital. And he came home doing great (heroin and most opiates are is drug of choice. We live a relatively normal life minus the elephant in the room of his increased frequency and intensity of his drug use and dealing. So he went to hospital and we are all feeling good and he's going to be ok. But...no...week later gets arrested for buying drugs. So his parents have been amazing and helping me financially and lovingly, but we are All kinda in the same "place"... So this was our text message just now after we yet again were in hell bc of our drug addict who we love more than anything ( I thought my feelings expressed may resonate with others and be helpful, bc that's my saving grace):

Me ("L"): Yes will do, thanks for everything. I just want matt to do the right thing and it just lets me down and I think he's starting to feel like he doesn't want to let people down anymore. He thought he could get away with everything and now this is proof that he can't go above the law. So thank you both for being a support for me and understanding it's a really ****** issue that kills you that your son/fiancé has to go through, and genuinely feel sad and love for him, but ateuggle with feelings of such anger at him. We need therapy together and he needs lots for himself. The more the merrier. Group, one on one doctor appointments, and personal therapy. It's deep feelings that need to come out and he needs to be forced with doing this. He always says therapy doesn't help, but I think it will

Fiance's mom: I ❤️ you L...Thanks for being you. Your a great person and we all need each other right now. Get some rest . He will come around. I'm sure he's plenty scared 😘😘💤💤💤

me: ("L"): Yeah and I feel a sense of protection for him and it just makes me sad to see him put himself in these situations that aren't really who he is. So I hope this is a very scary moment for him and it will maybe break some of his "I live above it all" syndrome. Make it real for him, like real life is. Xo have good night

Fiance's mom: Thanks lee . I hope he learns from this one!! Guns on him just might have done it!! 💤💤💤

Ann

My prayers go out that he finds a better path.

It's sad how so many people are affected each time one addict picks up his/her drug.

Hugs to you and his parents, it may be a long road you each have ahead of you.

zoso77

Krl...

I'm really sorry to learn about your ABF's troubles. Opiate addiction is, to put it bluntly, a motherf**ker.

One observation I would like to share with you right now pertains to the idea of couples therapy and how you both "need it". At this moment, for him, your relationship is not his priority. His first, and only, priority is opiates. And until that changes, your relationship with him is, for all intents and purposes, non-existant. Couples therapy will not help.

It is crucial that both you and his parents understand what you're up against. When his mother says he'll "come around", that tells me that she doesn't. It's not that simple. If she's not aware of our little community, she should be, so I encourage you to have her visit here so that she may understand how critical the situation with her son is.

Good luck.

hopeful4

Hugs to all of you. I agree that it may be a long road. When a person does a detox that does not put them into recovery. I would think very hard as you say this man is your fiancée. You may want to put off marriage and certainly children for quite some time as marriage to an addict is a hard hard choice to live with.

I don't say this to be harsh with you, but simply to say that I hear you thinking that the addict in him is not the real him. You are wrong there. They are one in the same. My therapist advised me on this, and it's very valid. We want to separate a person into who we know they were and have the potential to be, and the addict. The reality is they are one in the same and that that person is not the same anymore.

I hope you attend a group setting where you can gain face to face support form those who truly understand what you are going through. Take this time to work on the support YOU need.

Addiction is greedy. It is sad. It is hard to kick, especially H. They have to be willing to work on fighting that addiction, for the rest of their lives. It's a big commitment.

Tight Hugs. Take good care of you.

biminiblue

What I see in that string is you insisting that he needs to be "forced" into talking about his problem and all of you need to be involved. This is not the way it is going to go down, no matter how much you would like it to. The enormity of your problem hasn't sunk in yet.

What I see from his parents' text is detachment. Detachment, denial, and the unwillingness to take up this crusade.

Please read around in the Friends & Family sections of this site. You have a very long road ahead.

Croissant

Sweetie....big hugs to you. Even in your post, in all this, you say you hope it helps someone else. Bless you.

Please look after you. First. I understand that may be a hard concept, but please go and get counselling for you, and / or head along to ALAnon.

I'm not sure his Mum sounds engaged....whereas you will do anything, group therapy, one on one...all she says is she hopes the guns on him are a deterrent.

The other thing is you say life is normal, except for the elephant in the room. Sounds like a huge ball of denial....and I'm thinking they've lived with his addiction before you did?

I'm just surmising here, based on very limited info. But please, please....the desperation to help should be firmly focused back on yourself, honey.

scheherazade

Thanks for sharing, and my heart goes out to you and your fiancee's family. This is a heartbreaking situation.

I'm not replying to be mean, and I don't want to sound harsh, but those texts sound a lot like texts I sent to my ex-BF's family. As time passed, I realized that some of the things we were saying - "Maybe this will be it," "Maybe now he'll realize," "Maybe this talk will do it," were reflective of the fact that none of us truly grasped the enormity of the problem facing us.

H addiction is a monster. A horrible, horrible monster. It is hard for a non-addict to understand exactly how much people are willing to lose for this drug, and how much they will hurt and how much they will destroy.

By the time I left, I realized his family still didn't entirely understand - or maybe it was too painful for them to - how much of a hold this drug has on him. It broke my heart to still see them there and not be able to help, but it becomes a different story when the reality of opiate addiction starts to sink in.

The important thing in this situation is taking care of yourself. Loving someone with an addiction is so destructive to yourself - it took intensive therapy, some group support, lots of good friends and constantly returning to SR to keep me in one piece.

Sending love.

BlueChair

I hope this makes him want to get the help he needs. Maybe he will be forced to because of the arrest. Last year my husband was hospitalized during an awful period of binge using. He went into rehab from there and he's come a long way. Pretty much like you said lots of counseling (some for me, lots more for him) and we also do family counseling together.

His "friend" who supplied his drugs walked out of one rehab, but then got arrested and completed a whole 90 day treatment. Now hes doing outpatient and I think staying on track we try to keep away from him.

I think keeping a positive relationship with his parents is important. My inlaws were lifesavers for me. Sometimes we disagreed, and his mom in particular would get very emotional and I felt like she would strike out at me, but I let most of it slide to keep the peace.

I hope this takes your fiance to a better place, gives him his whole life back.

Krl015

Wow, all of your thoughtful and heart felt messages are overwhelmingly appreciative for me. I am just now beginning to use these types of support systems and I can't express enough how grateful I am for the response/feedback/shared stories. It does help. The pain in my stomach and constant stress that is a cloud over me can be somewhat healed by reading your words.

We got engaged before his addiction came to surface, and H was not part of his life. 2 years later it went from occasionally snorting (which horrified me from beginning), to full blown out IV user. He's always been a pot smoker which, to me, was something I was ok with. I have my own thoughts on marijuana, and dating someone who did that occasionally was not a problem for me. I dated guys who were very successful professionally and did that sparingly. So when we met, he dabbled in that, had a good job, and prescribed to Xanax and Valium. To me, the Xanax and Valium that the stupid psychiatrist just "handed out" to him was the turning point. I now know that he's probably always had addictive tendencies and it took some bad moments and friends death to just give up and unfortunately get into this bad addiction. His life has changed and I'm learning now that I can't think of the person he used to be, as many of you mentioned.

The hope is hard to keep around and I'm trying every day to cope with this demon. We have begun to start a life together, have 2 dogs, just got a new house in nice suburb...so the thought of leaving him and walking away is equally as heart breaking. I'm struggling with this bc everyone tells me to leave. Like many of you have said and it's a life long **** show that I'll be involved with. Does it have to be a lifetime struggle? Will he finally become committed to changing this lifestyle? I don't know, and I don't think there are any real true answers that I will get.

Day by day for me. And I certainly need to go to meetings. I've been kind of scared to, but I think it may help me to understand this all and maybe in a different way.

I thank all of you again, and if I can help anyone else in the middle of all this, then that will be a blessing.

Peace and love.

zoso77

Please do not take this too harshly. You two do not have a life together. The only relationship that he has, the only one he values, is the one he has with heroin. Anything and everything else, so long as he's using, does not matter to him.

That said, I understand both your pain and your confusion. You love him, and you've invested a lot of yourself in him. You ask if this is going to be a lifetime struggle. And the answer is yes. And how he fares is entirely up to him. You can't help him. Nor can his parents. It's not like he can just flip a switch and have everything be OK. If he wants to recover -- and I mean really recover -- it's going to be a full time job for him for quite some time, and then he'll need to be on guard for the rest of his life. Look at Phillip Seymour Hoffman; he was clean for about 20 years, and then he gave himself permission to drink. And look what that moment of not being honest with himself cost him.

Should you leave? I can't answer that for you. All I can tell you is sometimes, when faced with cold, hard facts, we are faced with decisions we really don't want to make. And yet if we want to be well, mentally and spiritually, we sometimes have to do things we don't want to do. You are rapidly approaching that moment.

Be honest with yourself about what you see. Be honest with yourself about what you can handle. And be honest with yourself about what you cannot tolerate because it's not good for you. Because if you're not, you will always be trapped.

And I don't want to see you trapped.

Raider

Whoa! I've muddled over something positive to say. But I can't. You are choosing a tough road to follow and your in-laws don't get it at all. The only thing I can think of is to go to some meetings so at least you can get a better understanding of addiction. Good luck.

Croissant

Krl015...my heart goes out to you because I can see in your post how much you want this to change. How things are will not fit into your vision of how you want things to be....no matter how hard you try, you can't force the puzzle piece to fit your vision of what you want out of life with this man.

You remind me of how I felt when I was with my first husband. I knew about, but did not encourage his marijuana use when we first met. His parents played happy families and it was not until he was in full blown opiate abuse and in rehab that I found out about previous incidents when he was a teenager that were glossed over. Petrol sniffing, juvenile offences etc.

For him to be on something like Valium, which is only meant to be a short term drug, is scary.

All the facts in the world don't change the fact that you love him and bless you, you sound very naive to the reality of his drug use. Believe me, sadly you shouldn't be punished for that, life shouldn't be this way....but it is.

ALAnon opened my eyes to what my future would be like with my ex.

Like others have said, his first and only relationship is with drugs right now and for a long time that will be front of mind, whether he is off them or on them. You however, want to build a life. So you simply have 2 different priorities right now.

Yep, there is sadly, no switch. I looked for it, it's not there.

Firefall

Wow, if only love was enough! It's not. It should be but it's not, not for the addict in denial and active use. I do feel you pain and keep you and many others in prayer.

juskeepswimin

Heroin is an extremely, extremely powerful drug that should not be taken lightly. One brush with the police often isn't enough to want and keep sobriety, nor is realizing that they don't want to let people down anymore. These things are very trivial to them in comparison to their want and need of heroin. The actual reality of heroin is painful for the addict and the loved ones involved. My heart goes out to you and his family.
It takes two healthy people in a relationship to make things work. He is not healthy and slowly but surely, you will not be either. There is never an easy way to live with an addict, as it robs his soul and will rob yours as well if you let it. I have found that living with my addict took away my ability to listen to my inner thoughts and my own self respect. Looking back I wondered how I ever let that happen to me. It's often not until we read, educate and step away from the addicts behaviors that we see all these unhealthy things we are doing to ourselves.
If you do choose to stay, be in for a ride. I don't mean for this to scare you, as I know how much pain you must already be in…but what people say about heroin is the reality and not even remotely close to being the exception. Please don't fool yourself and think even for a minute that your fiancés drug use and addiction with heroin is the exception, as this only causes more heartbreak for you in the end.
Reading and posting on here will help open your eyes and give you a different perspective, as I know it did for me tremendously. It was like one big lightbulb moment after the next in terms of realization. Also, check out the stickies that are listed here on friends and family of substance abuse. They are REALLY helpful in understanding and educating yourself about addiction and codependency. Heres one that I found particularly helpful:
http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...oundaries.html

You are in my thoughts.

nancylee

Hi,
I just wanted to add to what the others say about heroin addiction: it is powerful. My cousin was married, had 3 beautiful children and a heroin addiction. His wife finally divorced him when she came home with the kids one night and he had sold everything in the house - the furniture ,the appliances, clothes, everything. Why? For drug money.

Twenty five years later, he finally got clean. But his kids still barely talk to him.

Is this what you want? You have no marriage or children yet, thank God. If I were you, I would run as far and as fast as I could.
Nancy