I miss my Ex...wish he loved me enough to stop
 

I broke up with my ex a month ago after he choose to continue drinking and using prescription pills over me and blaming me for EVERYTHING that went wrong in his life. I was over it after 6 years, and found out he is with someone new who knows nothing of his past so he can start fresh as he called it. So we have not talked or seen each other since then. 6 YEARS OF LOVE, LIVING TOGETHER and memories...GONE in the blink of an eye.

I know him wanting to drink and be with someone else, should make me want to kill him but, becuase i loved him so much I miss him everyday and still cant stop crying and have never been so broken hearted. How can someone love you for 6 years and try to get help over and over agian for you just say never mind, its easier to just give up and walk away from true love. I pray ALL THE TIME, for god to give me strength to get through this and stay strong....Its so hard.

Please give me words of wisdom to let me kwno how to get through each day and stop crying.

:(

I'm right there with you. Just broke it off with my ABF. I finally just gave up hoping that he was going to get sober. After all we had been through, the pain, the misery, the disappointment, he told me that he didn't want to stop drinking. It was then that I knew it had to end.

And just remember, even if he's "with" somebody right now, alcohol is his girlfriend. He's in a relationship with drinking. It doesn't matter who is physically around him.

The thing about love is that it doesn't matter when it comes to addiction. I used to think the exact same thing you do-- if she loved me and our daughter enough she would stop.

I've come to believe over the course of 11 or so years that she loves me and our daughter with every fiber of her being-- it's just that she's an alcoholic/addict.

She is still fully responsible for her behavior and decisions, and once I stopped protecting her from the consequences of such she eventually found sobriety. There are no guarantees-- she could relapse tomorrow-- but she's been sober for over a year and things are getting better.

Alanon helped me a great deal in this. Please consider trying a few meetings.

Take care, take what you want, and leave the rest.

Cyranoak

Justtrae83, sorry you are feeling this way. It does hurt. I know pretty much exactly what you are going through, so vent here! I don't think anyone likes to hear this, I know I didn't, but Time will Heal.

If he's with another in a month, then it's a rebound and won't last. He hasn't changed his habits in a month! He has to have someone take care of him, and that's not you now.

Don't want to "Kill" him, he's doing that on his own. If anything feel sorry/empathy for the new girl that will have to go through what you did.

Hang in there.

I am so very sorry for your shock and devastation. The kind of vicious turning on us that addicts can do is brutal. It is a brutal experience for us.

The addict's heart can be very small and very cold. As I always remind others, the addict operates from the lizard brain, not the human heart.

Odds are high that he will want to come back to you. Prepare yourself for this. It is a classic pattern and codependents are so grateful to have the addict back that they jump right in, believe the remorse and regret, and forgive and reunite and then experience the fog of the addict honeymoon.

So please, when your body has released all its grief and agony, do your work: write down what he was like, why you couldn't take it anymore, and what it felt like to be pushed aside for drugs.

You will absolutely survive this and if you do your work, you will have a whole new rock-solid set of expectations for mutual loving relationship.

In the meetings I attend--Nar-Anon--we learn not to accept the blame the addict places on us and we learn to trust God's will and to RELEASE.

You are in hell now. You will ascend. Angels are all around you, dear.

I have felt the same way many times, and have finally realized that active addiction makes real love impossible. (so did my active codependence, by the way). So I'm trying to work on myself and remove the obstacles to my being a truly loving and healthy person. My AH won't be able even to figure out whether he loves me until he has been sober a while, if that ever happens (he's in rehab now and not doing all that great). And he won't be capable of true intimacy for a long time after that; his sobriety must and should come first. So I'm trying to accept the reality and focus on the many rewards that come from taking care of myself so that I can find a measure of happiness no matter what.

I wish I could hug you in person! You deserve love as true and deep as the love you give, and when the pain subsides a little, and the dark clouds start to lift, there's a world of freedom out there. You don't have to share your home or your heart with an addiction ever again.

I can only share from my own experience. No matter how much I 'thought' I loved my husband and children, as a practicing alcoholic I didn't love myself so it was impossible to 'love' anyone else. Yes, as a practicing alcoholic I had BIG self esteem issues.

The only 'thing' I 'loved' was my DOC (drug of choice) which ranged from alcohol to all sorts of different kinds of drugs. I NEEDED them, to keep me 'numb' and to function on some level. If I did not have or could not get any alcohol or 'something' I would panic. I would become fearful. HP help anyone that got in between me and my booze (or drugs).

I used my first husband's cheating as the reason for filing for divorce, but it was not until I had found recovery and was doing a 4th step that I realized I had 'checked out' on him many years before, when King Alcohol became my master.

Your Ex has found a 'drinking buddy', someone who will not say a word about his drinking. You will grieve this, just as if he had died, because in a way he has, the person you fell in love with is gone.

We are here for you, and we are walking with you in spirit.

J M H O

Love and hugs,

hi justrae-

mine replaced me within a month. that lasted 3 months and then he was back, all sad at my door. you know what he said to me? he said he didn't fancy her. never did. just didn't want to be alone and had to have sex.

it's not personal. it's part of their sickness.

i think it's healthy to cry and feel your feelings. and after i was done crying, i got into therapy to figure out why i would choose to invest so much into my relationship. that was eye-opening. the therapy was very helpful. i don't want to repeat that pattern and i needed to understand my half of it, which actually went back to my childhood and my relationship with my father.

do your crying and do your work. be ready when he shows back up, promising you the world.

best wishes to you,
naive

When my alcoholic wife started drinking heavily, I felt incredible feelings of abandonment. It took another 15 years before she hit her bottom. I wasn't alone during that time, but I definitely felt unloved.
For what it's worth, now, I really do believe that alcoholism is a disease. I now see that I wasn't abandoned, she didn't love the bottle more than me...she was just doing what addicts do.
Trust me, I'm not recommending that anyone stick around for 15 years waiting for their addict to change.
When she hit her bottom, I hit my bottom. I started attending Al-anon meetings and I started my own recovery. I was finally able to take out those feelings of abandonment, that I had been working so hard to supress, and take a look at them. I realized that I had been relying on my wife, my sick alcoholic wife, for my happiness.
We're both still working on our separate paths of recovery. I think we're both in a better, healthier, place that we were. But there is no longer an "us," it's much more a "she" and an "I." We're much more separate individuals, and I think we're closer than ever.
I've become such a cynic about this thing we call "love," yet I'm working everyday to become more open and loving. It's a mystery, huh?

Well im on the other end of this. Im the alcoholic clean and sober for 10 months now. I got sober and spent 6 months in rehab but my ex left me. We were together for 7 years. Hes with some one else now and here it is christmas and im alone. I chose to get sober for myself but also for him and our relationship. He walked away and moved on pretty fast with this new person in his life. It hurts because im now doing much better with my life. Im living on my own and working full time. Im doing all of the right things and have started to gain back my losses but i didnt get him back. It hurts like hell because i loved this man with all my heart and soul. So see it can work both ways.

Congrats on your 10 month's sober! Glad you are doing all the riht things to get YOU healthy again - may you always continue to make progress.

Peace,
C-OH Dad

Selfish idiotic confusing typical bs of an addicts behavior. Sorry if others dont agree with me. It really gets under my skin when I hear these stories. After all the stuff we go through with them because of their addiction to toss us aside. Psh! What garbage!
I am sorry you have gone through this . I have no advice for you other than I hope you find someone who will appreciate the loyalty kindness and determination youve given to this man and that your next relationship is everything he wasnt. I know you still love him and I am sure you have reasons to feel for him despite the heartache he has given you but he is sick and will be sick and I hope your new years resolution will be to start a new yr giving all of you to you and fullfilling your dreams and goals and not with the thoughts of what could have been. For now cry the pain away and thats ok

Truly it,s not about not loving you enough. It,s illness.

Alcoholism is an addiction, both a compulsion and a craving. While active, alcoholics make booze their higher power, great love of their life, God and, unfortunately, it's more important than anything -- anyone -- else. It's the nature of the all addictions, including codependency. It may help to understand that active alcoholics aren't capable of love.

When I ended a long-term destructive relationship it took quite a while to let go of the anger and hurt, but eventually that happened thanks to Alanon. Now I can look back and remember some of the good times as well as dealing with the issues that led me to get involved with him in the first place. I also learned that on my part, there's a difference between love and need. I didn't like the guy ... but I thought I loved him?

I promise that peace will come, it's a process.

So sorry you're going through this. I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after 27 years. I have asked myself how can they move on so quickly ? Over again and over again - I imagined them together , torchured myself really. But I have also been attending Alanon which has helped so much. I also read as much as I could and that helps to focus on myself. I have noticed that now when an image of him and her come into my mind, an image of him punching her in the face pops into my head soon after. Or saying vile nasty things like he used to say to me. I can tell you the ache in my heart pretty well disappears after that. Now I try to believe it really is a disease and the way we feel is the fallout. Time heals. Keep posting. You are not alone. ((Hugs)).:ghug3

My hat goes off to you. Our codependency( OHHHH ) Atleast you are learning and sounds like you are doing it. Learning to Love YOU. When I hear how after yrs of been with AH/ABFs and enduring sooo much this is whats helping me realize I made the right decision to broke off my engagement/relationship and start taking care of Me. I can see that when you are married you suppose to stand by your spouse but in my case, I have to take care of me first so this is why letting go is still hard but going to the meetings and been on here is helping me., He truly can't love me and Now I'm learning that dependency was a part of us hooking up. It's like there is this HUGE NEON sign that tells the addict/alcoholic where and who to look for, Maybe we pull from eachother. Hurting people hurt people...

I surely do understand and oftentimes have shared the anger and frustration and thoughts of "how can you do this to me... Or our baby?".

One thing that has helped me, after getting the three C's down, was the realization that everything that happens when it comes to the disease she is fighting I am neither ignorant nor powerless. I've chosen to be here and it took me a long time to decide to get on this ride but once I did so I did so knowing the worst.

She might and probably would relapse - two small ones this year
She might not always be the joy she can be while struggling through year one of recovery
There may come a day when the alcohol wins and either she leaves because I won't live with an active alcoholic again and she chooses going to somewhere or someone else instead of rehab
Choosing to commit myself 100% means I will probably never go to another Jimmy Buffet concert (lol), I will learn to enjoy great food without wine, I won't go out to parties or events where alcohol is all over.... My life will be different due to her disease.
She may never realize what I (and many here feel) about the time before she got sober and the relapses since or yet to come.

BUT I became OK with all of that when I realized that I made a decision to be in this situation and have chosen to remain in this situation despite the bumps in the road and have decided that I choose to continue knowing the risks and the high probability that we are not through the woods yet and may never be.

I have a choice. We all do. This isn't to say "well if you don't like it, it's your own fault". It's just to say that we are not powerless and not victims of this disease. We choose to deal with it in our lives or we choose not to. We are not 'stuck' once we realize that and it makes it much easier to deal with when we accept that.

Hope that makes sense. For a time I was very much afraid that the rest of my life would be like it was when my wife was drinking - fear of what would happen next and where the next crisis would hit from. ...but when I decided I was going to commit to my wife I didn't commit to dealing with living with an active alcoholic, my decision was based in the clearly communicated condition that my commitment to her depends on her commitment to sobriety. She has my unconditional love but knows that I will never live that way again.

So to the OP - you made a hard choice and a painful one but you made the choice that you did not want that life and you walked away to save yourself. Be proud of that. You devoted a lot to this person and it sucks to feel that everything you did was 'for nothing' but maybe it wasn't. Maybe walking away was what it took to save him AND yourself.

Hang in there. Tomorrow is a new day and YOU get to determine how it goes.