Amithyst

I came across this forum recently & have been reading & honestly am astounded at how many people seem to get it! And I don’t even know if I really belong here, or in Al-Anon, because I’m not with him anymore. It’s been eight months, and I am still not over it. I still love him. And he left me and betrayed me in a really unnecessarily traumatic way. He exploited me to gain favor with the alcoholics who enable him by video recording me having a panic attack which I have no memory of in my home, then showing it off to show how crazy I am and how he left in a harrowing escape. The truth is he moved into my home in December 2022, we adopted a puppy together in June 2023, in August he took my car to his mechanic & paid nearly one thousand dollars to have repairs done that I couldn’t afford & was saving for, & he said that concerned him and he wanted me to have a safe vehicle. Forty eight hours later we had an argument (an argument, not some crazy knock down drag out fight), he said he was going to call the police & the last thing I remember is being unable to breathe. My memory is so spotty from there, I remember paramedics lifting me off my bathroom floor & wanting to take me to the hospital. I remember calming down & realizing there were police officers carrying his dresser out of my house. To this day I really don’t know what happened. We were together for five years & I feel like it sounds so stupid but he was the love of my life. I thought we would be together forever. There is so much detailed back story over five years, but the fact is that I have no experience with alcoholics or alcoholism, & recently in therapy this is what we’ve been focusing on, & people who know us both have gently brought it up to me, so now it feels like I am processing everything all over again through this new lens of his alcoholism, & realizing just how much it affected our relationship the entire five years, & I just didn’t know. & of course I am not a perfect person & I have emotional baggage as we all do, & I spent the majority of our relationship in therapy because I absolutely believed (& he was always telling me) that I was the reason for all of the problems we had. That there was something wrong with me. & I devoted myself to fixing whatever was wrong with me to be the best person I could for him and I could never understand why it wasn’t enough. I’ve spent the last eight months since he left wondering why and how I wasn’t good enough for him. For a few weeks at first we were in contact and then he completely ghosted me. Since November I have received a handful of texts from him, all of which have been cold & hateful & blaming me. And I am so stupid because I have still tried to reach out. And I don’t understand how he could hate me so much, seemingly out of nowhere. And I’m sorry this is long and probably makes no sense. This is the loneliest & most painful experience I’ve ever had, & no one really understands, especially after this long. My friends don’t understand why I care, why I’m still sad, at all.

makeitwrite

You don’t need to question if you belong here, you deserve support. I’m very sorry you’re in so much pain and I’m very glad you decided to reach out here. There are many people here still sorting out trauma , rough emotions, and lingering attachments even if they are no longer in a relationship with their alcoholic ( I’m one of them)
You aren’t stupid and none of his treatment is about you not being good enough. You did not deserve the awful treatment you received. You were in a relationship with an addict. Addicts will try ( often very successfully) to make you feel like you are responsible for their bad behavior, for their drinking and the problems it causes.Addicts will often try to make you feel like you did something to cause them to mistreat you, that you aren’t good enough no matter how hard you try to bend yourself into being what you think will make them treat you better. It’s not about you. Their priority is alcohol, that’s about the addiction, not about your worth. He did a horrible thing to you by exploiting your panic attack- recording it, using it to his advantage. I’m so sorry you had to experience that. Of course you are still struggling, that is a huge betrayal of trust. Anyone would be struggling with being exploited during something as vulnerable and scary as a panic attack.
This site is full of information about that will help you . This forum is full of people who understand the things you’re feeling and want to support you. Please do not blame yourself or beat yourself up for what you went through or that you’re still struggling with moving on from the pain of your experience. Sending you a big hug.When you can , read through what people share here. Definitely explore findong support via Al Anon. You aren’t alone. Be gentle with yourself and seek out as much support as you can- it’s here for you and you belong.

Branches

Amithyst, dear sister in this craziness,

For the past 18 years I have lived with a man who has deflected, denied, dismissed and made it my fault about damn near everything. Our sex life took a decided dive? It was my fault. He didn't find me sexually attractive. He had no answer when I asked him why he married me then. That you don't marry someone and then tell them you don't want them because their only option is to either remain celibate or commit adultery. Oh, well, "maybe we can work on it. I don't want you to leave." Honestly, one of the ways you know you're living/married to/ in relationship with an addict is it is ALWAYS your fault. And because you have never experienced the cunning, the manipulation, the emotional abuse that comes with addiction, you are just sitting there in your tears thinking "It must be me. I'm defective and I don't know it." No. You are not defective. He is an addict and he is cruel. He feels less bad about himself and his addiction if he can abuse you and make you feel like dog doo. Block him. He was a monster masquerading as the nice guy you fell in love with. Now the mask has dropped. The spell is broken. You can go forward and find peace, have your own beautiful live, and leave him in your rear-view mirror, all while thanking your Higher Power you did not marry him or have kids with him.

And just in case you think, in the privacy of your bedroom late at night, what if he gets sober and wants to come back to me? (Insert sound of record player needle scratching a record.) In all honesty, you do not want a "recovering" anybody unless they have been clean and sober for quite a while, like years. Read the posts on here about people who started dating people who confessed right up front that they used to do drugs or were alcoholics and things were great at first but then - relapse. Think how painful that would be.
I wish you all the best going forward.

Amithyst

I cannot thank you both enough for the time you took to read & offer me your kind words. I just cried more reading them. He moved in with his alcoholic brother & sister-in-law who truly hate me & spent the five years of our relationship interfering & manipulating to break us up. It feels like an army against one, like I’m left out in the cold & they “won.” His other sister-in-law told me in a message that she always thought I was a good influence on him & that he didn’t share anything with her & his other brother. This makes me think that the reality is not the insanity I’ve been living in but that people, people close to him, do see the truth of the situation. It also makes me think he only showed the video to the small number of people he knows will readily accept his version of events & who already hate me. I think he must not have shown it to anyone he knows he can’t manipulate & would recognize what they were seeing, and which was me in crisis & not me who is a crazy person.

branches, I thank god every day I never had a child with him. It is bad enough that I exposed my children to him, not understanding what he was. TMI but our intimate life was good, he never made me doubt his attraction to me or love for me when we were alone. So it’s yet another thing I don’t understand. I miss that closeness so much and how was it so easy for him to literally just get up and walk away from it? I don’t understand the abrupt change in his attitude toward me and he always always promised me he would never ghost me. He promised me a lot of things that he went back on though. I just can’t understand how after five years a switch can be flipped and it’s like it never happened, never mattered. Like I never mattered. I’ve had two other significant relationships end & those endings could be seen miles away. They were falling apart 1-2 years before the end actually arrived. This was literally out of nowhere. He packed haphazardly & I spent weeks filling garbage bags with his things — socks, tons of shirts, shoes, his phone charger, not stuff that was tucked away & rarely used. I kept it in my garage for months but he never even mentioned it. A few months ago I threw it away. It just doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes any sense.

makeitwrite

The only way this makes sense is that your ex, and the people who around him who are participating in cruel behavior towards you, are functioning through the disease of alcoholism. There are some very helpful links in this thread that will help you see the madness that is the operating system of addiction. You had the rug pulled out from under you because of that, and so many of us understand that flip of the switch, a Jekyll and Hyde effect that leaves one disoriented and reeling. There is no rational baseline when someone is in active addiction. He is surrounding himself with other addicts and enablers and I’m glad you recognize that.
He hasn’t “won” - his battle is with alcohol and from what you’ve shared, alcohol has total power over him. Alcoholism is progressive, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse. He’s not seeking treatment so dealing with this pain now is saving you from enduring more and more of it trying to negotiate with his addiction. The alcohol will always win that battle. You were also powerless against it and still are, but now you have been removed from that situation and you can use your energy to help yourself . In spite of the hard work of moving through all the pain and recovering from the abuse you endured, the fact that you are away from him and beginning to seek support is a huge victory for you! You are not an army of one- there are countless people who will understand your experience, give you acceptance, and support your recovery from this. You’re going to be okay and someday this pain will be behind you.
I relate to the shock of finding, almost overnight, that the person you love is not what they appeared to be- it’s good to feel the emotions, cry, grieve- balancing that process with information- ie reading about alcoholism, reading about codependency, going to Alanon and listening to the stories and feedback from your support community - all so important. It can really help to write down the bad moments so you can reread them when you find yourself longing for the good things you miss. It can really help to make a list of what you deserve from a partner- that list will get more clear as you heal and detach from blaming yourself for his bad treatment of you. Like so many of us, you were caught up in something going on in his world that you had no control over- NONE of what you experienced means that you are to blame, that you lack worth , or that you somehow deserved to be treated badly. I’ll try to find a few links that might help. Stay close and give credence to the people who see what’s really going on- try to detach from the madness of the addicts and enablers who are attacking you. They are looking at this through the broken lens of addiction.

makeitwrite

I copied this from a recent post in this forum- it’s a lot of information but it was so helpful for me to read it, even though I’ve had more time to detach from my alcoholic ex than you have - I think the information here might be really helpful for you as well- hang in there and know you aren’t alone!


This is an article written by Jim LaPierre, LCSW, CCS

It's a succint explanation of the thought processes and behaviors of an active alcoholic in his professional experience. I think many of us recognize these behaviors in our loved ones. A newbie member in our Newcomers to Recovery forum posted about this article, and I wanted to share it here.

The Insanity of Alcoholism
Sadly, well intentioned folks try to protect the alcoholic from him/herself (enabling) or try to predict what they will do next (no crystal ball available). There are hundreds of wise sayings amongst alcoholics in recovery. Some are meant to make you think and some are meant to be taken very literally. Alcoholics Anonymous refers to, “the insanity of our disease.” This is a very literal statement. I can tell you a bit about understanding the active alcoholic but I cannot make it make sense to you because understanding the active alcoholic requires stripping away a lot of rational thought, the acknowledgement and willingness to learn from mistakes, the ability to recognize obvious patterns of behavior, and quite often, the application of common sense.

There are at least a hundred forms of alcoholism. What I am describing here is the person who is still drinking, is high functioning, and has not yet lost the things they hold dear. The disease of addiction dictates that they will lose these things in time and the rule of threes dictates a grim long term prognosis (jail, institution, and/or death).

Alcoholics think, act, believe, and feel based on distorted perceptions or themselves and the world around them. They live at the extremes of all or nothing. There is no moderation, no middle ground, no compromise, and no gray area in their worldview. To varying degrees, alcoholics live in denial of their destructiveness (self and others) and this further distorts what they are able to make sense of.

"Probably"
Alcoholics are the very best liars because they are able to use rationalization and justification to convince themselves that a lie is truth. This happens subconsciously. They are not aware that they are, if you’ll pardon the term – mind screwing themselves. Alcoholics adopt a language that facilitates lying in a way that sounds very well intentioned. Their favorite word is, “probably.” This word implies intention where in fact none exists. An alcoholic who tells you they will probably do something is highly unlikely to do it. Using words like these provides them a loop hole – an escape hatch in which no absolutes are given and no promises made. The alcoholic relies on words and phrases like: possibly, maybe, would, could, should, I’d like to, I want to, I need to. These words mean nothing. They sound good but almost always lead to disappointment. Progressively, alcoholism blurs every line and impacts every interaction, every relationship, every part of the alcoholic’s world.

Firehouse Management
Putting blinders on a horse leaves it with no peripheral vision – such is the worldview of the alcoholic. They may attend to many things, but in order to do so they must turn their attention away from one thing and toward another. Multitasking for the alcoholic means making many messes at once. There is no balance for the active alcoholic. As one area of their life declines they will often focus their attention on it and take it to an extreme. As this happens, another part of their life declines and gradually their life becomes dictated by “firehouse management” – every course of action becomes based on the most pressing problem. This is an inevitably downward spiral, though some alcoholics manage to maintain it for a very long time.

External Locus of Control
As alcoholics tend to drink progressively more they will generally conceal the frequency and amount they drink. They will tell you they only had three glasses of wine and this is true. What they have not told you is that each glass was a 16 ounce tumbler. It is not only the drinking that gets hidden; it is also the negative affects alcohol produces in their lives. Alcoholics develop what counselors call “an external locus of control.” Progressively, everything is someone else’s fault. If their job is going poorly it’s because their boss hates them. If their marriage suffers then their spouse is unreasonable. If they fail as parents they will see their children as ungrateful. Everything and everyone becomes a reason to drink. The spiraling alcoholic will often say that they don’t even want to drink but that circumstances like their horrible job/spouse/kids “force” them to.

Self-Pity and the Sense of Entitlement
Alcoholics often have a bizarre sense of entitlement. They reason that having such a difficult/stressful/demanding life entitles them to act in ways that are immature, irresponsible, and selfish. To observe their behavior is to conclude a belief that the world must owe them something. The active alcoholic wallows in self-pity and concludes that they are a victim of life. As they demand more from the world they expect less and less from themselves.

Appearance over Substance
The quickest route to self destruction for alcoholics are the words, “Screw it.” This is a declaration that everything is already screwed so they might as well drink. When people decide to stop drinking we encourage them to notice that “It” is actually, “Me.” This is evident in, “It’s not worth it.” On some level the alcoholic always knows the truth and they are usually working hard not to know it. They pretend and demand that those close to them buy into the fantasy that all is well. Life becomes progressively less about anything substantive and progressively more about maintaining appearances. This is well explained in Pink’s song, “Family Portrait.” “In our family portrait we look pretty happy. We look pretty normal…”

Master Manipulators
Alcoholics are master manipulators. They may not have been con artists before they started drinking but they come to have remarkable skills. They are the folks who can sell ice to Eskimos. They will pick a fight with you because they want to leave and they will have you believing it’s your fault. They show little or no accountability. They may have had integrity before their addiction kicked in but it will be conspicuously absent from their lives as they spiral. There is often one exception to this rule for each alcoholic – one thing they do especially well and it will most generally be their sole source of self esteem. We have known a large number of alcoholics who have incredible work ethics because being a good worker is the one thing they know they’re good at…well, they will say that and drinking.

Alcoholism - A Unique Disease
The disease of alcoholism gradually and insidiously strips everything away from a person. We have been asked countless times whether alcoholism is truly a disease or a choice. In truth it is both. Alcoholism is unique as a disease in that it not only hides from view – it also lies to its carrier about its presence. The person who is active in addiction has a unique choice relative to all other diseases. The alcoholic can go into remission at any time and many do. We see that alcoholics will abstain from drinking for a time to prove to themselves or others that they are not addicted, only to return later with a vengeance.

This is from an article entitled: Alcoholic Thinking - Understanding the Insanity of Alcoholism: How the Alcoholic Thinks

mattmathews

Wow. That's a really great post. I feel like it should be a "sticky" in this forum! I can't say I'm an expert on alcoholics, (I just live with one!), but everything rings true.
I'm just grateful that my alcoholic is in recovery.

makeitwrite

mattmatthews -

I found it really helpful too- I’m also not an expert on alcoholics - but I’m an expert on the one I was tangled up with! The article really helped me see things more clearly.

Amithyst

makeitwrite, thank you so much for that. I have been reading & thinking & processing a lot these last few days. Having some knowledge is helping, & reading this forum is helping. I would like to join a virtual Al-Anon meeting next, I think.