ltcb

and I finally reconnected with him. He is not well. About to do some significant prison time. He tried to give me my closure. Closure I thought I would never get. But I still don't feel like I really got it. Just feeling very sad tonight and could use some uplifting. You can read my old posts for some background. I'm starting to feel as though my heart may never fully mend.

EnglishGarden

I understand how you feel, ltcb. I was involved with a man who had 15 years clean and sober from heroin. Then he was in a very bad cycling accident and received morphine and painkillers because it was absolutely necessary. And within two months he became what your old posts describe about your heroin-addict exbf: distant, cold, angry, self-absorbed, grandiose.

And just as with your experience, I felt, well, I felt electrocuted. The shocking flip in personality took me by complete surprise. This was a program man and I had never experienced the addict personality in him. I became physically ill--nausea, shaking--when the addict emerged one day out of the blue. And I went away from him and have not seen him in two years. We both went no contact. And inside me is this feeling that something critical has been left undone in my life. You know the feeling you get when you think maybe you left the stove on. Maybe you left the door wide open. Maybe you forgot to take the kettle off the heat before you went shopping. That sense of panic in the far reaches of your mind that something vital has been overlooked and left undone. That is how I still feel after my experience with a heroin addict who I think slipped back into addiction. And your need and hope for closure echoes that, I think. It's like falling off a cliff but never landing, isn't it?

Your old posts are filled with shock. Disbelief. And this is the story of anyone who comes into intimate contact with an active drug addict. Because there are two personalities. And when one first becomes involved, the mask of the addict is quite attractive. Lovers are seduced by it. Heroin is a drug, especially, that creates such a contented high in the addict that his delicious pleasure in life, in his woman, in everything, she believes is the result of falling in love with her. But he's just overloaded with dopamine. It's dopamine.

When the dopamine goes, the experience goes, too. This is when he turns. This is the Jekyll/Hyde experience we all here know very well. His worst self takes center stage. And this self operates from the lower brain, which cares nothing for anyone and cannot care. (Re-read "What Addicts Do" in the stickies. Those are the facts).

This flip of the addict from light to dark creates a mental schism in us. And I find it takes most of us a long time to recover. Some here mark three, four, five years before they felt free of it. I hope it won't be that long for you. I don't think so.

Have you attended Al-Anon yet? Alone with this, we suffer much more and get well more slowly, I think. I go to weekly therapy and weekly meetings. I have a full life and a peaceful home and trustworthy friends. But I still have that feeling in me. That kettle on the stove feeling, some days. Especially when I wake in the morning and my subconscious is still in control.

Please give yourself an opportunity for some support where you live. Meetings. Counseling if that is possible. It is not good for us to sit with this in our heads all alone.

I often tell my therapist I ate of the poison apple.

So get help, don't be sick, find good safe people for your life, hold your head up, tell yourself you will be all right no matter what. I hope you'll find a meeting you like. There is something in us which attracted addicts into our lives. It is important for us to know what that is about. Meetings help.

Ann

EnglishGarden said it very well, Itcb, sometimes the pain does not just fade away, sometimes we need support from meetings and counseling to work through it and begin to heal.

Illusions can appear very real, yet they never can be because they are a distorted vision of reality. Facing reality can be painful but it is the only way to learn, heal and move forward.

Hugs

ltcb

That critical feeling is a spot-on description! And the falling off the cliff yet never landing!