sadly you are right, there are too many of these same stories and they are all heartbreaking in their own ways.. but it is a comfort of sorts to know that we are not alone and to me it helps me realise I’m not completely crazy, my feelings about all this are 100% valid. i just wish he did not put me in this category of people, it’s a horrible, horrible position to be in.
your husband does sound determined, that’s good. do you believe he has stopped? i said on an earlier reply somewhere we did drug tests at first but i am pretty sure i could tell from here onwards if he took cocaine as the difference now from what he has been like the past 2 years is like night and day.
i don’t know if you saw my story but my husband and i used to occasionally use cocaine/party drugs at parties, never, ever separately in 18 years together and never at home, above all NEVER ever around our kids. Unfortunately after a Halloween party in 2018 he had some kind of mental breakdown and started doing it alone as a form of escape from stress of home and work. It genuinely had been a very difficult few years, including a 4bed house move which he had to work through and i handled 99% alone. In that time he had become isolated from the family and responsibility of family life. So a little at first one night turned into every time we argued, turned into picking arguments as an excuse to storm off and use. I didn’t know what was actually happening though.
For 2.5 years things got worse and worse, his drinking was through the roof, he didn’t want to know me or the kids, he acted like he hated me. After a year or so he was getting so mad he was pushing me around, hitting me sometimes and smashing up the house. Over lockdown i threatened him with the police most weekends and sometimes during the week too. He terrorised me to the point i was suicidal but at the same time petrified to leave him unsupervised with the kids. I asked him many times if he was on drugs because om some occasions he was talking utter mad, paranoid gibberish. He sometimes would drag me out of bed accusing me of messing around with myself..to the point i would put my hands on my pillow and pretend to be asleep because i was so confused i needed to catch him out as talking rubbish. Which he was..i felt like i was losing my mind.
I issued an ultimatum sort it out or leave. He begged chance after chance all of last year.
Finally his business partner caught him out scoring and it all fell into place. So bloody obvious now looking back. I feel like a complete idiot! I wish i had called the police on him. But he didn’t want to be caught and i trusted him. Silly me!
But…. we can’t be held responsible for their behaviour and to a point they aren’t in control of their behaviour either. Their thinking is hijacked by the drug. The more they do the more removed from rational thinking they get. But when they really, truly want to stop they can if they take the support. Ca are very good, they helped my husband completely change his outlook on everything. He always was selfish and unhappy. Now he was given a lifeline he’s very grateful and is doing all he can to repair the damage he has done.
We are always talking honestly about it now, which was extremely hard and painful at first. For both of us. Plus it took several months for him to really honestly open up to me. At first he would just say random crap to get me off his back.
The worst things i learned were that he took drugs at our family ny party this yr (me, him, our then 10yr old daughter and 13 yr old son), nearly got caught drug driving by the police but got away with it, though my children have been in the car when it seems he should not have been behind a wheel and also that on several occasions he overdid things to the point he thought he was going to die… imagine that… our kids could have come down for their breakfast to that!!!!
Anyway that’s my story. Im 6mths into therapy now and it helps. And we’re 9 months down since it came out and our relationship is strong but hurt. We’re working on it. I have severe ptsd from all of it plus stuff in my past that has been dragged out because of all this. I have chronic bad dreams, insomnia, amnesia and am very depressed and anxious. I was always a very cheerful and outgoing optimist. Now i hide away and expect the worst. I hate that i missed spotting this situation and feel huge guilt, despite rationally knowing im not to blame.
So the long and short… there is hope if they want to change but it’s a long. hard road. He knows if he goes back, he is out. I refuse to allow my kids childhood be destroyed by that shit.
Sorry if you find I’m rabitting on!
Big hugs to all of us living this nightmare xxx