What's Mine.

I've read and read your glorious top 10 posts, and I keep telling everyone about them and laughing and laughing, especially that going into the bathroom to look for the smell of poop. That's priceless.

But just in case anyone is out there reading our rantings and wondering what to do about his or her situation with an addict, I want to offer that poor person some advice (GO TO MEETINGS! FIND NAR-ANON! DO IT NOW!). Ok, I want to offer that person some more specific advice.

All the searching, intervening, questioning, drug testing, and stalking in the WORLD will not do anything. It won't make you feel better. It won't make your addict stop using. It won't help, anything.

I have been as guilty as anyone of hunting through the house, going through his phone, searching through his pockets. I was doing it out of a place of fear that was coming from hurt at being betrayed and genuine terror over the danger my husband was putting himself in. I'd watch him breathe at night half to see if he'd been using and half to make sure he wasn't going to stop breathing...I was scared I was going to lose him.

Nothing has made me feel as good as that first Nar-Anon meeting that I went to. I learned that first night that I can't fix my husband. I can't make him change, and I can't make him do anything. I can catch him or not catch him. It doesn't matter. If he is going to use, he's going to use.

What I have learned in the last few months is that if he's using, it will come out. Either he will tell me, or I will know. And also, it doesn't matter if he's using.

Seriously. It doesn't matter.

What matters is our relationship and how he is interacting with me. When he is using, it keeps him from treating me right, from fucking me right, from talking to me and loving me. Using makes him so sick physically and spiritually that he will steal from me. If he could use and still be the husband that I need, I wouldn't care if he used.

When we plunder their things and search their private belongings for evidence of their using, we're getting distracted from the work of taking care of ourselves. If you're obsessing over what your addict is doing, you're not taking care of what you need. As soon as I learned that it was ok, and in fact better, for me to let go of my husband's bullshit, then I was able to take care of myself. It was a great relief for me to take that first step--to admit that I was powerless over the addict and that my life had become unmanageable.

What I've learned to do, instead, is to focus on ME, on making my life manageable and doing for myself what I need. If he is going to fuck himself up with drugs, he won't do it on my time or on my dime. I love him dearly, and I want us to work out together...however, I do not want us to work out together so badly that I will allow him to destroy me.

And in the end, letting go of these behaviors and this urge to fix him has actually been the best thing for our marriage. I have become stronger, more compassionate, and actually much more helpful in his recovery. I am able to allow him the dignity of fucking up and feeling the pain from his mistakes.