u/Powerful-Morning5047

I’m the wife of someone addicted to fentanyl. We have two children, and I’ve had to Narcan him three times over the past five years. He has been to rehab seven times.
I eventually asked him to leave after discovering he was smoking blues. He is still using, and we are now separated and moving toward divorce.
What I’m struggling with most lately is trying to understand what is actually going on inside of him.
During our separation, he has given me so many different explanations for how he feels.
He has told me that somewhere along the way I became the breadwinner and that I was always ambitious and moving forward.
Then he tells me how much he misses our relationship and that drugs are the reason he becomes so defensive and angry with me.
Then he says he is simply a lost person and talks about how his father wasn’t there for him emotionally in the way he needed growing up.
Other times he says that people around us wanted our marriage to fall apart.
And then he talks about how amazing our friendship and relationship actually were.
The hardest part is that I agree with that last part.
Before addiction completely took over our lives, this was someone who understood me to my core. We laughed together. We built businesses together. We built a family together. We had two beautiful children. We had a home. We had a life that, from my perspective, was incredibly beautiful.
I spent years supporting him through sobriety, relapse, rehab, businesses opening and closing, financial instability, and everything that came with his addiction. I worked a full-time career in healthcare, ran my own practice, became the primary breadwinner, and eventually became the person carrying most of the responsibility for our children and household.
And somehow he continued going back to drugs.
I understand addiction intellectually. I work in healthcare. I understand that addiction changes the brain. I understand that trauma, shame, cravings, dopamine, avoidance, and mental health can all play a role. I genuinely have compassion for people suffering from substance use disorders.
But being the spouse is different.
There is an emotional part of me that keeps screaming: How could this life not be enough?
How could your children not be enough?
How could watching your wife carry everything not make something inside of you say, “I have to fight like hell to get better”?
I know people will say that addicts don’t “choose drugs over their family” in the simple way that it looks from the outside. Intellectually, I understand that.
Emotionally, it absolutely feels like he chose drugs over us. Over and over and over again.
And now I resent him.
I’m angry that I spent so many years understanding him, protecting him, supporting him, believing in him, and trying to understand his addiction—and I’m realizing that maybe there was an entire part of him that I never understood at all.
That is probably one of the most painful realizations for me. This man knew me better than almost anyone in the world, yet now I find myself wondering whether I ever truly knew him.
So I would genuinely love to hear from people who are in recovery, especially those who had a spouse and children while they were actively using.
When you were using, did you know how badly you were hurting your family?
Did you actually believe the explanations you gave them at the time?
Did you love them and still feel unable to stop?
When your spouse set boundaries or stopped allowing you around your children, did you see it as abandonment at the time?
And once you became sober, did your perception of what happened change?
I’m not asking because I’m trying to save my marriage anymore. I think that part of me is gone.
I want him to recover because he is the father of my children and I want them to someday have a healthy father.
But I’m trying to understand how someone can have what appears to be everything they once wanted—and still keep returning to something that is destroying all of it.