r/naranon

I know there’s no like certain answer but do they feel bad in the present how much they’ve hurt their loved ones? Or does the addiction take over so much that they can’t care about anyone but themselves? And then if they get clean, do they look back and notice the pain they caused or are they just blind to it all?

The cycle always goes like this: 1) for 3-4 days, sometimes more than a week no one hears from her or can get in touch with her 2) she starts calling or just showing up all confrontational and aggressive bc she needs/wants something - 9 out of 10 times this leads to verbal abuse and threats when she doesn’t get what she wants 3) a day or so later she is paranoid and delusional and can’t focus on anything other than her personal conspiracy theories 4) after sleeping for a couple of days she is depressed, anxious, sad, and sometimes willing to take a step towards getting some help. We can actually communicate a bit and I can maybe even talk her into going to see her therapist……except she ends up back at #1 before any of that can happen and within a week she has again become the abusive person we refuse to let into our homes because she can get so violent. Meth is the devil. I want to help but I’m tired of dropping everything and putting everything and everyone in my life on hold only to have her start the cycle over the next day. It gets hard to forgive and forget all the ugly words she says and ugly way she treats us. Anybody else dealing with this? 7 years and I’m so over it.

My husband is my Q and he recently relapsed after recovery from a huge relapse last year. After his last IOP he didn't keep up with meetings or take other preventative measures and due to his half medicated bipolar disorder and negative side effects from an anti psychotic that was supposed to help he found himself back at the gas station buying his current DOC. A week and a half later I found out after money from our joint account was disappearing in mysterious ways. He spent the four days after being caught saying he would detox at home and then finding ways to take money, sell things, and continue using. I couldn't take it after the last day and told him he had to leave in order to try and salvage what's left of our marriage.

He's been gone a week and he is depressed and heartbroken. He's mad at himself but also upset with me. We talked earlier in the week about how, yes, addiction is a disease but it's a treatable one that can be maintained using preventative measures. But yesterday he said, "I'm having an incredibly hard time emotionally and none of this really feels sensitive to the fact that I have a disease. I feel like I'm being guilt tripped for having a disease and being sick."

I truly empathize that his brain works differently when it comes to drugs and that it is a disease. But i feel like he's skirting the responsibility that he has in unlocking that once again.

How have you all navigated these emotions?

An update from my previous posts, but I am almost entirely certain that my MIL who is living with us, is a “functioning” meth addict or is only recently sober. I can’t quite prove whether she is in recovery or still using because she hides it very VERY well and still seems to function mostly normally (normal for her, others find her behaviour very quirky, bizarre and disheveled).

My husband isn’t as quick to believe or doesn’t want to believe because she seems normal around our kids, helps a little around the house and will be polite/nice. I need to know for my own sanity and because we have multiple very young children.
Many of the things she does my husband writes off to her vaping habits which we know she does, or to a mental illness, or possibly using at one point earlier. She disappears to the car often, runs “unknown errands” everyday, or to the front porch (insists on the front porch and not the back where we can all see). There’s a lot of overlap between mental illness/vaping and meth so it’s hard to prove. If she was using, it would be in the car but I can’t have it tested as she has her keys dangling from her belt at all hours of the day, even at night. I’ve caught her in a few lies or overprojecting when asked simple questions about what she’s doing or where she’s going (goes to Walmart every single day for a few hours - my husband thought maybe she was eating there or just wants a reason to get out).

How can I ask her or prove this? I am assuming she will lie (and some of her lies are quite big and complex I never would have caught them). If I ask her to do a drug test I am sure she would be extremely offended and it would shatter all relations (she doesn’t know anyone suspects her past or current use at all). And the other outcome would be her abruptly leaving which although isn’t the worst thing, she has nowhere to go and it’s still my husbands mom.

She has almost all the symptoms except the sleeping for days. The slightly gross sweet chemical smell from her body could be vape. Many of the other symptoms could be from past use or mental health (teeth, never eating, very bad breath from poor unaddressed dental hygiene).

2.5 years in and 5 relapses later, I'm burned out. I'm fatigued and deserve peace but this is one of the hardest things I'll ever have to do because deep down I know she's sick and wants to stay clean but she's struggling to overcome it. A manic episode drove her to this latest relapse and even though I've tried dozens of times to convince her to work on her mental health, she believed she was doing enough.

The relapse happened 3 weeks ago. I visited her in the hospital daily, worked together with her and her therapist to get her into treatment. She was asked to leave the one treatment center and used the day in between transferring because they dropped her off at a motel.

She's in a different treatment center that specializes in repeat relapse so she has hope but I feel guilty because I've lost hope and can't take another relapse.

So while she gets better and I contemplate how to get out of this mess, I'm left with constant reminders all throughout our apartment just how intertwined our lives are. We were planning things, in the process of doing things together but now I must do "What's best for me" and push her out of my life.

How can I do this and be able to live with myself afterwards?

My husband is in NA and got out of rehab a few weeks ago, clean after 5 years. 5 days later, he said that he can’t fight for our relationship as he doesn’t love me and we’re no longer compatible. The conversation was totally out the blue and he said it suddenly then just walked out.
He’s always been such a family man. Whilst in rehab he was very much fighting for our family, constantly saying how much he valued our 15 year relationship.
What really hurt is he said that he’s been unhappy for a while and “self medicating”, which just does not line up with how he acted, what he said, our wedding, baby etc everything. He’s now got me questioning if he only ever felt happy because he was using, despite us being together for 10 years before his addiction.
I’m just wondering if people have experience of a Q who has bolted so early into their recovery? It felt like he felt the pressures and flew to his mum’s.
(He hasn’t met anyone else in rehab as I know some people will say this!)
I’d like to add though that I am now doing better 4 weeks on. I have accepted this is the end of our marriage and I’m determined to move on with my child for their sake.

Is it him or the drugs? How can he be so selfish at times lack so much empathy to the point where he laughs or shows no feelings while im clearly distressed and crying. I just want to make this stop, the rumination and constant overthinking is killing me.

I met my partner of 2.5 years when she was 4 months sober. Not only does she struggle with addiction, she has BPD.

She is on her 5th relapse since we've been together and this is at least the 15th time she's been in treatment(wish I knew about the other 10+ when we met).

She's used every drug out there but her DOC is fentanyl.

Relapse 1 - Was meth, cocaine and fentanyl. This is the one I was least prepared for because I had no clue what I was dealing with or how to handle it.

Relapse 2(2 months after 1) - I saved her from potentially suffocating because I found her face down in a pillow after almost ODing off cocaine and fentanyl. I also wrestled out of her hands, a loaded needle that she had hidden.

Relapse 3(13 months after 2) - She went missing for a couple of days after being in a hit and run accident. She was labeled clinically dead after she was found ODed on fentanyl and benzos. Multiple doses of Narcan and CPR saved her life.

Relapse 4(4 months after 3) - A month out of IOP following relapse 3, she manipulated her primary care into prescribing her a high dose of benzos. She abused them and went missing again because she went on a quest to find fentanyl. Luckily she wasn't clinically dead this time but she did call me after she was almost raped at a hotel by a drug friend she'd ironically met at the last treatment center.

Relapse 5(6 months after 4) - After undergoing the most successful treatment program she'd ever been in, she finished school, got a job in her field but chose not to focus on her BPD. The right combo of things caused her to relapse on fentanyl again.

During this relapse, she got a DUI and possession charges after driving 40+ MPH directly into the back of a parked truck. Believing her life was over, she went missing for 2 days after being released by the police. Of course she used fentanyl again, ended up in a hospital, and eventually a treatment center. She was asked to leave the treatment center because she got into a fight.

They dropped her off at a motel 15 minutes away from the center and she used again in between us getting her connected with another treatment center

After all of this, I don't believe I have any support left in me. We share an apartment but have no kids together even though she's insisted that she's ready for marriage and children.

I feel awful because I'm the most supportive person in her life, her emergency contact and her family loves me but I just don't feel as though I have it in me to continue this.

Please enjoy this rarely spoken about article written by Bill Wilson. I have done extensive research on his work and find his later work to be more effective than his earlier work. To put it in perspective, he wrote the AA Big Book between May 1938 and April 1939. The book was formally published in April 1939. This letter was written in 1958.

Before he died, he had dreams a spearhead for the next major development in AA --
the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Bill wrote this letter to the AA Grapevine (monthly AA magazine that you can have mailed to you here: https://www.aagrapevine.org/) in 1958.

Here is what he wrote:

“The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety” by Bill Wilson

I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA --the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance --urges quite appropriate to age seventeen -- prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.

Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up,
emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very
painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living -- well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters
have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious -- from which so many of our
fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream -- be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.

I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones -- folks like you and me -- commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back -- ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.

I kept asking myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer..."It's better to comfort than to be the comforted." Here was the formula, all right. But why didn't it work?

Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence -- almost absolute dependence – on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like.

Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until
these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.

Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.

Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as
He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.
1For my dependency meant demand -- a demand for the possession and control of the people and the
conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute demand" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to
trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can't flow until our
paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of
what adult love really is.

Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step
case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product -- the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.

The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.

In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet
this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or
small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.
Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea -- only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.

© Copyright, AA Grapevine, January 1958

I recently asked my husband to leave after his latest relapse. He has a history of using before we got together. Had a slip early on, then started using 7OH and developed a big problem for about a year. He was sober for 5 months before he relapsed again. It wasn't the relapsing as much as the hiding and lying and stealing he was doing to maintain this addiction. We had four days of trying to get sober and relapsing each day until I told him he had to leave and go get himself right before you come back to our family. And now I am sitting here thinking about whether or not that's ever going to be a possibility. He seems really committed to getting better and figuring out how to stay sober and be healthy not just for our family but mostly for himself. He's saying all the right things, he seems to be doing the right things, but even thinking back for a relationship there's lots of things related to his mental health and his addiction that might be more than what I should have handled and what I could handle.

With all that background in mind, I'm wondering if anybody has a significant other that they took back after leaving and if they end up staying sober. I'm afraid if he came back he would immediately relapse.

tll:dr: Did you Q stay sober?

Just had a perspective shift that nobody in my life can really understand so wanted to share here. Last summer I ended my 7 year relationship with my heroin addicted partner. Leaving was horrible. But I tried to hard to trust them again etc etc all of the stuff we think about when considering leaving. You know. This time last year I was exhausted from worry & stress & taking on financial responsibility & basic life stuff. And I just can’t believe how much space in my brain opened up from not wondering about all the what ifs about their use/recovery/relapse. Like it’s amazing how much more energy I have now that I don’t worry about my partner overdosing or getting arrested or having whatever latest crisis. Recently started dating again & was out with this person who I suddenly realized had a personality lol like what. Interests & opinions about how they spend time & what they like. And I guess I just hadn’t noticed how low my expectations had gotten & how much of my ex’s personality had actually just become their addiction. Like this person wants to do stuff with me & they have goals & hobbies & just are a whole person I guess. Which should not be mind blowing but dang. Anyway, just wanted to say I think there’s an easier life out there for us. I do still love & worry about my ex but the guilt of leaving is gone. Sending compassion & hope & some calm brain space to anyone wondering if the good outweighs the heartbreak. 💕

Not really sure where to start here.

I have been NC with my older brother for roughly 7-8 years. I was 18 at the time and needed to step away for my own mental health. I have kept up with him from a distance by getting occasional updates from family and checking his legal charges, etc. Around this christmas he was 6 months sober, and doing well.

We got a call Monday that he was in ICU under police custody, with no additional details. We were told it was likely time to say our goodbyes so I went through the hellish hospital/corrections process to see him for the first time in 8 years. When I was approved for visitation and arrived, he was awake and they even took his breathing tube out halfway into my hour long visit. It was night and day compared to how the pictures from Christmas looked. I was never privy to information surrounding his addiction growing up, as my parents wanted to keep me out of it as much as possible (he is now 30 and started using at 14, when I was 10ish). The last time we were in contact, I was under the impression that it was just cocaine, alcohol, and prescription pills. In our visit I learned that his DOC now is heroin, with meth occasionally if he can’t get what he wants. Pre-arrival we had assumed he OD’d, but it was actually a bad seizure due to withdrawal in jail that triggered the ICU and coma.

He seemed happy to see me, and said he loved me as I was leaving. He even recalled seeing me walking down the street while he was in rehab, noting my hair and outfit, said I looked happy. That absolutely gutted me.

I know I can’t do much in terms of helping him until he wants it, but his recent rehab stint makes me think that maybe when he’s released from jail he might be willing to go back to rehab. Our mother is estranged from our whole family, minus him and our younger brother who splits his time between our mom and dad. She is the only one privy to information at this time and has shown to consistently lie about his progress/status. I am hoping he is willing to sign forms to allow me to be a point of contact regarding health and legal updates - until now everyone has given up on him but with this scare I want to be more involved and help where I can.

I want to continue with regular weekly visits at the hospital and whatever facility he gets transferred to when he’s medically cleared.

This is a massive life change for me and I have a partner and friends who support me, but I think Nar-Anon might be a valuable resource for me as well. I have never been religious and am weary about the higher power aspect - even attending the meetings in a church feels like a lot to me.

I’m not really sure what I’m asking for here, your own stories and advice? What to expect when I attend my first meeting next week? Any words of encouragement? I think I just need to find a community who can understand. My partners mother is an ex addict and I hope to be able to get some insight from her as well, but no one in my circle has experience like this.

Father of my 2 young kids and stepdad to my teen has relapsed on cocaine again.

I left the family home 1.5 years ago with my kids and was put into temporary accommodation and now thankfully have a long term stable home. He was dealing drugs and I found drugs laying around the house numerous times. After years of lies and relapses I left for the kids safety and for my sanity.

Fast forward to now he had been doing so well. I started allowing unsupervised contact and we even went on holiday as a family. He was clean 1 year. I was so proud and considering giving our relationship another go.

I went to collect my kids from his one morning last week. Him and the kids were asleep on the couch.. they were in pjs, nappies full of pee and the house was a mess. I walked through to the kitchen and found a plate with lines of cocaine on the top shelf. I also seen powder residue on his dining table.

I’m absolutely heartbroken, angry, all the emotions! It turns out he’s been using for months… I removed the kids and told him they will not be back to his house and all contact will be supervised until he sorts his shit out. I recently started a new job and now I’m going to have to get something else as I was relying on him collecting them from nursery twice a week and covering when I do the odd nightshift. I have a meeting with my manager to see what they can offer but it’s not looking promising.

He’s put my kids in danger again.. I don’t think I can ever go back now.. thanks for reading.

Every time he goes to detox, he gets himself fucked up into oblivion. He “wants” to get clean, but at the same time, he’s shooting fentanyl right before he walks in the door and is shoving fentanyl up his ass to take later while he’s there- this is a person WILLINGLY going to detox.

Does everyone else’s addicts do this?? He keeps saying that it’s saying goodbye to the love of his life and if he doesn’t get high before he goes in, he will crave it even worse when he gets out.

I try to have some empathy, but I firmly believe that he’s making excuses and he can’t honestly be that serious about getting clean. Since I’ve known him (2years) ge’s gone to detox 7+ times. He has done this every time…

About a month ago now, my boyfriend confessed to me that he had a cocaine addiction. With guilt and shame, he told me he wanted help and at the time he had told me that he would do his best not to push me away. Fast forward and weeks went by of going back and forth about getting help, him disappearing, ghosting me, showing progress and then vanishing again. He blocked his whole family, won’t talk to any of his friends, essentially running away from any one he loves and wants to support him. He’s sleeping in his car or random hotels or couches of people who don’t know he has an addiction. I’ve spent the entire month worried sick about him and have lost myself in this as well. I quickly became the only support system he was choosing to keep in his life but even then, he kept vanishing leaving me to feel abandoned. When I realized my mental health was rapidly declining, I knew I had to break up with him. I hadn’t heard from him in five days and he was screening my calls. I was gutted and sent a break up text because there was no way to reach him. I also blocked him knowing that if I didn’t, I would easily forgive him in hopes of change.

When will I stop feeling guilty for leaving? For feeling like I gave up on him? I miss him so much and I miss what we used to be but I hear addicts don’t change until they hit rock bottom and that’s heartbreaking to know I’m apart of that.

okay so my Q supposedly has about 9mos clean. i got a weird feeling that i haven’t had all that time. those 9mos came after about a year of constant relapses.
i looked through some things. a while ago, i found a 5ml syringe, a blunt fill needle, a small bottle of sterile water, and a mg scale. he said he was going to make adrafinil capsules and i left it alone because nothing felt weird. but looking back i dont feel like that makes sense. why would you need a liquid to make capsules…
today, i found all of those things, but a much bigger bottle of sterile water. in addition, a large bottle of rubbing alcohol (both bottles over half empty), a large syringe with about 5ml of clear liquid in it with a blunt fill needle attached, syringe filters, and what looks like a wax warmer (we don’t use those).
he does have a bunch of different supplements that come in powders that i’m assuming he would want to put in capsules. but i feel like none of that really correlates to that.
can somebody please tell me if there’s any other logical explanation for all of that other than a relapse? his behavior hasn’t really changed lately, but i can’t think of anything else.

My BF has been in rehab for 2 months for opioids. He’s been contacting me daily. His behavior has gotten worse, not better since he’s been in there. He’s acting extremely immature, impulsive, disrespectful and texting me all day with silly and gross topics and won’t stop. I have to ignore him some days. He’s not taking anything serious at all. I’ve been supportive while also setting boundaries. It’s pissing me off so much that I’ve wasted my time being there for him taking his recovery more serious than he is. He acts as if he doesn’t care about anything anymore…like everything is a joke. I’m at my wits end with his behavior and really thinking of ending things. Previous to his relapse he seemed to be striving hard to build a stable life, now he’s acting like he’s in a frat house. It’s like he reverted back to a childlike state of mind. Has anyone experienced this?