Drug Addiction Stories & Info

I can’t tell you the exact moment an occasional drink became an every night thing but I do know the time-frame quite well. I was engaged and happily planning a wedding when I found out that my beloved fiance was married. Married and still quite involved with his wife. Seemed the two of them had what is known as an open marriage. Even with four kids, they happily went about their lives both separately and together. In this instance, instead of the wife not knowing, it was the girlfriend in the dark.

I was easy to fool. His friends and even his family members that we associated with never breathed a word to me about it. Here I was, planning a wedding, and there he was, never even filing for divorce when all along I thought he already was.

One night, he didn’t come home. I was worried and called his sister. She told me he was probably with his wife. What? He said he was divorced! She said that yes, that was how it was with the two of them. One or the other would meet someone and then the other would get involved with someone, making each other jealous. It was a game they had played for nearly twenty years.

I was numb. I remember drinking an entire bottle of wine that night and eventually changing to Jack Daniels. I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t socialize after work. I was an idiot and I was broken-hearted. Till the day one of my ex-fiance’s own family members helped me.

His wife’s cousin came to see me. She told me she knew what I was going through because her husband’s best friend had fallen for the guy’s wife and been played as well. But my problems could not be solved in the bottom of a glass. She knew because she herself had once been an alcoholic. She knew about my trips to the local liquor store, that’s right, still another of his family members worked there, the cousin’s son.

With the help of a person related to the one who broke my heart, I began going to meetings and have been sober for four years now. I am also dating a really nice guy who is serving in the military and last week, he surprised me with two bits of news: he received orders to transfer three states away and he proposed.

Today, as I once again plan a wedding, I look back and can not think anything but relief and gratitude that, instead of being married to a man who cheats, I am preparing for a life with a man who is sincere, strong, caring and loving. He knows about my time as an alcoholic and he accepts me for who I am.

I had urges to drink for a long time but honestly? I haven’t had them in over a year. I’m volunteering with my local chapter of AA and plan to do so when we move as well. I hope my life’s turnaround will help someone else just as it has me…just as a woman who owed me no favors did a huge one for me the night she helped me seek help.

The old addage drugs, sex and rock and roll must have been someone’s hallucinatory dream because in my experience? It did not happen quite that way. I liked music, loved it. I grew up on the greats like Journey, Cheap Trick and Styx. So what happened? I partied hard in school and had my pick of all the pretty girls. So what happened?

Drugs. Alcohol. They led to bad choices. They led to bad grades. They led to my dreams being just that: dreams. While most of my buddies went on to get degrees and make something of themselves, me and a couple of others wasted our lives and our time.

I eventually dropped out of school and got on at a local factory. I married a girl who had crushed on me in high school that in all fairness, I had not paid much attention to back then. Maybe if I had, I would have reached my goals. There I go again, giving others the responsibility my shrink says I need to take on myself.

We had some lay offs and my wife stepped up to the plate, working two jobs while I began drinking again. I stayed clear of the drugs this time around but I was just deluding myself. My wife tried to be patient with me. Still, when I could not even vent my frustrations in a positive way, making love to her, I really freaked. My shrink and my physician both said it was the excessive drinking that was causing my problems in the bedroom.

One morning when I got up, my wife was still at the table instead of at work. She told me she was taking the day off from both of her jobs because we needed to talk. She told me that she loved me and she supported me but she could not keep enabling me. Puzzled, I look at her. She explained that enabling me was allowing me to drink and making excuses for me. She told me she knew that deep down inside of me was someone who had the courage to fight back and get through this.

We talked a lot that day. She did not yell at me or nag me. She simply looked at me with love in her eyes and told me I was the man she knew me to be, the man I did not believe I was. She restored my faith in myself when the truth was, she was the strong one in our marriage.

That was three years ago. Between my wife, my shrink and my doctor, I sobered up and started going to AA. I got back on out at factory I worked at and also took a few classes. Last year I finally got my degree in business and went to work in a large firm. Things are going well for me and my wife. We just had our first child, a boy. I think I can be a good dad now and I know he will have the greatest mom there is.  I know she was certainly my hero when I needed one.

January 7 has long been a sentimental date for me. It is not a birthday, it is not an anniversary but it is the day I found out that Christmas wishes do come true. I remember being 17 and crying because my parents were fighting again. My dad was drunk again. I had the television on hoping to tune them out. I had my headphones on and was playing on my computer. Multi-tasking and just trying to not hear the screaming going on in the house. Still, it was all about my dad’s drinking and before I realized it, I was typing in on search engines “my dad is an alcoholic”. 

Then I saw it. A link about an Alcoholics Anonymous group for family members. There was a phone number and I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number. The lady on the other end listened to me and told me I was not alone. She said alcoholism affects every member of the family and that there were others who understood what I was going through. She walked me through the steps to get in touch with a local group so I could go to a meeting for teens who have parents who are alcoholics.

I went to several meetings that got me through Thanksgiving and the approaching Christmas holiday from school. A couple of days before Christmas, a sponsor at the group helped me to meet with my parents one Thursday evening after my dad got off work. She told my parents I had been going to a meeting for teens of alcoholics and that I had something I needed to say to my parents.

I looked at them and told them I loved them both. I then looked at my dad and told him that listening to the two of them fighting over his drinking hurt and that all I really wanted for Christmas was one whole day where there was no drinking and no fighting. My dad actually looked ashamed. My parents looked at each other and then my dad hugged me and promised me I would get my Christmas wish.

Then, a couple of weeks later, on January 7, he knocked on my door and asked if he could talk to me. My mom walked in right behind him. He told me that he had just returned from his first AA meeting! That was two years ago. I am in college now and still living at home and today marks the two year anniversary of my dad’s sobriety. It also marks the day I began to believe in wishes again.