Hi BL
I hope it will help you when I tell you that I would not be here writing to you if I didn’t know the addiction to gamble can be controlled.
You feel you have lost your best friend and your husband has not only lost his too but he has lost himself.
Everything he has done can certainly be true of addiction and I know it is incredibly difficult to believe that a CG can love you when they are behaving so unacceptably towards you – but they can or once again I would not be writing to you.
It is probably impossible to know when your husband’s addiction began but it is common for those who love CGs to feel that there is something wrong long before it is known what is causing the rocky patches.
The finest thing you can do for yourself and your husband during this break is to put yourself first, enjoy the things that his addiction will almost certainly have spoiled for you. See friends, indulge yourself, take up a new hobby or revitalise an old one but don’t waste time fretting over something that for the moment is out of your control.
You are in the early days of separation and also just starting to gain knowledge of the addiction to gamble – it took me months. Every day does feel like a roller coaster but you can put the brakes on and give your brain some much needed TLC.
I believe that a really good coping mechanism to stop the lies going round and round in your head is to write down all the bad things you have experienced with your husband’s addiction. Bang out all the anger and hurt on to a page, then file it away. If the next day more things that puzzled you, hurt you, confused you, start whizzing round in your mind with nowhere to go then write them down and file them away too. Keep going until there is nothing that he has said or done to rock your world that is not consigned to your journal. By taking your worries and putting them into an external hard-drive you will hopefully be able to stop the same thoughts crowding and clouding your mind. The hard drive can hold your confusion leaving you time and energy to work on you and what ‘you’ want to do.
Hopefully your husband is using his time away to reflect on his behaviour but even if he isn’t ready to control his addiction yet, all the good things you do for yourself will put you back in the centre of your life rather than you living on the periphery of your husbands. To face a gambling addiction takes courage and when a CG makes a leap of faith there is often a void – if you have been looking after yourself you can be the rock on which he can rebuild his life. When he controls his addiction then you can destroy the pages and live ‘your’ life free of the inner turmoil.
The addiction to gamble is selfish and the way a CG changes his life has to be selfish too – they have to work hard at who they have become and the less distraction at this time the better. You won’t know yet what is true and what is not but you can know that you are not to blame for his addiction and he didn’t ask for or want his addiction any more than you.
I was hoping you would have made the group tonight but keep posting because you are creating a journal here and it is the experience that most, if not all, F&F members who use this site surprise themselves when they look back and see how far they have come.
I don’t know what your outcome will be – over the years our members have travelled on every road and arrived at many different destinations but none of those outcomes are ever judged, we have to make of our lives what we will. I believe that with knowledge though we make better informed decisions.
Velvet
