My Two Dependencies

I. Problem:

I remember coming home from college one fall morning and for some reason I didn't want to live anymore. My doctor had prescribed medication for my anxiety attacks and for some reason the medication wasn't working like it had been. I remembered taking up to eighteen pills that day and throwing the rest on the floor and crying. It was by the grace of God that my sister found me and the next day she put me on a plane to Florida where I was admitted into an alcohol and drug treatment center. I was so miserable with my life, I didn't care if I lived or died. I was in a miserable thirteen- year marriage to a man who drank and had extra-martial affairs. I knew I had a drug problem and I had some co-dependency problems toward men.

II. Life History:

I was born 40 years ago. I was the last sibling of seven children. Even though I didn't have any baby pictures of myself, everyone thought I was a beautiful blonde haired, blue eye baby girl. My father believed the woman should stay home and take care of the children and the man was to go out and make a living for the family. My parents married at an early age. My mother was neglected as a child and my father moved around as a child as well. My parents met in a park. My father was sitting on a bench playing a guitar and my mother heard him playing. For three months they dated and then they got married. My mother said she married my father too soon because she never really got to know him. My father loved her but he loved alcohol and women. So, my mother stayed home and raised us children and my father worked. Many times my father would come home late and drunk. He would be abusive toward her and us children. My mother never talked back to my father; she just let him do as he pleased. My father never let my mother grow to be her own individual. I don't think my mother knew how to be an individual. My mother was unhappy living with my father, but she would never leave him because she was afraid of making it on her own. My mother stuck it out with him.

III. Early Childhood:

I don't remember much of my childhood, there were never any baby pictures of me and I don't remember any special memories as a child. The memories I do remember were negative. I was an active child and always getting into things I shouldn't have. My father never had much to do with us as children because he worked during the day then he came home at night drinking. My mother neglected us because she never showed us any attention either. She was always thinking about my father and what he was doing. I remembered going over to my neighbor's house to escape the negative feelings from my own home. My neighbor was an old man who always gave special attention by giving me cookies. He gave me attention that my parents never gave. I remembered going over to his house one day and he had bought me a cowgirl outfit. I put it on and I wore it home and my mother made me take it back. I never returned to his house again. During this time my three oldest sisters got married and their husbands turned out to be like my father. They were alcoholics and physically abusive. They never left their husbands until after the children were grown and out of the home.

IV. Adolescent Years:

In my adolescent years, I got into much trouble. At school, friends, law, and drugs. At the age of thirteen, I was walking to school and a boy asked if I wanted to come over to his house for a few minutes before school. I knew this boy and I thought he was trustworthy. He gave me a lot of attention, so as naïve as I was at that age, I went with him. When we got there, he showed me some of his records. All of a sudden, he was all over me and holding me down and he raped me. After he raped me, he told me if I ever told anyone he and a couple of his friends would hurt me. I remembered walking around in different neighborhoods crying. Somehow I got my way back to school that afternoon and rode the bus home. I never told my mother or my friends and I know my life wasn't the same for a long time. Instead of staying away from boys, I was always clinging to them. My first boyfriend was a tough boy. We spent a lot of time together. Everywhere we went we were always together. For the first time I thought I was special. Someone was giving me attention in a way I never got from my parents. At the age of sixteen I became sexually active. After I had sex with him for some reason he didn't want to spend much time with me. At that time I couldn't understand why. He stopped calling me and would cancel our dates. Eventually after a year he broke up with me. "I was devastated." All that special attention and someone, who I thought loved me, were gone. My mother and I weren't getting along. She was off in her own little world and my father just drank. When I was seventeen, I couldn't stand to be around my parents and siblings, so I decided to run away from home. Three girls and I ran off to Nashville to meet some guys at an apartment. When we got there, three guys were partying. Everyone got drunk but me. I never wanted to drink alcohol because I hated my father's drinking and I swore I would never drink. After a week of being there the police found us and I was taken back home. I was shamed by my family for that instance. After a couple of weeks I started hanging out with the wrong kind of friends that I had met in school. We were partying and I was introduced to "pot". At first I loved it. It made me forget about my problems and I got to escape. I started smoking pot for a while, and then it wasn't doing anything much for me so I was introduced to acid, opium and other wonder drugs. I thought these drugs were the best things to help me escape reality and they did. I was hanging with friends who did drugs and even drug dealers in Nashville. We would break into homes and party. I didn't care much about school or what would happen to me. I liked drugs and what they could do for me. I liked my friends who did drugs with me. I thought my friends liked me and took care of me and loved me. I progressed and got deeper into drugs and I was breaking up with one boy after another. By the time I was eighteen, I had enough. I was one year behind in school so I decided that I couldn't take the rejection that I was getting from boys and drugs, so I decided to turn my life around. One night I remembered crying in bed because of what drugs had done to me and how I gave myself too freely to boys, I started praying to God and that's when I first found out there was a real God. This was my first spiritual experience. I dropped all my friends and started hanging out on my own until I was associating with a different set of friends. I started making better grades in school. I ignored my parents and their problems and focused on God and school. I eventually graduated from high school in 1978.

V. Marriage:

After graduating from high school, I decided I wanted to go to college. I went to work because I wanted to save up enough money to go. I went to work in a factory. During that summer I met a guy I thought hanged the moon. He was a handsome man. He was smart in many ways; at least I thought he was smart. After dating for a while, I stopped thinking about college and kept on working at the factory in order to be with him. After a year of dating we got married. I thought this man was going to give me everything I wanted. I thought I had love, money, attention and a house with a picket fence. I got pregnant after three months in our marriage. During my pregnancy I noticed my husband would come home drinking and high after work. I knew he drank and got high a little before we got married, but I never worried about it because I thought he would stop after we were married. His drinking got progressively worse. The more he drank the more I kept wanting to fix him. I thought this was supposed to be a normal family. My son was born and I thought he was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. But of course I would think that, he was my baby. After he was born, my husband's drinking got worse. I realized I was becoming just like my mother. I would ignore my husband when he was at home. I would take my son and go over to my friends or parents' home. After three years of marriage I had my second child. He was the reddest little baby I had ever seen. His head was pointed and when I saw that head I screamed. I thought he looked like one of the cone heads I had seen in a movie. But of course he was all right. I just couldn't take the verbal and emotional abuse from my husband and his drinking. I called my mother up and talked it over with her and I will never forget her answer when I asked her what I should do. She stated " I made my bed and now I have to lay in it". Another statement she said to me was "stay with him because of the children". She told me I couldn't make it financially without him and it would get better. So I stayed with him because I felt I wouldn't be able to make it on my own. I kept myself involved with my children. My world was always centered around my children. My children were involved in sports, and other community activities. When my children got a little older, I decided to start back to school. I was so happy to know that when I was going to graduate from school I wouldn't have to depend on him any more and I would be free.

After thirteen years of putting up with his drinking and staying with him he got drunk at work one night and his supervisor found out and gave him a decision to get some help or get fired. My husband started going to outpatient treatment for alcohol and drugs. I never knew there was help for alcoholism, since I grew up around alcohol. I thought he would be cured and our family would live happily ever after "Wrong". Six months after he went into outpatient treatment I got a phone call from a woman. She informed me that my husband and her had been seeing each other for eight months. I was devastated and my life seemed like it was turned up side down. I thought how could he do this to me. I stayed with him and his drinking for thirteen years. How could he break our marriage vows? I felt ashamed to even go out of my home. I felt ashamed to show my face in public because I thought everyone knew it and was talking about it. We separated and during this time I felt my body was in chaos. I was scared to death of being on my own. Just the thought of it scared me. It was like I lost half of my leg and arm. I wanted to run as fast as I could. I couldn't stand it anymore. I was studying hard in school at this time and trying to isolate my children from all the talk and fear that other children would tease them. I was fighting the fear and chaos inside of me. I decided to go to the doctor because my heart was beating fast at times, my palms would sweat, I would get dizzy and I felt I was a million miles away from everything. When I eventually went to the doctor, he informed me that I was experiencing panic attacks. He prescribed a medication for me to reduce the panic attacks. When I took this medication I felt great. It was like my first high. I was so calm and I could actually think. This was my new wonder drug (Xanax). I felt they took away all my worry and pain. I could deal with life as long as I could take the pills. But I was still afraid of that fear of being alone. My husband decided to go into an alcohol and drug treatment center for thirty days. During this time, I let my fear over take me, so I went back to him. As long as I had drugs I could put up with him. He got out of inpatient treatment and moved back home. My panic attacks had gotten better, but I was still taking pills. It was more than a year and I thought I could forgive him for all the pain he had caused me. I felt the inside of me was eating away because of the resentments I had for him. The more I thought about how he went out on me with another woman the more I took pills to try and forget. I became obsessed about that other woman. What was it he saw in her that I didn't have. It got to where I was taking up to ten Xanaxes a day. When I was in school I was swaping some of my pills to other people for some of their pills. I lost interest in everything that was involved in my life. School, my children, community activities. I just kept having feelings of being betrayed and I felt abandoned. One cold fall morning I woke up and got my children off to school, then I went to school, took a test, and made an A on it, but for some reason I didn't care. I went to another class and as I was sitting in class while my professor was lecturing, I had flash backs of some of my childhood memories. I got up to go home and as I was driving, I kept having flash backs of me as a child running behind a building and hiding from someone. I remembered having this same dream over an over as I was growing up. When I got home, I took about ten pills from the bottle. I fell to the floor and almost passed out. I remember talking to God and asking him to help me. The next thing I remember was seeing my sister and her picking me off the floor and calling the doctor. Two days later, I was admitted to a medical hospital base unit for alcohol and drug abuse. The medical doctor and counselor stated that from all the blood work they received on me, I had a high content of drugs in my body. They stated to me that, normally, with all the drugs I have taken, it would take a year and a half to wean off that particular drug. They informed me they were going to have to wean me off in three weeks because I was only to stay for thirty days. Believe me it was hard. During my stay I was participating in A&D groups, psychodrama groups, co-dependency groups and individual therapy. While going to groups every day, each day they were lowering my doses of Xanax. During my "wean down" I was suffering panic attacks, tremors, and loss of memory, chills and mild seizures. By the end of the second week, my heart rate was extremely high and they were watching my vital signs twenty-four hours around the clock. During this time I found a new spiritual sense of being through the twelve-step program. During one meeting, I was sitting in group and my body was still going through physical side affects and my counselor informed me that the next day was going to be the last day of my wean down. They informed me to get prepared for it. As I was sitting in group, I saw a dark face and it spoke in a very deep voice" Well Sister, what are you going to do now that you won't be getting your drugs". After that I didn't remember anything until I woke up an hour later in my bed. I asked my counselor what had happen and she said I went into a jozing state. For the next couple of days, my heart rate was so high I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The end of the third week I was finally feeling better. I learned a lot from being in the groups and I focused a lot on myself. After thirty days I was released and I got to go home. The counselor was worried that thirty days was not enough and she hoped I didn't relapse.

VI. Staying Clean:

It was hard trying to stay clean, free from drugs. I craved a lot and was searching in my hiding places to see if I had any pills. I was having using dreams and sometimes I could taste them in my mouth. I was even thinking of a substitute and of trying a new drug. My determination of staying off drugs was strong. I knew that if I went back to drugs I would surely die. I did a lot of crazy thinking during this time period. If it wasn't for God and the twelve-step program I believe I would had relapsed. So, I decided to get a sponsor. Someone I could call and who would help me get through the hard times of cravings and teach me more about the twelve-step program and co-dependency. I'm grateful to God because he gave me a special person as my sponsor. She was short, chunky, and looked mean spirited. When she approached she was the kindest, gentle, spiritual person I had ever met. She called me every day for a solid year. She never missed a day. She gave me AA, and NA teachings, and counseled me in co-dependency. She was the most interesting person to listen to when she spoke of how to live a wonderful life without drugs. I remembered one night after being out of treatment for two months; I was craving real bad. I couldn't stand thinking about drugs, all I wanted was just to "use" one more time. I kept pacing back and forth through my house. I called my sponsor, and she told me, "Sister, if you chose to use, I can't do anything about it. But I believe if you do use you will surely die. Remember the 1st step "We admit that we are powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable". 2nd " Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity". She informed me that I had become powerless and I would have to turn my craving over to God. After our conversation, I went into the den where my children were watching a movie. I wanted to cry because I loved my children so much and here I wanted to go back and use drugs again. I went into my bedroom and got down on my knee's and prayed to God to help me not to use again. After that, a warm feeling ran through my body. It was if someone had poured beautiful clean warm water over my entire body and I felt at peace. I felt like a voice inside of me was telling me not to be afraid and that I was going to be ok. That moment I felt I had found another spiritual awakening. After that night I didn't crave any more. I got my family and myself into church and my family loved this new spiritual life. My sponsor wanted me to do some community service work at Pathfinders. It was an alcohol and drug treatment center. So I started volunteer work there. I learned that if I could help someone stay sober and clean from drugs it would help me to stay clean. As my sponsor put it, we can never shut the door on our past but we can never go back and use. This means that looking at others trying to come down off of alcohol and drugs, it reminds us of how we were when we were using. When we look back we can see the insanity we were in. For two years things were going great in our family. Then my husband started working part-time at Pathfinders. We worked together many times for about a year or so. I met a male employee and we enjoyed working together and we became good friends. While I was working with this new friend, he informed me that he and another employee had seen my husband and another employee intimate with each other in the back of the center. I began to get that old feeling again just like I did when I found out about his last affair. When I got home, I confronted my husband and he said that it wasn't true and he didn't want to talk about it. I knew something was wrong but I thought about my comfort zone. I was happy being comfortable with my husband and I enjoyed having that secure feeling. My husband told me there would be more talk about the other employee and him and how they were going to be all lies. Deep down I knew he was lying. I went completely crazy. Those deep-rooted resentments came up in me like sores that were infested. Hate over came me. The most crazy or insane decision I made was one that has been the most negative impact on life and I still am living with the mistake today.

VII. My Co-dependent mistake:

My co-worker, who had warned me about my husband, was a responsible man who had a great body and was very intelligent. We were working together one night, and he informed me that he was resigning from Pathfinders. I just couldn't believe that I wasn't going to see him anymore. It couldn't have happened at a more insane time. I told him I wanted to kiss him good-bye. He asked me to meet him in a parking lot. Even worse than that, it was a church parking lot. We met and instead of saying good-bye we said hello. I thought my co-worker was the answer to the end of my problem with my husband. I had so much resentment for my husband, I thought I 'd get him back. So I kept meeting Tom at different places and over time we became intimate and had fallen in love with each other. According to Dr. Scott Peck (1978,pg.84) when a person falls in love what he or she feels is "I love him or I love her", but he states that falling in love is specifically a sex linked erotic experience. This experience is invariably temporary. I consider this to be true. At first when my lover and I would meet we were intimate with each other. When I wasn't with him, I was having intimate dreams about him. I never thought to ask him what he really liked or what he was interested in. I believed our relationship was only sexually motivated experiences. My husband and I separated. After about a year and during the end of our divorce, I became pregnant. After the divorce, my co-worker and I got married. None of my family came to the marriage ceremony. We didn't go anywhere that day, we just came home and watched TV and went to sleep. I remember sitting up in bed and when he turned over and went to sleep, it was like a hammer had hit me and I thought, What in the world have I done? Our falling in love with each other was gone. Reality came. I was looking at him and he became an instant stranger. I truly felt that feeling of loneliness and pain again.

VIII. My Second Marriage:

The first year of our marriage was hell. I got to know my second husband's ego boundaries well. He informed me that before we got married he could not support my other two children and me. I was not allowed to ask him for money or how much money he had. I was not allowed to look in his wallet or checkbook to see how much money he had. That first year I became very poor. He went on trips with his relatives and he really didn't want my other two children or me to go, so we stayed home. He would sometimes be gone four to five days and would never leave me any money. He wouldn't take my other two sons anywhere or spend time with them. I didn't remember him ever telling me that he would not financially support my other two children or me. Dr. Scott Peck was correct when I read that, when falling in love it lets us escape from the walls of our individual identities, boundaries and loneliness, and sometimes merge our identities with another person. I believed this happened with me. I thought, once we were married, everything we had together would become one. At that time I considered that to be healthy but later on I found this to be dysfunctional.

A son was born in our first year of marriage. My new husband was very excited. I had never seen a man so obsessed with a child. I guess it was because he was my new husband's first child. He worshiped the ground that child stood on and still does today. Every Saturday he would take his son and they would stay gone until the evening and they still do. He would never let me go. He would say it is a father and son time. I envied my son sometimes and I still do. During this time my oldest son was starting to get into trouble.

IX. My oldest son:

My oldest son started hanging out with negative peers from school. He started getting into trouble at home and school. I would ask my husband to help him because his father wouldn't but neither man would. For two years I watched my oldest son go from making good grades, involved in sports, and being active in church to truancy, unruly, destroying property and eventually getting into drugs. Everywhere I turned, I felt no one would help me. I was slowly losing my son. My husband never supported me at all. He only kept rejecting me. His world was his son and himself. It appeared the more I knew my husband, the stranger he had become. Reality truly sat in and I could not escape. My husband and I disagreed on everything and still do. After work he would go downstairs where his TV, computer, bed, and other personal items were and stay there. Our family became a two family home. After all of this I was still afraid to leave and I didn't want to be alone. I was afraid of not making it on my own. It was that comfort zone. I was afraid to leap out for the unknown. Sometimes I wonder if I could just take one pill I would be all right, but I knew that if I went back to that life I would die. All I cared about were my children.

Over the course of three years, I would make appointments to see counselors to help me with the problems concerning my marriage and my eldest son. We had seen four counselors during this time. Every counselor asked the same question to my husband, "Why did you marry her?" He really never told the truth. You see there is one thing he said to me. He was introverted. He needs his introverted surroundings, that's what keeps him sane and intelligent. "He needed his space". The counselor stated, But what about your wife? Where does she come in? His remark was, If she can not understood my space, then we need to separate. After four counselors the last one informed me that he married me only because I was pregnant. There is your husband and his son and I'm in the picture because I'm his son's mother. My other two sons never were in the picture and never will be. I try to rationalize with myself that things would get better. Basically I was afraid to be alone. It seemed every time I felt this way, I was like a little girl behind a door and reaching for the doorknob but afraid to twist the knob and open the door. I'm afraid of what might be on the other side. I've always been afraid of that door.

After three years of marriage I had consumed much pain. I had gotten my eldest son into several programs and treatment. He was getting better. When he finally turned eighteen, he had matured in many ways. Just when I thought my eldest son was getting better; it had got a lot worse. I had started to work at a girls group home so I could make some money; I had just gotten off from work. Thirty minutes after I got home; I received a phone call from a medic telling me that my eldest son had been in an accident. I could hear my son in the background screaming. He finally gotten on the phone and was telling me to hurry and get down there because his friend was dead. I was so shocked and worried. At that moment I got down on my knees and prayed to God to let everything be OK. I phoned his father and when we got there about seventy-five adolescents were all at the scene. I could smell alcohol everywhere. There were medics, firemen and police officers at the scene. My son ran up to me and was hugging me and crying. I couldn't get much information out of him because he was so hysterical, so we stood there holding each other. After two hours the firemen finally got the dead body out. I will never forget the white sheet as they put it over the body. I looked down and my son was beating his head on the pavement in the road. From the time I looked at that white sheet to looking at my son beating his head on the ground I felt I was in a slow motion. That was the longest night I had gone through. My son was at the police department for most of the morning until the next day. Apparently he was at a party and a friend of his asked to borrow his car, so my son let him. This friend took two other boys with him. Apparently after leaving the party they went to two more places and had gotten drunk. On the way back from dropping one of the boys off, the boy driving my son's car was speeding, and lost control of the car, and hit a tree and killed the boy in the back seat of the car. Even though my son wasn't in the car, he was charged because he gave the boy the keys to his car and the boy was drunk when he had the wreck. My son was neither drinking nor doing drugs that night. During this period my husband never offered support or comfort to me. I believe I truly went through an insane period and no one was there to comfort me but my father. If it weren't for my father's comfort, I would have gone insane. After two months, a trial was set up for the boy who was driving the car. He was found guilty of vehicular homicide and he was placed in state custody until he turns eighteen. He was only sixteen when this happened. During this time I started feeling a change in me. It was an inner change. Two weeks after he was sent off, my father went into the hospital. I was trying to keep my head above water. I was in my first internship with Karen Lee; doing good and having to go through the pain of seeing my son suffer but also my own pain. A week later, my father got worse. I didn't get to see him for three days because I had missed a couple of days from class and field placement. On the third night I was awakened from sleep, and I had a feeling my father was dying. At that time my brother called and said for me to come up to the hospital because he was dying. When I got there my father was unconscious. For the next twenty hours I kept having flash backs of my whole life. They were flashbacks of my father and the relationship that we had developed since he got sober 11 years ago. I never left my father's side. He died early in the morning on the next day. My father and I never got to say good-bye. I remember coming home early the next morning and my husband never hugged me. I felt he never supported or comforted me through the death of my father. It's been ten months since his death, I've been thinking about my life and how unhappy I've been. I've thought about all the relationships I've been in and most of them have been dysfunctional. I've been questioning myself about the relationships I have had and my marriage. The same question still haunts me, is this a healthy relationship? If I leave him will I be able to make it on my own. How will my youngest son be effected if I do leave him, so should I stay? But if I stay, will I regret it and grow old and lonely. Will I find someone else? Will I be so lonely that I will drive myself back to using drugs? When my husband and I grow old, will I be sitting in a rocking chair rocking on the front porch and he in the back porch? The biggest question I've been asking myself for ten months is, " Who am I?" As I've been writing this self-analytical paper I've been thinking about the big question over and over in my mind. So I decided to go back into counseling. I thought I had this figured out through my previous counseling. This paper has helped me figure that I hadn't worked it out. Thank you for my nonverbal written friend. I have decided to set some goals to help me with my other two problems.

X. GOALS:

As I ran these goals over in my mind I have decided what my goals will be. My first goal, I feel that I need to go back into counseling. I made an appointment for counseling in October to work on my relationship issues. My second goal is that I feel I need to establish more healthy boundaries concerning relationships. My third goal is that I will continue to go to Co-dependency meetings in concerns with relationship issues. My fourth goal is to continue to gather information from self-help readings. My fifth goal is to continue going to AA and NA concerning my drug issues. My sixth and last goal is to continue talking to my NA sponsor concerning my drug and relationship issues. By setting these goals I feel that I will find inner peace in my self that I have been yearning for a long time.