Turning A Corner?

We had more honesty and talk that wasn't tinged by rage last night. I think he understands that the only way I'm going to be able to move on is if he moves on. We're going, for real for real this time, to look for jobs as soon as I get off work tonight. I hope that he finds a good job in a good shop. It'll save our marriage.

He keeps saying that he knows that he needs to work on himself and get in a position where he can start to make things right for me. He held my head last night and told me that he knows he needs to do a lot of apologizing, more than he's done already, but that it's meaningless to start until he's in a position where it is more than just words, just appeasement to make me let him stay around.

It feels like an improvement, and I'm especially hopeful because I had read his anger last week as that pre-relapse mess. I still think it was the pre-relapse mess, but he got through it. We got through it.

I also know that a few things have changed for him. He doesn't try to convince himself (or me) that he can do drugs casually anymore. He knows, now, that the thing that was wrong with him, that was making him do all these things he hates and doesn't understand, was the drugs. He'd been convinced, and convincing, that it was a deep, internal problem...and it is true that he is a deeply wounded man with all kinds of fucked up issues; however, the DRUGS are what have been destroying his life. He knows that now. It's happened finally that the pain caused by the drugs outweighs the pain that they alleviate.

At my meeting last night, we talked about how confusing and confused addicts can be in their first few months of recovery. I am ambivalent about how much "recovery" he's really doing, since he's not in a program or doing anything outside of talking to me and his mother about what's going on, but he's clean, and he's working through things in his head. Someone said that it's like you're dealing with a 13 year old or a 15 year old, emotionally, because these guys have been numbing themselves out whenever things got rough since they were 13 or 15. It's hard to learn to deal with life on life's terms, especially when your brain is trying to rewire itself and work out all the kinks the drugs have left in it.

Another woman told me that it took her husband almost a year to start attending meetings after she started, but that he's recently admitted that seeing the changes the meetings brought out in her really inspired him to want to go when he was ready. His mother keeps assuring me that he will, eventually, want to go. It's possible. I try not to push the issue...I'm hoping that his mother's progress as well as mine will make him want to go, eventually. If he relapses again, though, especially if he relapses BIG, like more than one stupid time using, I think I'm going to say that the only way we can be together is if he goes to meetings or therapy or something...it's a thing that I'll need. I think I'd feel a lot better if I knew that he had more going for him than fear of losing me to keep him on track.