Episode 115: My Husband’s Addiction is Killing Me

Welcome to the loving truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host relationship expert and certified master life coach Sharon Pope. Hello loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the loving truth. And today we're going to be telling the truth around.

Addictions, because it's become very common for me to hear from my clients and the members in my program about their spouse's addictions. Now, certainly alcohol is the most common addiction that I hear about, but sometimes it's weed, sometimes it's porn, right? There's a, there's a bunch of different addictions that people can tap into, but it's become sadly very common.

And so let me just share with you the story of a client of mine that I'll refer to as Shelly. That's obviously not her name, but she would tell me about her husband's alcohol addiction. And she had plenty of evidence and experience with her husband to know that it was in fact an addiction. So she would tell me about how he would go to happy hour several nights a week and how, when he was at home, he was always drinking, you know, he might stay up late and Several strong cocktails.

She'd often just go to bed earlier, and sometimes he'd come to bed a few hours later. Sometimes he'd just fall asleep on the couch in front of the TV. She told me that the saddest part was that, you know, he was there physically with her and the kids, but he wasn't, like, mentally and emotionally present.

So he was sort of half there, and it broke her heart, and it also frustrated the hell out of her. And so she would beg him to please stop drinking or to slow down the drinking. And he would slow down after those conversations for a little bit, but it usually didn't last that long, right? It wasn't that long.

It was a few months or a few weeks before he'd be back up to his normal drinking habits. It was sort of like, as long as she wasn't applying the pressure, then He was going to indulge alcohol or alcoholism tendencies, right? And she told me if our 26 year marriage ends, it's because of this for sure. She was convinced of that.

And so in the context of our conversations, I told her, I said, look, your husband's drinking isn't the problem. It is a problem. It has become a problem in your marriage, but it's not the problem. And so I had to explain what I meant because she was absolutely convinced that if he would just stop drinking, their challenges would be solved.

But here's the thing, my friends, if you're dealing with this, is that there is something else going on that we just can't see or understand. So the over drinking is just a way. For Shelly's husband to numb his emotions in some way or not deal with something that's going on inside of him, right? I think of it as the sharp corners of our lives.

We all have these, these prickly sharp corners, and we can, if we can just dull those a little bit, if we can round those sharp edges a little bit, they're not so prickly and alcohol is a way to do that and to avoid the parts of our lives. that feel really challenging to face or really challenging to process.

So usually the things that we use, we're using it to avoid. So what I told her was there's something going on with your husband that is making him overindulge in alcohol because it's not like you feel great, right? Like you don't feel good the next morning. You don't feel good when you're not sleeping well.

You don't feel good that your wife is unhappy, like none, like, you know, when you're causing destruction to your life, even if you don't want to know deep down, some part of you does know, right? So the only reason we do anything is because it serves us in some way. And so it serves her husband to drink a lot because now he doesn't have to deal with whatever that thing is that's going on inside of him.

So I told her, I said, look, I don't know your husband. So I don't know what that thing is that he's avoiding, but I know that there's something that he's avoiding. And until you deal with that, he might give up drinking. But he's just going to replace it with something else to use in order to avoid. So that could be food.

You can overeat. Like, just go to the grocery store, get a bag of Oreos, or whatever. A carton of ice cream. You can numb your emotions through eating. It could be porn. He could turn to weed or other drugs. He could turn to gambling. He could turn to an affair. An affair can be used as a point of distraction.

And then the affair becomes the problem that we become focused on. Just like now we're focused on the drinking. It's a symptom of a deeper problem. Overworking. My friends is just a socially acceptable way to avoid the challenging things in our lives that we don't want to face and we don't want to deal with.

So the drinking isn't the problem. The drinking is a symptom and there's some deeper issue. There's something else that's going on. So what could that be? I told her, look, I don't know your husband. Maybe he is using alcohol to avoid the challenges inside the marriage. You know, they hadn't had sex in several years.

Well, he's probably got some feelings about that, that he's probably not ready to face or equipped to face. Maybe he has some insecurities or some unworthiness that he feels. You know, and he doesn't want to feel those things. So instead he numbs those emotions, pushes them down and avoids them with alcohol.

And we can't take out of the equation that there could be some trauma in his background. It could be little T trauma or big T trauma from his childhood, from his upbringing, from somewhere in his life that maybe he's never even shared with you or anyone else ever, but that's what's causing. The need to run from his own life to numb his own life as opposed to being actively engaged in his own life, right?

But here's what we got to do. We've got to be able to understand what that issue is because the drinking or the gambling or the porn or the affair, whatever it is, it just creates a, another problem. I call it like a smokescreen problem. Because it's like everyone's looking over here so that none of us have to look at what's really going on over here, right?

It's like just distract your attention and then the drinking becomes the bigger issue in order to avoid the underlying, more serious issue that desperately needs to be addressed. So this is not unusual for people to tell me this in my program. There are an increasing number of women that tell me about their spouses addictions.

Right. And Shelly wants her husband to stop drinking. Of course she does. It's rational that she would want her husband to stop drinking. But really, what she wants is her husband to feel healthy enough that he doesn't have to numb his life and he doesn't have to run from his life or run from his problems or avoid them or stuff them down or pretend they're not there.

She wants him to be healthy enough to be actively engaged in his own life and the life of the family, right? She wants a present partner. That's ultimately what she wants and that's what they need to be having the conversation about because otherwise we're just putting a Band Aid on a gunshot wound and we're hoping for the best and it just often doesn't work.

So what is required? What are her requirements? The things that she needs to think about or her next steps or your next steps. If you're dealing with some kind of behavior on your partner's part that you might refer to as an addiction or something that's causing a real problem in the marriage that you've not been able to get them to change.

So you have to number one, understand what is that underlying problem and can we, can he heal it? Is he willing to face it, accept it, heal it, change it, whatever. Are we willing, but first are we willing to look at it? Because if we're not willing to look at it, we cannot solve it. We certainly cannot heal it.

You can't heal anything that you're avoiding. You just carry it with you like a suitcase through the rest of your life. And the other thing that is needed here is, and maybe even more importantly, are some tools to deal with processing your emotions, right? Where was the class on understanding and processing your feelings?

Right. And they're called feelings because we're actually supposed to feel them. But most of us avoid them unless they're happy feelings, any kind of negative feeling we want to avoid. And so the way to avoid it, there's a million ways to avoid it, right? There's a, there's a bunch of ways, a bunch of things that we can use to avoid our feelings.

So we all, and Shelly's husband included, need to get equipped with some tools to help them understand What it is that they're running from and be able to process those feelings because that is a skill set and it can be learned, right? So we need some tools to be able to feel our feelings and we never got those tools, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

And so that's sort of what Shelly's working with. And if you're dealing with an addiction problem inside your marriage, that's also what you're working with. Now I heard something recently that I just wanted to share with you. So this was from Stephen Bartlett on Diary of a CEO. It's like one of the top podcasts.

And honestly, this particular podcast was, I mean, I'm just going to say it, it might be the best podcast I've ever heard. It was this particular one was great. And so here's what he said, and he was talking about addiction. So I'm just going to read this segment to you. He said, people's pain, sadness and trauma rarely looks like pain, sadness and trauma.

It looks like anger. It looks like hate. Sometimes it looks like laughter. Sometimes it looks like addiction. Addiction is a symptom of pain and trauma. And we're all searching for ways to feel less pain. For some of us, the pain is so unbearable, so unescapable. That the ways we choose to feel it become destructive in and of themselves.

We never heal from pain we refuse to acknowledge or try to escape. We can't pornography our pain away. We can't drink our pain away. We can't smoke our pain away. We can't drug our pain away. Because these escape mechanisms just become our new pain. We have to confront our pain. And I thought that was very well said.

So instead of coming at your partner with a wagging finger of you need to stop because XYZ, wouldn't it be better if we extended the olive branch and said, I think there's something deeper going on here. And I want to support you through that. I want to understand it, but we can't heal anything we're not willing to look at.

And so how can I support you in understanding what the emotions are, what the experiences are that you're afraid to feel or that you need to numb with alcohol every day? Talk to me about that. Like, if you can get them talking about their pain, now you're getting at the gunshot wound, right? Now you're getting at what's real.

And who knows? The drinking, if you solve that underlying issue, the drinking may take care of itself. It may not. But it's at least going to improve it. Right? So, I hope that that is helpful for you. Until next time, please take really good care of yourself and each other. If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage, and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team on the call.

We'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together. So you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to ClarityForMyMarriage. com to fill out an application now. That's ClarityForMyMarriage. com