Loving an Addict: How Alcohol Made Him Disappear (And How I Found Myself)

When we met I felt a transcendent peacefulness around him. I mistook that feeling for divine confirmation — that he was someone special, someone meant for me, and I for him.

Looking back, I understand now that it wasn’t peacefulness I felt. It was the eerie calm before a storm I didn’t see coming.

The Human Pitbull

Jared once described himself as a pitbull.

“No one knows what to expect. Especially not the pitbull,” he explained, looking somber.

The truth was, he carried the scars of a painful past, a past far uglier than my relatively ordinary one.

He had been the unwanted child of a young teen mom and the man who had seduced and impregnated her. Forced into marriage together, his resentful father took out all his rage on his wife and children, regularly beating them while drunk. His mom also became an abusive drunk and sometimes resented her son for being the reason she was trapped in a hellish marriage.

Still, I didn’t realize the extent of the brutality of his upbringing until Jared opened up one day about the time he finally erupted as a teenager and almost beat his father to death with a metal bat, putting him in the hospital for days.

On the one hand, I completely understood how being badly abused your whole childhood will cause enough pent-up rage to kill or nearly kill your abuser.

At the same time, I also wondered — deeply unsettled — what kind of effects this kind of childhood rage had on the development of his soul.

…

Our early days were intoxicating, but as summer cooled into autumn, cracks began to show. The more I got to know him, the more I judged him. He blatantly cheated, drank like a fish, brought me (and other women) around his teenage daughters, slept in, and partied.

And that was just his charming side.

As time went on, I haplessly witnessed a few of his rage-fueled tantrums.

So, I pulled away.

I initially assumed that once I lost respect, I’d lose the physical attraction as well.

Much to my dismay, I learned that you can be turned off by someone’s negative qualities and still crave them like a hard drug.

Dammit.

When Rock Bottom Isn’t Actually Rock Bottom

One Thanksgiving night, Jared texted me: “You up?”

Normally, I ignored his sporadic booty calls. But that night, I was vulnerable — tipsy from red wine and reeling from recent trauma.

I let him in.

By dawn, furious banging on the window shattered the silence. His girlfriend had tracked us down.

Though she already knew he was a prolific cheater, this event was the last straw for her. She promptly dumped Jared, taking everything with her — their house, business, dogs, and even his truck.

In the months that followed, his life unraveled completely.

Jared was reeling: spending his free time drinking and paying strippers and sex workers.

I tolerated his drinking, his tantrums, and his disregard for my boundaries because, on some level, I felt responsible for his rock bottom.

He had, after all, been at my place when he got caught and blew up his entire life.

Still, I felt a darkness swallowing him up quickly.

I felt scared.

How much longer will this rock-bottom behavior last? I asked myself more than once.

Much to my disappointment, half a year later, he was still spiraling.

In fact, he seemed worse, having recently lost his job building houses with his ex’s brother.He’d been unemployed for months now, constantly wiring money from his pension account to pay for his constant partying. When not drunk and partying with others, he was nagging me.

Eventually, I hit my breaking point.

I told him I needed a break from him.

I expected him to put up a fuss, to refuse my request, to keep showing up at my doorstep, petulant and sad.

After all, that’s kind of what he’d been doing for the past six months since his girlfriend dumped him.

I was wrong.

Fake Redemption: When Hope Becomes a Lie

Jared kept his distance after that.

In fact, he completely disappeared. Like a ghost.

He did, however, occasionally answer my wellness-check calls, and over time, he claimed to be turning his life around.

He got a new job, started a construction business, and found a new girlfriend named Iris, a young woman with a three-year-old daughter.

I told him bitterly, “I hope you treat her better than you treated me.”

I never expected Iris to call me.

Early one morning just before Halloween, she did.

Jared had been arrested the night before for assaulting both her and her stepfather in a drunken rage. He was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence and a felony for harming an elderly person.

She told me she was considering bailing him out, hopeful that sobriety conditions enforced by a court-ordered alcohol monitor might fix him.

“I don’t think he can change,” I admitted.

“I think he can,” she insisted, sounding confident.

My stomach twisted, fearful, for her, but especially for her daughter toddler.

The Brutally Ugly Truth About Healing

Jared grew up in a violently abusive household, which makes sense. Research shows that individuals with high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores are significantly more likely to develop substance use disorders and exhibit violent behavior.

But knowing the science doesn’t excuse the harm he caused.

I finally quit Jared for good that day.

Looking back, I see how my unresolved trauma made me drawn to his chaos. I had chosen someone incapable of loving me because it felt familiar — like the fractured love I’d known growing up.

But I also learned that surrendering to pain is a choice.

Jared may not have chosen his trauma, but he chose to let it consume him.

Healing, too, is a choice — one that requires boundaries and the courage to walk away from someone else’s darkness before it extinguishes your own.

Because — you see — healing isn’t hoping someone else changes; it’s choosing to walk away and protect your own peace before you drown.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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