When someone you love has an addiction

Three weeks into my marriage, I discovered my husband’s addiction to alcohol. It was like a one-and-done knock-out punch. I was out cold and left in a daze of anxiety and confusion for weeks. It was like getting shoved onto a roller-coaster of denial, anger, shame, fear, panic and extreme grief. But what surprised me the most was the lie. 
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A lie is like a slow black sludge that fills your heart and mind. It rots you from the inside out. 

I had been so panicked about the addiction in the first few days that I never thought twice about the betrayal; about the lie. Looking back on it now, it is so obvious that it had already triggered a deep shame within me, but I couldn’t see it then. And as it slowly sunk into my heart, almost unnoticed, the ground under my feet began to crumble.

​Here’s the interesting part: most people would think that my husband’s betrayal would have broken the trust in our marriage, which it technically did, but the most harmful and unexpected consequence was that I stopped trusting myself. I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. I didn’t know what parts of my lived experiences and memories I could trust, and that included God. 

​I had never felt so alone and so helpless in my life. I had absolutely no-one to turn to. I couldn’t turn to my friends and family because they would be biased, which would have just divided Daniel and I even more. I also couldn’t afford to go see a counselor. 

I scoured the internet for anything I could find to help me understand addiction. I looked everywhere I could for testimonies of couples that had found a way through so that I could try and imitate them and use their strategies, but I found almost nothing. Instead, I was met with devastating statistics about marriage and addiction. I had no one to turn to but God. Even though I wasn’t particularly impressed with Him at that time, I had no other choice.

So I reluctantly prayed… Since I was a young girl, everytime I had a problem in my life, my mom would tell me to go talk to Jesus about it. She never gave me any other instructions, she simply told me to go talk to Him. So that’s what I did, I talked to Him like I would anyone else and I have continued to do that in prayer time ever since. It has proven to be such an incredible blessing, and this situation was no exception.

​​I prayed for weeks and told God exactly how I was feeling and what I was thinking. I hid nothing from Him. I spoke to Him plainly, and honestly, disrespectfully many times. I was angry. I felt I had been betrayed and I didn’t trust Him anymore. I yelled at Him in my heart and asked Him why He would ever let this happen to me. And He didn’t abandon me. Quite the opposite! He showed up in big and unexpected ways. 

He met me in those dark places. He answered all of my questions, slowly letting His truth sink deeply into my heart. With each answer I was left baffled and astounded at His goodness and creativity. He gifted me a deeper understanding of the sacrament of marriage, addiction, and His grace. And once I was ready, He invited me to participate in my husband’s healing and conversion.

It's crazy to think, but all of this happened in about six weeks. It all led up to one final period of prayer. In a moment of fear and despair, I asked God how He could have let me enter into a marriage where I would not be protected and provided for. His answer shocked me. I felt the greatness and firmness in His voice reverberate through my entire being as He said: “I am your protector and provider first. And I will give these things to you, through your husband, when and how I see fit.”    

As I pondered these words in my heart, I began to see my husband through a completely new lens. Instead of seeing Daniel as someone who had failed me, I began to see him as a gift, as a vessel of God’s protection and provision. I no longer felt as though he owed me these things because it wasn’t really his job, it was God’s job. And if I didn’t receive these things through Daniel, it didn’t mean that I was deprived of them, but simply that God would provide them in a different way. 

What a shift in perspective! I was able to stop desperately grasping at my husband. I was able to release him, to free him. I realized that I had been robbing myself of the gift that my husband was, because when you believe someone owes you something, it's no longer a gift but the repayment of a debt. Now, instead of feeling like he was giving me what I was owed, everything he gave me felt like a bonus! Instead of anger and resentment, I was filled with gratitude for even the smallest things he would do. 
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You can imagine how drastically different it would have been for him to be met with gratitude every time he did something good, and patience and forgiveness every time he failed. But loving like this is just not possible without God’s help. 

​It’s an amazing thing to look back over our story and see where we are today. We now have a thriving marriage filled with prayer, joy, honesty, and intimacy. People keep thinking we’re newlyweds, even though we’ve been married for over 7 years! It still feels like a dream to see him chasing God and taking his role as the Spiritual Leader of our family with joy and intentionality.

But what I found most surprising is that we found so much  joy and intimacy in our marriage before my husband ever took his recovery seriously. All that had changed, quite honestly, was me.

​With God as my source of security and source of joy, I was free to love him unconditionally. That unconditional love created a place of safety and trust that my husband had never experienced before, and it drew him into intimacy with me. And this place of love and safety became the fertile soil for his healing and conversion. 

There is absolutely no way that our marriage would be where it currently is if I had relied solely on psychology or human logic. Don’t get me wrong, I still used the insights of psychology alot! But it was the insights that God gave me through prayer that brought about these transformations and I am forever grateful for His faithfulness to me in this. 

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Written by Rita Taylor for Faithfully. Currently residing in Saskatchewan, Rita and her husband Daniel, former parishioners of St. Peter's in Calgary, have been married for just over 7 years and have dealt with multiple addictions in their marriage. In her spare time, Rita enjoys reading about the saints, spending time in silent prayer and reflection, taking long walks by the river, and playing cards with her family. 

​​Rita completed her Master of Science in Psychology with Divine Mercy University in 2020 and is currently getting ready to launch a new program for Catholic married women whose husbands are struggling with addiction: womanofstrength.org in September 2023. "There is always a way forward when you have Him at your side! But knowing exactly how to do all of these things isn’t always obvious. How do you learn to trust God in this way? How does His grace work, particularly in marriage? How is He inviting you to participate in your husband's healing and conversion?"  

She invites you to learn how to lean on God, protecting the sacramentality of your marriage, and finding joy and intimacy through the addiction. 

​​Photos courtesy of Rita Taylor.