I have been reading for a few days. While reading and shaking my head in common bondage with everyone else here, I realized I should tell my own "story"...mainly as a means to purge. I have spewed my story in rehab, to patients, to doctors (who would even bother to listen) and on another recovery website...and when I tell it...it's STILL as if I am telling a story....in other words..not a REAL story...and in reality, that's the way my brain works, I am beginning to realize...I am never IN reality...IN the moment....and I somehow LIKE it that way....
SO...I was born to teenage parents in 1966. My mother and father married, but as soon as my father left for Vietnam, my mother ran off with another man just returning from that war.
I was raised by a heavy drinking, good-ol boy child/wife abuser....anyone from the South (and/or from Texas, Louisiana, etc will know these types....) and even though at first, my beautiful mother was kind, loving and creative...she eventually became an alcoholic just like my step-father...but worse...my mother was/is mentally ill. My childhood is filled with not only the typical alcoholic, child abuse family stories: the beatings, explaining away the bruises, the screaming fights...the embarrassing moments at family gatherings, social events, etc but also with the terrible moments like my mother pacing back and forth with a knife in her hand hearing "voices" that tell her to kill every one and then herself...the moments where she is strangling me with my roller skate strings and I have to punch her in the face to be able to breath....my mother passed out face first on the floor in her own vomit and urine with my step- father laughing and hitting her prone body.....I can go on and on with ever increasing horror stories.
At age 15, my mother and step-father divorced. My younger half brother stayed with his father and I went to the other end of Texas with my mother. My mother was quickly institutionalized and my unloving maternal grandmother, with whom we were living, forced me to live with my natural father who I had never met before that time. I was tossed from house to house, unloved and unwanted. I was kicked out for graduation and joined the Navy to have a place to live. My anorexia should have kept me out, (I was 90 pounds at age 18 and am 5 ft 5 inches tall), but my mental breakdown DID get me thrown out of boot camp...amazingly, I got a scholarship to college because my mother was institutionalized...I dropped to 85 pounds my first year in college. I lived in the dorms less than 5 miles from home because nobody wanted me around, (I was a reminder of other's failures). I married the first man who asked me...11 years my senior. (I KNOW this is long, I am sorry)
I will speed through the middle part of my life, as I didn't even TOUCH alcohol until I was in my late 20's...no..not even in college or HS.
My first husband was a religious freak and I was abused in many ways. I had a son with this man. I did the wrong thing and ran off with another man to be able to get away from my abusive first husband. When I told him, the next day EVERYTHING I OWNED was gone and I didn't see my son again until he was almost 10 years old. I had some good come of this as I went back to school, was able to live on my own and then moved back to Texas, met my 2nd, (normal) husband and moved to Utah, remarried, had a daughter. Then I am about 28/29. I have had terrible female problems since puberty. There was no disease called endometriosis when I first started to have problems, so I was tossed all kinds of hormones, pain killers, sedatives...you name it..I was becoming more and more chemically messed up and also, I probably AM bipolar as a result of my family history......
SO...I start to become dependent upon the pain killers....I never got any kind of help..I just drifted away until I lost my mind. I left my husband, daughter and any kind of normal lifestyle...and I dated all the wrong kinds of men...married ones even...I started to smoke pot, take pills, drink, sold everything...gained 30 pounds...just lost everything I was inside...(to this day...at this MOMENT..i still cannot find that gal I was in the 1990's...)
I am SO sorry this is so long....
I met my current husband after being forced to leave Saudi Arabia in 1999. I was not drinking much at that time...just a pill popping pothead. I was living in a studio and not even working in medicine like I have been doing since 1988. He is from Wisconsin and ALSO from an alcoholic family. We drank on camping trips...then we began to take MDMA and go to raves and parties. We moved to Chicago. The partying became more and more prevalent in our lives. We drank so much on weekends that I would not remember a thing. I began to black out. speed forward to 2008. I was, by this time, drinking 4 beers a night...in front of the computer alone..AND on weekends..holy cow.....drink, drink, drink, puke...drink more...every weekend. Then I heard my brother was dead and cremated. He had tried to get help and took the pills the MD prescribed...drank his normal..and never woke up...he was 38 years old. Unfortunately, the last memory I had of him was drunk and holding a shotgun to my forehead, (another long story) and so I flipped out and started to drink even more. My liver got fatty. I was forced into rehab...my first. I stopped for a little over a month then started again....2 months after rehab, I woke up handcuffed to a stretcher..I had suffered a grand mal seizure! Tests after tests couldn't find a cause, yet monthly, I would have a grand mal....
I have gone through 2 formal programs and only managed a month AF. I have gone to hospital twice for detoxing and managed only a month. This last time, in January/Feb, after spending a week in hospital with gastritis, deuodenitis, and colitis...vomiting every 20 minutes....I was again only able to stop a month...and here I am right back at it! Now my husband, who I thought would always be with me and loving me...is staying out in bars until 4 am or so... IF he comes home at all, he is found passed out in the hall, on a park bench, in the bushes...and he doesn't want to get help!
I KNOW I need to stop...I KNOW all the things I need to do....but I WON'T do it...it's like a beast inside me has taken over and I am trapped into this nightmare.....
and the seizures have made me seem almost retarded, (I am not very politically correct, you know), I cannot remember stuff...I am like a walking dead person.....it's like I am killing myself with neglect and feel as if I somehow DESERVE TO DIE.....
well....there it is, ya'll...long as hell and probably not making ANY sense.....
so..now what? HOW IN THE HELL DO I STOP THIS RIDE? I have tried and tried...all I KNOW is pain..pain..pain...sometimes being strong is a hindrance...and when I say strong...I mainly just mean BULL-HEADED.....
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