My comments on communication are by no means a criticism of you. I unfortunately know only to well the desire to communicate with an active CG, to talk, to sort things out and hopefully to start again with a ‘clean slate’
I am particularly familiar with the desire to snoop and like you my snooping skills served me well and I found out all sorts of things that I didn’t want to know, the results of which pointed to one thing, which was the addiction was still there kicking and screaming, finding new ways of funding itself, more lies and deceipt and consequently more distrust.
Managing someones finances is a short term fix, it is a barrier to assist someone in their quest to control their addiction. Someone who really wants to stop, not someone who has made sure that they have left themselves an avenue to continue their habit. There will always be another avenue until he wants to stop. Your snooping will drive it even more under ground than it is already, you unfortunately will burn out trying to keep ahead of the situation, its not worth the hassle.
I can only tell you what I would do and that is to make sure my own financial situation was safe and protected and then let him get on with it, his addiction, his debt, his consequences. No snooping, just concentrating on thoughts of how I could best look after me. No more listening to the lies etc. It took me a long time to get to that and the burnout in between was awful, through the snooping, trying to communicate and pure bewilderment as to why everything was happening and what I could do.
It took me a long time to accept properly that there was nothing I could do and no real way to understand all the ins and outs of it all.
What I meant was not that there is anything wrong with how you are communicating with him, but how you are communicating with yourself. In your posts, your happiness seems to depend on his outcomes and not yours, you listen well to him and you have learned what you can.
I think from my knowledge of my own experience and reading between the lines of very many struggles on this forum, I would say that the toughest lesson I’ve learned and the best one ever was to begin to look after me, to trust and listen to myself instead of wasting countless hours listening to the blithering promises and lies of an addiction, through that listening I learned to look after me and put myself further up the list of priorities than I had been doing, the rest slowly fell in to place.
I hope that clears up my somewhat cryptic last post to you
Jenny