[nomore 56]

One of our instructors in the substance abuse counseling program said “anger is a second hand emotion. It comes from fear and pain.” So logical and still none of us had ever looked at it that way. As a child I was always afraid of something, mostly of being rejected/abandoned by my parents. My anger at that time was more passive aggressive but already lurking around the corner. In school, I was angry and frustrated because the other kids never included me. As a teenager I was still angry and frustrated because all the boys I had a crush on ignored me to the best of their abilities. Looking back now, I know that I was in pain of some kind all the time. When I became an adult, my anger turned outward and my best know feature was my need for revenge. You hurt me, I will hurt you back before you even know what happened. It gave me some sense of satisfaction to know that I could finally take control and hit back so to speak. But the pain and the fear really never went away. My motto was “offense is the best defense.” Of course I was angry and outraged at my hb when his gambling got completely out of control but I was also in a lot of pain and very, very afraid. The feeling of being absolutely helpless became overwhelming at times. These days my anger is different I think. Most of all, I am angry at myself for making the wrong decisions over and over again. For taking the wrong turn at every cross road I ever came to. I should have known better became my mantra. The one time I pushed my logic, my reasoning, simply my brain in the background and let my emotions rule, I ruined everything I had worked so hard for all my life. I am not that great in the luck department but could always and always did rely on my intelligence. That is all I have and can depend on. I ignored my inner voice that told me early on to just run as fast as I can and count my losses quietly in a safe corner. I am also angry at the cruel system that people here call justice and that punishes everyone until the day you die should you ever be human and make a mistake. Last but not least I get angry nowadays when I am being told for the 100st time that I should have hope, that “it” will get better one day. That I should be optimistic. That I should be grateful for what I have. Nobody ever tells me where this hope is supposed to come from, HOW my situation will and can get better and WHY on earth I just be optimistic. Or WHAT exactly I should be grateful for. Nobody can change the facts. It is what it is and can’t ever be changed. Of course everyone is different and so are lives and circumstances. I don’t expect people to understand me, I just want to be accepted. I did have hope, I was sure that the day would come where I feel ok again. I did not want to give up or give in for that matter. I fought very hard and am proud that my daughter said on her fb page that her mom is the strongest person she knows. My anger was my best fuel, it drove me to show the world that I was still alive and kicking and ready to do whatever it takes. I always thought that once my hb started his true recovery I could rebuild my life and move on. But it has become clear to me that it was an illusion. I feel like the addiction is still holding me hostage because of what my hb did to finance it. I am not able and not willing to completely re-invent and re-define myself and hereby bow once again to the addiction. I cannot change what is important to ME, not to others, to ME. I always had a very hard time with identifying who and what I am. So I kind of built something for myself that I could call ME. The gambling is somehow still rules how I live and wants to force me to change my priorities in life. If I would have left my hb, had an affair, lost everything in a natural disaster, it would have been a whole different story. The worst these days is not my anger though, it is the almost unbearable pain feel. It never goes away and sometimes it becomes almost physical. I curl up in a ball and can’t stand it anymore. And the fear also never goes away. I live in fear almost every minute of every day. I am not saying that I don’t understand that this is not “normal” or whatever. I just think that the addiction hit me in the center of my being, it destroyed the core of me. Anything else I could have handled. I needed to get this off my chest and to write it all down. I can’t get rid of the thought that it this is what the rest of my life looks like, I really am not that interested. Thanks for reading and not judging me. It is hard to bare my soul.

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