What is addiction - A testimony

 When you ask people what addiction is, you are going to get a large variety of answers from a person's inability to handle their liquor to a disease that makes someone feel like they cannot live without putting a needle full of chemicals in their arm. I have found that at its core, addiction is the action of putting the wrong things into the God sized hole in our life. 

Please don’t take me wrong, I am not saying that all you have to do is find Jesus and all of your problems and addictive tendencies instantly go away. Many of us have heard stories of how it happened that way for someone - I look at these instances as modern day miracles. I believe that they did happen, and can happen, Just as I believe that Peter walked on the water. My faith in these events does not mean that I am going to tell people to hike across the lake to go fishing, nor will I tell them that all they need is Jesus to turn their life into nothing but butterflies and unicorns.

Yes, a key step in recovery is putting God into the God sized hole in your life, but that is not the only step in the recovery process. Nor are alcohol and drugs the only addictions that we use to try to feel better or replace God with. 

 -

I grew up knowing that my mother was a bad drunk. I did not really  understand alcoholism at the time, but I did know that very often her relationship with alcohol made for some very bad times in my life. I made the conscious decision that I was going to do better than she did, I thought that as long as I did not drink much or often that it would be good enough. No one explained to me that there is something called the cycle of addiction, and that it affects much more than the substances we use. 

Before my brother left home, I was aware of her coming home with many different men, and arguing with my brother a lot. Sometimes they would get physical. I had to change schools often because we moved often thanks to our mothers addiction. Sometimes multiple times in the same school year, and that made it hard for me to make friends. 

One of the most embarrassing events of my childhood happened when my new best friend from my new school was FINALLY allowed to sleep over at my house. Her parents were really protective, and I could stay at her place, but it took FOREVER for her to be allowed to stay at my house (maybe a couple of months and parent meetings, but it really felt like a lifetime to us as kids). 

I really don’t remember how the argument started. My friend and I were playing and decided to go to the living room for something and my mother was punching my brother a lot. He broke free and grabbed his hunting rifle and pointed it at her and told her that if she touched him again he would shoot her. 

My friend and I were sobbing and terrorized, we hid behind the recliner and I don't remember how, when or why we came out. Police came, my brother went to juvenile detention and my friend was never allowed at my house again - in fact she never spoke to me again. I think my brother was 16 at the time and I was 10.

My mother apologized to me, explaining how my brother just drove her up the wall sometimes and how when he leaves home she and I would have the best time in the world because it would be “:just the girls” and I could have friends over all of the time without fear of anything like that ever happening again. 

This was so believable to me - it seemed like my brother was always getting in between my mom and I. Many times I remembered how he would see mom pull in the driveway and he would send me to my room, outside to clean horse stalls or to visit the neighbors. I had no doubt that life was going to be perfect when he left home. 

He was able to get into the Marine Corps early and I very quickly learned that my brother had not been keeping me from having a relationship with our mother, he had been protecting me from her. Very quickly I was able to tell by the way she pulled into the driveway if she was in “one of her moods”, and I realized that my brother had learned that same skill and would get me out of harm's way. Now I learned that it is much harder to hide when I was the only person she has to take her aggression out on. 

Sleeping under every blanket and stuffed animal I could find does not soften punches very well. I even tried sleeping in my closet and under my bed - but learned that she would beat me harder if she had to look for me first. I felt crushed and all alone and confused. I had thought that my big brother was mean, but it turned out that he had been my shelter and I couldn't even tell him thank you. Now I was left to live with this stranger who was supposed to be my mother.

  
    One Christmas my brother and his wife came home and we all stayed at mom’s house, and I thought maybe that everything would be right in my little world again. The upstairs bedrooms were being used by the kids, so my brother and his wife slept on one sofa, and I was on another. The sofa I slept on was on the other side of the wall of my mothers headboard. I knew when she came in from the bar because the headboard knocking on the wall kept me awake for what felt like forever. I thought this was odd because her boyfriend was supposed to be out of town until the next day. 

I walked into the kitchen the next morning to find her kissing some guy I had never seen before goodbye. Her boyfriend showed up later that day and there was much arguing between them. My brother and his family left early, and my mother asked me to lie to her boyfriend for her and say that there was no other man the night before. She disgusted me, I added another thing to my list - not only would I never be a drunk, I would never be a cheater either.

I could avoid being a drunk by never drinking much or often, but I could not avoid putting men in the God Sized Hole in my life by limiting myself to only one man at a time. I desperately wanted to be loved. I was lonely before my brother left home, and felt desolate and abandoned after he was gone. 

After years of being called a whore and accused of sleeping with my mothers boyfriends, I became sexually active with a boy my own age. The feeling of being loved exhilarated me, and I could not get enough of it. However, there was a problem. My boyfriend, ******, was powerless when my mother came after him and decided that she didn't like him. Being 15, neither of us could get me away from her, and thanks to lies she told we lost contact while I was in and out of foster homes. 

I soon learned that men had more power than boys. A man had his own vehicle, money and house. My mother couldn't intimidate a man’s parents, and if I hid the beatings she gave me, I wouldn’t be separated from a man by being placed in another foster home. I would be able to find the love I needed. 

So **** and I started dating. In his twenties, he was a man. I didn't care if he lived in a camper, he taught me things about working on cars and I learned how to play house and dreamed that he and I would have a life together. My mother found out and got a restraining order on him, and we stopped seeing each other after he was sent to jail for giving me the love I craved. I am so grateful that he did not get a statutory rape charge over me, because I was over 16 that charge was not possible in our state, but in many states he would have been labeled a pedophile for loving me. 

Next was *****. I wish someone had gotten a restraining order to keep him away from me, and I don't know why it didn't work out that way. After I had two sons and he and I were married, I learned that he was a registered sex offender, and pedophile.  If there had been a restraining order to keep him away from 16 year old me, he would have been sent back to prison for a parole violation. Instead, I became his victim - but I didn't recognize that for what it was until I was 40. But I thought I just wanted to be loved, and he took great advantage of that.