Hooked: When You Love an Addict

Are you the loved one of an addict?
You are labeled as Hosea throughout this book.

Are you an addict?
This book refers to you as Gomer.

Who is your Gomer? Perhaps your spouse is your Gomer. Your Gomer could be your teenager or your adult child. Your Gomer could even be your best friend. To me, when you have an addict in your life whose destructive habits are corrosive to your own life, health, emotional well-being, finances, etc., then that person is your Gomer. Often we Hoseas are willing to go down the destructive path along with our Gomers, because we love them. That is why this book appeals to you, right? That is what is making you want to read this book. And you pray this book has answers.
I didn’t start out writing a book. When I discovered my husband was an addict, I looked for books to help me but was only frustrated. I didn’t find any. Everything I found was based on helping the addict. Nothing out there was just for me. I was drowning. Lonnie may never clean up! Where was my help? Who had advice for me? You can tell people to walk away and don’t look back, but that’s not really a solution for the loved one of an addict. The problem is that we do love them. Walking away is not a realistic solution. Even if we do physically separate, the heart is still troubled and tangled up with them.
Beginning in 1994, I started dealing with addiction—not my own but rather my husband’s addiction to crack cocaine. He used other drugs, too, including alcohol and marijuana, but his real love was crack. In 1999, while driving down the road to find my husband, who had been gone a couple of days on a drug binge, I heard a gospel bluegrass song by the Isaacs entitled, “I’ve Come to Take You Home.” Through the lyrics of this song, I found a personal connection with the story of Hosea, a minor prophet in the Old Testament. For the first time, my emotional roller coaster was summed up in a matter of three verses and a chorus. I pulled to the side of the road and sobbed uncontrollably. I encourage you to listen to the Isaacs sing this song on YouTube or iTunes. The lyrics can easily be found on the Internet.
While this story is very much the story of God’s love toward humankind in that he sent his only Son, Jesus, to die on the cross in order to redeem us, it also demonstrates the agony that one goes through when a loved one is an addict. While my husband didn’t sleep around like Gomer did, he did slip around to use crack. Crack was his lover, his mistress. It was how he spent his time and money. He became so engulfed in it, that he might as well have been considered its slave. He all but forsook our marriage for the substance as he slowly turned into someone I barely knew and truthfully didn’t like.
If you are like me, the news of your Gomer’s addiction came as a real shock. I wasn’t completely naïve; after all, a husband doesn’t stay gone for days on end nearly every week unless there is a problem. Our finances had taken a severe plunge, too, in recent months, but since my husband and his brother owned their own business (there were no paychecks), he explained it away, saying the business wasn’t doing well anymore. I didn’t have a clue how much money was missing until much later.
“There’s no easy way to tell you, so I’ll just say it,” was my husband’s reply when I demanded to know what was going on. “I’m addicted to crack cocaine.” He didn’t look at me. He said it flat and dry.
My reaction was equally emotionless. The weeks leading up to this revelation had already taken all our emotions away. There were none left to erupt. We talked intermittently for the next couple of hours. My first question was whether or not he wanted to quit or continue. He cried, saying that he wanted off of it. “Do you still love me?” he asked with pain in his eyes. Of course I did. I was hurting deeply, but my love for him hadn’t gone away completely. It had merely crawled into a ball in the corner to protect itself from any more blows. It crept out slowly and then embraced him like a mother would embrace her terminally ill child.
So there it was. He was addicted. He wanted to stop.
We still loved each other. It was just a matter of his quitting.
I would help him.
There.
With that settled, I took a deep breath of relief. Needless to say, I knew nothing about drug addiction. I had personally never used a single illegal drug in my life! I knew when we married that he had used drugs in his past, I didn’t realize their long tentacles could reach forward into a user’s future and poison it, too. I wasn’t prepared for the future of ups and downs, broken promises, and endless nights of tears. I didn’t know how often I would scream in the solitude of my own disastrous life.
I know there are many other Hoseas out there suffering as they watch their Gomers—husbands, wives, sons, daughters, parents, siblings, or even close friends—addicted to a substance. It’s pure agony when you try to help, giving all that you have attempting to somehow reach them, and all your efforts seem futile. This book is about hope, peace, and sanity—the three things we Hoseas long for yet struggle to maintain. I pray what I have gone through offers you help.