Reality check desperation, spouse

[SMLtexas]

Hi! This community is so supportive and amazing. I’m writing because my husband of almost 12yrs is abusing adderall. He has a high pressure/hi travel job and someone at his work gave them to him a couple years ago. Fast forward to now and I am finding pill pouches with street adderall frequently. His personality has shown so many of the characteristics I have read in previous posts - crazy jealousy (he has never had a reason), Anger (already a problem that’s gotten so much worse), Lies, Gaslighting etc etc. 

However, he does not want to admit he has a problem. I have struggled with alcohol addiction in the past, so I very personally understand that you can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge.

SO I am writing today to ask for help - We have three beautiful daughters (4, 7, 9) and he is an amazing dad, but I am scared to death we could lose my husband to these venomous pills.

I’m hoping this incredible community might have some stories (especially if any loving dads on here might relate? Or anyones cautionary tales? Inspiration!?). I am desperate. 

My hope is that by sharing them with my husband he might be able to see himself and the danger he is in.

Thank you!!!

 

 

[mci]

SMLTexas - I am so sorry to hear about this situation - very little you can do unless your husband can recognize that the stimulants he is using are ultimately destructive to his and your family's happiness.  Real pharmaceutical Adderall is dangerous enough - if he is using "street Adderall" it is likely pressed meth etc. and the potential consequences of this are dire. 

I was a husband on Adderall, in what felt like a high-pressure job.  I took it pretty much normally and came to depend on it completely in order to function.  Adderall made me a bad partner to my wife; I was impatient, prone to angry emotional outbursts, and generally paranoid.  I was so focused on "being productive" during the short window in which the stimulants were working that I remember being annoyed that my wife called me to talk for 5 minutes in the "middle of my productive workday".

I thought I was working my tail off, doing really important productive stuff, but I was acting like a tweaked-out selfish jerk.  Part of the deviousness of Adderall is that it builds a temple of logic within the users' mind that justifies continued use above all else. 

Ultimately, what your husband will have to understand is that stimulants will eventually stop working at all for anything good or truly productive, and that continued use/abuse is totally unsustainable.  When I was at this stage, if I took the Adderall I no longer experienced any improvement of motivation or clarity of thought like I had before - instead I was paralyzed by anxiety.  If I didn't take it, I was still feeling anxious but I could barely get out of bed - no energy, anhedonia etc.  After staying in this pattern far to long, I finally saw through the fog and quit taking stimulants.  However, up until this point, I really had trouble seeing the truth about Adderall because I really felt it had improved some aspects of my life - this is the lie that Adderall tells you every time you put it in your body.  Until I realized the true nature of this drug however, I blamed the way I was feeling on literally anything else, when it was so obviously the Adderall.  

I truly feel for you and your family because there is very little that you or any other person can do to influence your husband under the circumstances.  You could have shown me the all the posts on this site and you could have told me that getting off stims would be a multi-year process filled with untold personal suffering and I wouldn't have listened.  Adderall hacked my brain chemistry in a way that made me feel like what I was doing was right, necessary and even praiseworthy!

Good luck and God bless you.