Lying: making false statements on purpose. Lying includes deception, gaslighting, manipulation, evasion, forgery, stonewalling, fraud, and fabrication.
All people lie, whether you’re an addict or not, good or bad. Lying is a symptom of addiction. Addicts lie to cover up their behavior; they don’t want to hurt their loved ones or be confronted.
My spouse may not be doing hard drugs, but I’m convinced he is addicted to marijuana. He’s changing. He’s moody. He’s lying. I cared about my spouse and wanted to help him or at least talk about what was going on. I looked at one of my spouse’s AA papers. I saw a blip that said recovering addicts should abstain from all mood-altering drugs and alcohol because it triggers old behaviors. One day, I showed my spouse the paper, and he snatched the paper and told me not to touch his stuff again. When confronted with the truth, he further distanced himself from our relationship.
The more my spouse went to AA, the more he got involved. People from different AA groups started asking him to speak at their meetings. The big lie was that he was lying about his sobriety in his speeches. And after the sessions, on the way home, he smoked weed. He was living a lie. He was lying to his family, me, and AA. When I confronted him about the lies and deception, he got mad and accused me of jealousy and everything under the sun. There’s a difference between sitting in an AA meeting trying to get better humbly with your mouth shut, knowing you still dibble & dabble, and deliberately telling lies in public about being abstinent. People believed his lies. I was torn. I was proud that whatever he did and however he did it might help somebody. But what he was doing was wrong. Lying to yourself doesn’t help you to recover. I no longer approved of him self-medicating, but I tolerated it, which drove a wedge between us.
I stopped trusting my spouse because of the lies, and he stopped trusting me because I might expose him. I suspected he was cheating, but I can’t prove it. He’s gone all day, at work, meetings, or God knows where. When he comes home, we chit-chat; he eats dinner and stays glued to the Tv for the rest of the night. The kids are upstairs, and I don’t dare question him out of fear he’d get upset and loud. I watched him and wondered what I had gotten myself into. I recalled my dysfunctional family growing up, all the times my mom asked my dad where he’d been, and all the times my dad lied and told her: at an AA meeting. I feel like a cycle is repeating itself. Now I’m haunted, wondering if my children will repeat the cycle.
Speaking of lies, I developed my own bad habit. I lied too, all the time. I am a liar. I lied and told myself my lies were noble and his lies were sinister. I lied to cover my spouse’s lies and behavior. I lied, pretending to have a headache or to be asleep. I told shopping lies, don’t tell your daddy lies, you’re right, it’s my fault lies, everything is peachy-keen lies, he didn’t mean it lies, this is from both of us lies. I lied to keep the peace, and I lied to protect the children…