Betrayal Trauma

Hello everyone

I need to share my story and ask for support. It's been hard for me to reach out, but this is my attempt right now. This is going to be long.

I've (45M) been in a relationship with my wife (39F) for nearly 14 years. We have 3 children together. From the beginning I knew she suffered from addiction (pills) but I've always been able to handle it and support her. She got clean right from the beginning and had very few relapses. She was always honest and sought help immediately. She had never really touched alcohol before any of this, but a few years ago, alcohol became a significant factor in her life due to her job. She started to become interested, first in collecting fancy, pretty and strange bottles of alcohol, but still never really drank anything. I then started to notice the bottles in our cabinet emptying and her bringing home new bottles I knew she had purchased before. I asked her if she had been drinking and she explained that she started having a glass to relax in the bath with. I suggested that maybe we could sit together and have a drink then instead of her drinking alone. She was open to that idea, but it never happened. I soon noticed that the alcohol in the cabinet was disappearing very quickly and approached her again. She denied that she was drinking that much and basically started to make me question whether what I could see was happening, was really happening. Things like, a bottle I knew was already open and half gone being replaced with a new bottle, but telling me that's the same bottle that's been in there for weeks and she hasn't had any of it. After a few months, I started getting suspicious of her behaviour based on the disappearing alcohol, the long baths late at night behind a locked door (never used to lock it), she started keeping a very close guard on her phone and deleting all her texts, etc. I came to find out she had been getting close with a male coworker and had been sitting in the bath every night drinking quite a bit and sending him pictures of herself. Once I knew what was happening, I confronted her about the coworker and the drinking. She never really came totally clean about it, but just said she only did it because she was drunk in the bath. She did admit she was wrong to have an affair, and we worked through that to fix our relationship. Looking back, we focused on the relationship only at that point and not on ourselves individually. She never admitted that the drinking might be becoming an issue.

Moving ahead a year, her drinking had tapered off a bit. We had moved to a new house and things seemed ok. Then her drinking started to pick up again. I started finding empty bottles hidden around the house, morning, noon and night. She started going out for 'girls nights' and coming home severely intoxicated. (Couldn't walk or talk sense).

Some nights she wasn't coming home at all until 7 or 8 am. She would leave around dinner time some evenings, make a promise that she was only going for a few hours, then come home 8 hours later. She would ignore texts and calls the entire night and never text or call to let me know she wasn't coming home. I learned that many of these 'girls nights' were actually parties and she would drink so much that she would pass out there. We ended up having a pretty big argument about all of this and took a break from each other for a few months, but still lived together. We reconciled and she admitted a lot of things about her feelings and why she was drinking so much. She never admitted that her drinking was a problem, but she did promise to get it under control.

We moved again and I had grown a bond with some co-workers that I became very good friends with. We would go fishing a lot, play video games together and hang out a lot. I thought, my wife and I could use some common friends so we could both feel included in each other's lives. She had many friends, but none of them were our friends or friends to our relationship. I introduced my friends and we all seemed to get along great. She still visited with her friends, but she also liked to hang out, all of us together. One of my friends was struggling in his life and needed help, so my wife suggested he move in with us and we could help him. I agreed and he moved in. Things were good for a few months and we ended up having to move one more time. He came with us and we loved the new place we were in (currently living). One of the problems my friend was facing was alcoholism, which should have been a red flag for me (hindsight). Neither my wife or I drive, so I would drive with my friend to work as we worked together, he would drive us home, then he'd go pick up my wife when she was finished work. Things were good. Soon, I started noticing the smell of alcohol on her breath when she'd get home from work. She'd deny she had anything and my friend would deny he saw her have anything. After a while, she couldn't deny it anymore, so she'd admit that her and my friend had one drink on the way home. I asked if she could wait until she gets home and have a drink with me if she was just having a drink to unwind after work. She agreed, so the next day she came home, brought me a drink and herself a drink...but she was already slurring her words. She said she only had one on the way home again. It gradually got worse, where she was coming home stumbling and slurred speech and she wasn't bringing any home and still denying that she'd drank much or anything. After a few arguments between us, I finally sat them both down and confronted them. They both admitted to lying to me about her drinking. She was asking him to cover for her and he was doing it. I felt betrayed by both of them for all their scheming, secrecy and lying and I let them both know that. It should be mentioned that, previous to introducing my friends to our relationship, I explained some of our relationship history with addictions and alcohol to them. So this friend knew, but enabled her anyway.

Fast forward a year. My friend was still living with us and we were still mending our friendship and he assured me many times he was no longer enabling her. I started getting a gut feeling that there was more secrecy and scheming going on between the two of them, and I thought it was the drinking again. She was still drinking and mostly denying it still, but I had withdrawn from it and hadn't brought it up for a while. Both her and my friend had started saying many times "I'm an adult, I can do what I want"...mostly true, but neither of them understood about consequences...and that attitude was one of the reasons why my friend was in the situation of needing help in the first place. One night while I was working, I got a text from my wife. She was out driving with my friend to go get an errand done that I had told her I would take care of when I was home. She then called me, and as soon as I heard her voice, I knew she was drunk. I told her I was getting off early and about to head home. She met me at home shortly after, but she was too drunk so I decided it wasn't a good time to talk about anything. She knew I was upset and I was beginning to suspect something else was going on. I got off work early again about two weeks later and found the two of them on the front porch talking about me before they realized I was home. I confronted her this time and she started crying and said 'theres feelings there'. After another day or two of talking, she soon opened up to me and admitted that he had been giving her pills for at least a year now, that she had been having an affair with him for at least 4 months and that she relied on him to take care of things around the house for her while I was at work so she could sit and eat pills and drink and it would look like she was taking care of the house when I got home...and that every time she was drinking and taking pills, the two of them would physically do things with each other. (Never sex, she said) and that he was trying to convince her to leave me and get alimony and child support. When she was sober, she was ashamed and trying her best to avoid him. (Staying in our room at night with our youngest child and the door closed, so he would leave her alone).

The revelations crushed me. My friend had betrayed me and pretended to carry on this friendship with me and my wife had betrayed me in more ways than one. I think part of my current feelings have to do with having been in 'discovery' for way too long (years?!) and that it was a double betrayal. D-Day was a few weeks ago now, we both confronted my friend and had him out of the house within 24 hours, and my wife has taken major steps to recovery. She's been clean since that week and she is enrolled in a rehab program that she will begin next month. She's started taking an interest in her own mental health and looking at things like her anxiety and causes and triggers for her addictions. We have talked quite a bit about everything, but I know I need help beyond what we can work out on our own. I'm stuck with nightmares, intrusive thoughts, crippling anxiety about going to work (he works there), loss of focus, inability to enjoy the things I love doing, panic attacks , and a whole mess of other feelings. One doctor said possibly PTSD. My wife and I have committed to repairing the trust between us, becoming friends again and starting our relationship new. Her rehab journey will have to be completed before we can address our relationship 100% though. I just haven't got much in the way of support, because my friends, (I think they all knew), I can't turn too...so I'm feeling isolated and alone.

I'm sorry it was such a long post... I've just always been that kind of guy I guess. Once I start pouring, I can't stop.