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I had been married for six years when I found drugs in my house. While my son was napping, I decided to hang a small canvas painting depicting coffee on the wall above my kitchen cabinets.
While I was up there, I looked along the dirty, dusty line of the tops of my kitchen cabinets, and there, in the back right corner, I saw an empty prescription bottle. I reached over and picked it up. It wasn’t dusty.
It hadn’t been there that long. Most of the label had been removed and inside was a resealable bag containing only pot crumbs.
Pot isn’t that big of a deal for most people. It was currently legal for medicinal purposes in neighboring states. CBD retailers were just starting to pop up, and it was only a matter of time before our state started selling weed as well.
But I wasn’t ‘most’ people. At the time of this discovery, I had been free from drugs and alcohol for over nine years. The only other person living with me—my then-husband, whom I met at a 12-step community—had also been clean for nine years. The fact that drugs were present in the home of two recovering drug addicts was a major problem.
“I found weed in our house,” I texted my husband. “What?” he replied.
I took a picture of it and sent it to him. “Whose is it?” I asked. “I have no idea,” he said.
“Is it yours?” “No.”
“Whose could it be?” “Don’t know.”
No one had been in our house long enough recently to even think they might have put it away, so I just let it go as if I’d never found it. The “mysterious” owner of the pot was not officially discovered for another month.
It was – you guessed it – my husband’s. It wasn’t just weed I found later either. It should have occurred to me that if I had not brought the drugs into my home, the next logical choice would have been: the other drug addict who lived there.
The fact that I shouldn’t trust my husband didn’t even cross my mind.
“When we discover that someone we trusted can no longer be trusted, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the entire instinct and concept of trust. For a while we are pushed back onto a gloomy, protruding edge, in a dark environment. pierced by plates of fire, swept by plates of rain, we are brought close to formlessness in a world without kinship, naming or tenderness.’ – Adrienne Rijk
Timur Weber/Pexels
I later learned that he had been secretly using drugs for almost the entire time we were together.
I was so stunned and so confused when I found out. I’m a smart woman. Not only that, I am a recovering drug addict myself. Shouldn’t I have known that the man I was living with was using drugs? I should have done that, but I didn’t.
What I know now is that I was experiencing “cognitive dissonance” as a result of my husband cheating on me. Cognitive dissonance, according to psychologyis defined as ‘mental discomfort resulting from holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes’.
Part of cognitive dissonance involves trying to deal with difficult situations through “positive illusions.” To avoid facing uncomfortable realities, we try to convince ourselves that everything is better than it is.
Suppose you have been diagnosed with diabetes and your doctor has told you that you need to make drastic lifestyle changes. While you naturally believe your doctor, you may not want to accept how serious your diagnosis is.
You don’t want to go through the upheaval of making major changes to your diet and exercise habits, so you trick yourself into thinking that it’s okay to continue as you were before. Then, predictably, you become seriously ill and you finally have to make those changes.
It’s not that you’re an idiot or a fool for not following your doctor’s advice. It’s some political science instead Arthur Lupia from the University of Michigan calls it a “basic human survival skill.” There are simply more important things than the truth.
Suppose you hear a growl in the bushes behind you. The safest thing you can do is run away, even if it turns out that someone just fooled you. Survival is more important than the truth.
Just as we apply fight-or-flight to dangerous situations, we also apply it to threatening information. People, scientists have concludedtend to engage in “motivated reasoning,” which means an unconscious negative response to new information that conflicts with our prior beliefs.
Our reasoning is steeped in emotion. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things and ideas arise much faster than our conscious thoughts. Our feelings arrive before our reasoning can.
It’s not that I didn’t want to see my husband’s behavior for what it was. It’s that my response to receiving information that contradicted my own belief system caused me to focus on information that supported my beliefs.
RDNE Inventory Project / Pexels
So I went out of my way to explain away my husband’s problematic behavior, which probably would have been obvious to someone else.
So my husband had a lot of red eyes due to ‘allergies’. He craved sweets because he had a “merciful sweet tooth.” He couldn’t hold onto money because he “really enjoyed collecting.” He rushed me to bed night after night “because he needed time to himself.”
“A man of conviction is hard to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he understands not your point.” — Festinger, Riecken and Schacter, When prophecy fails
It is so difficult to admit that we are wrong, that reality does not match our beliefs. I’ve thought about this a lot for myself. How even when I had drugs in my hands – not just once, but three times – I still wanted to believe that my husband had never done that. betrayed me.
I wanted to make the drugs I had discovered disappear. But eventually I had to give up my theory that my husband was a good man, or at least a man I should stay married to. Admitting that I was wrong about him, wrong about our marriage, was hard, but sometimes… the best you can achieve is to admit a mistake is that we can build something better on top of it.
If you or someone you know is suffering from addiction, there are resources to get help.
The recovery process is not linear, but the first step to getting better is asking for help. For more information, referrals to local treatment facilities and support groups, and relevant links, Visit the SAMHSA website. If you want to join a recovery support group, you can do so Find the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings near you. Or you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-799-7233, a toll-free 24/7 confidential information service in both English and Spanish. For TTY, or if you cannot speak safely, call 1-800-487-4889.
Tara Blairball is a certified relationship coach and podcast co-host for the show Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse. She is also the author of three books: Grateful in love, The diary of a coupleAnd Recovery and recovery: Heal from toxic relationships.
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