The Forums › Forums › Tools, Techniques & Treatments › Impulse control, how do you get a handle on it › Re: Impulse control, how do you get a handle on it
Thank you, jeneticallymodified and Saffron. Yes, it’s an addiction. He has been to a 90-day program at The Meadows for it, over 10 years ago (a couple years before we met & started dating). He has been to SAA. Attended for years. He – briefly – saw a counselor. He has read books. He calls people he knows from SAA when he feels the “urge” coming on. . . and then still goes and hunts down porn, as if the phone calls had never happened.
He also used to play World of Warcraft for up to 90 hours a week, and still talks longingly of the game. He buys into every Get Rich (or Emotionally Healthy) Quick scheme that comes his way. He’s never met a shortcut he doesn’t love.
And I can’t boot him right now because I *am* in a financial pickle. I am unemployed (drawing only $1600/mo in benefits, which will end in May); I have no savings; I have already sold everything of value to help keep us afloat; the mortgage – which is mine – is only 14 days late at the moment, but I would be in foreclosure in a heartbeat without his additional income.
And I’m having trouble finding a support group that will work for me. I am atheist who sees huge problems with the traditional 12-step model. I believe it has done more harm than good. So Al-Anon or COSA are out for me. What little support I have gotten from family and friends has been: “Get a job, and get him out of your life.” Well, duh. But there’s no help for the day-to-day insanity. Help to keep me from spiraling deeper and deeper. No one wants to listen to someone whine incessantly about the lunatic they are tied to. I also suffer from clinical depression, have for all of my life. So my work history is sketchy; and finding – and keeping – a job for more than two years seems to be an impossibility for me. I buckle under the stress of having to perform like a normal person day after day after day. Yes, I’m on meds. Yes, I’ve had years of counseling. Yes, I have my own self-help books and books on neurology and psychology and neuroplasticity. But nothing every truly gets rid of the depression that eventually has me calling in sick to work many days in row because I flat don’t have any mental or physical energy left.
Anyway, the advice, “Get a job and get rid of him” is spot-on. It’s just a tad over-simplified. And, “Get support,” is correct as well. . . but the support available is terribly limited if you don’t happen to believe in the super-natural, especially here in Texas.
I am majorly open to suggestions on all of this. Because you are right, I cannot continue like this. I have told my boyfriend that, right now, there are only two possible outcomes: I manage to land a job that will support me 100%, financially, and he is out of my life and my house; or I will end my life. And right now the latter is *very* much the more likely scenario of the two.
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