Jaime: I Was Married to a Meth Addict

Jamie was living with her meth-addicted husband for over two years while pregnant with their second child. Though she knew something was wrong, he repeatedly lied and made her feel crazy. She suffered in silence to protect him until she found his "sex den" and crack pipes, confirming her worst fears. In a last-ditch effort, she staged an intervention with his family. After dropping him at rehab, she felt free for the first time in years.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jaime: Like, I found a crackpipe. And then he would give me, like, one. Yes, but then he said he would stop, and then I would drug test him. And I didn't realize there was something called synthetic urine. I mean, this is all stuff I had to figure out by myself.

Brianne: Welcome to the Secret Life Podcast. Tell me your secret, I'll tell you mine.

Brianne: Sometimes you have to go through the darkness to reach the light. That's what I did. After twelve years of recovery in sex and love addiction, I finally found my soulmate myself. Please join me in my novel, secret Life of a Hollywood Sex and love Addict. A four time bestseller on Amazon. It's a brutal, honest, raw, gnarly ride, but hilarious at the same time. Check it out now on Amazon. Welcome to Secret Life Podcast. I'm Breanne Davis Gantt. Today, I'm pulling back the curtains of all kinds of human secrets. We'll hear about what people are hiding from themselves or others. You know, those deep, dark secrets we probably want to go to our grave with, or those lighter, funnier secrets that are just plain embarrassing, really, the how, what, when, where, and why of it all. And today, my guest is Jamie.

Jamie was living with a meth addict, and he hid it from her

Brianne: Now, Jamie, I have a question for you. What is your secret?

Jaime: My secret is that I was living with a meth addict, and he was my husband. And, he hid it from me from a very long time, and I, had to become a sleuth and figure it out and then escape it.

Brianne: Wow. Okay. So many questions. Okay. Before you knew his problem and his addiction, were you even lying to yourself that something was going on? Did you have any inkling?

Jaime: I partied a lot when I was younger, so I'm not a saint.

Brianne: None of us are, girl. Don't even worry about that.

Jaime: So I was more upset that we didn't have trust and faith in each other, that he could at least be honest with me. So I knew something was up right away, and I kept approaching him and asking him and telling him that I was a safe space and he needed to at least tell me the truth and then we could help each other. And he just kept lying to me. And so he made me feel like I was crazy and that I didn't know what I was talking about. And I was wrong, and how dare I? And so it really tests a woman's intuition, which is amazing, and we're right, and we just don't listen to ourselves.

Brianne: you are already stating what I've been saying. A woman knows, like, you know when something's not right, and then sometimes the other person, a man or a woman, makes you feel like you're crazy, right.

Jaime: Because they don't want to get caught.

Brianne: Yeah.

Jaime: For his sake. It's a sickness. I mean, doing meth is not a small thing, but I was desperately trying to help. But then the more you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, and the more it goes down a rabbit hole. And then meth leads to sex addiction, which he had, and a porn addiction, which he had. And then I was pregnant with my second child and had a three year old as well. So on top of this feeling crazy, destroying this absolutely amazing moment that I was supposed to be living in, it turned into a hell for me.

Brianne: Yeah. And especially being pregnant, knowing all those hormones, taking care of a toddler, and trying to keep your marriage together, and you're trying to just hold it together.

Your husband used synthetic urine to pass drug tests while pregnant

Brianne: Now here's my question for you. How long was it going on? How long were you questioning him?

Jaime: I was questioning him from the moment I was pregnant until, our second child was, about a year and a half because I just couldn't like, I found a crackpipe, and then he would give me, like, one. Yes, but then he said he would stop, and then I would drug test him. And I didn't realize there was something called synthetic urine. I mean, this is all stuff I had to figure out by myself.

Brianne: Wait, okay, I don't know what synthetic urine is. Can you explain to the listeners and me what that is?

Jaime: So synthetic urine is something you can use to pass a drug test that you can buy, apparently, at ah, like headshots. That's what I've been told. And you use it to have clean urine. And he hid his in his pants, warmed it up in his pants, and would use it to take a drug test right in front of me.

Brianne: Like put a hole in it, and then it squirted.

Jaime: It's like a squirt bottle.

Brianne: Yeah.

Jaime: So imagine visine or something. Or something like that. So, yeah, it was pretty like the levels of deception where he was trying to make me feel crazy was insane. So that was really hard for me.

Brianne: So when you finally figured it out and he said, yes, that is my crackpipe, and he was going to stop, did you then keep the secret longer from other people around you? Did anybody know what was going on? So this you kept to yourself.

Jaime: I suffered in silence for about a year and a half, and then I finally opened up to his parents because I was desperately trying to save his life, because once his parents found out, we were going to lose everything because they are his lifeline. And I just desperately didn't want my friends to know, so I didn't have to tell them later. Oh, yeah, my husband's a meth addict, and so I just punished myself, basically.

Brianne: So you kept this secret and you were trying to save somebody, which I know and other people probably listening know you cannot save anyone if they don't want to be saved. So it's almost an impossible task. You're putting on yourself?

Jaime: It was. And looking back, it only hurt everybody because my kids were getting half of me. I was a shell. And the first time I saw it, I just should have left. And then he would have had to figure it out himself.

You're looking actively at one specific woman, for him at least

Brianne: So what was your darkest moment, holding this secret? Do you remember a specific moment where you looked for me? I'll just say like one of my darkest moment. I remember I floated out of my body and was kind of like watching what was going on. Did you have any moment like that?

Jaime: I had two. I had one in the thick of it where I found him in the back in the garage with like a porn sex den. And he had gone missing in the middle of the night and I couldn't find him. And finally I found him and then I looked on his phone and it was just like, find your next door fuck and all these crazy porn sites. And then the second moment and that moment felt so surreal because I was pregnant.

Brianne: And I think porn is the worst thing in the world right now. I think it's killing our world. I think it's killing intimacy between two people. So that alone, if that was just his addiction, that's pretty bad.

Jaime: Well, you're choosing to do this instead of with me. I mean, my thing is always if you want to watch porn, at least include me and let's do something together. I'm not saying let's make about intimacy.

Brianne: Or that connection, but when you go off and hide it by yourself.

Jaime: There'S an issue there that to me feels like cheating.

Brianne: So that feels cheating to you? I've never heard anyone say that. And why does that feel like it's cheating to you?

Jaime: You're hiding something from me. You're looking actively at one specific woman, for him at least. And you were actively finding time to make time just to do this and to not be with us.

Brianne: Yeah, I agree, that is definitely cheating. I just wanted to hear what you were feeling. But I agree that to me would be a betrayal almost as going out and intimately being with somebody else, which.

Jaime: I think he was as well. So then the second thing was the second feeling that I felt was when he finally we checked him into rehab. We had a family intervention. How did that go? It was crazy. He was just bananas. The whole like getting him just to get him in the car took us 4 hours. but we got him in the car and he was drinking, his last drink in the car. And he was kicking, I was driving, he was kicking the seat, verbally abusing me, calling me names, cussing at me. Dropped him off at rehab. He just says probably the most spiteful, crazy things. and then I broke down on the way after I was crying. My body was just, like, releasing him. And then the next day, I woke up feeling so happy, so light, and so reborn. I felt like I died. And then I was myself again.

Brianne: That just hit me. Because letting go of someone you can't fix and a situation you can't fix, that you've been holding on to for it seems like over a year, at least. It's like two years.

Jaime: Two years.

Brianne: So what did you do that morning? You feel reborn? I mean, can you remember? I don't know, but can you remember? What did you do?

Jaime: I ran into my kids rooms. I turned on my favorite song, and we just had a dance party. We just danced. I mean, I love my children. I love my life. I love being a mom. And all of a sudden, I felt like I was free and able to be a better mom to them. Because now I didn't have this dysfunctional teenager that I was trying to take care of.

Brianne: Right?

Jaime: But I was so concerned about how it was going to come across and what others were going to think of him, which, would affect us instead of just worrying about how it was affecting me and my kids.

Brianne: Right.

Jaime: So, I mean, I didn't think about that till right the second I only thought about how it affected him, I was right. Every single time, I was right. My body I was asleep. The night that I found him in his sex den, I was asleep. And my body woke up and I sat directly out of bed and I was like, I know exactly where he is. I have to go there now. And then the times that I found the crack pipes, pipes, pipes, plural, different times, it would be my body would lead me to this jacket or this spot that I would never go to. There's no reason for me to go there. And I would put my hand and I was like, crackpipe. There's no reason for it.

Brianne: It was like your higher power or your angel or everybody has a saying was, like, guiding you to this place where you could not deny it anymore. It was like the mirror was right in front of you, and you couldn't go around or over it. You had to keep seeing it until you made that choice.

Jaime: Because I wasn't listening to myself. I wasn't trusting my instincts before. And now finally, to give in and to, like, my body, it just took over. And I definitely feel like I was given it out to save myself.

Brianne: So holding this secret, who do you think it harmed or it benefited definitely harmed me.

Jaime: people tell me now that they said I looked like a shell of a person and they don't recognize me anymore. Everybody's like, wow, you look amazing. Or, oh, my gosh, you look so happy. And I'm like, this is who I was before. You haven't seen her for a while. And I definitely think it hard my children because I let him be around them while he was even though he told me no, I knew better and that's my fault. And that's messed up that I let him be around my children even though he told me no, but I knew he was still using that.

Brianne Davis Gant: It's freeing to talk about addiction now

Brianne: It's interesting when you're talking and I love the things we do harm ourselves the most, but it's almost like when you were talking, you were so trying to fix him and not enabling, but a part of you was trying to fix him and save him and that was almost your addiction. Like his addiction was the porn and the crackpipe and yours was like, fixing him and you finally just surrendered.

Jaime: Right. You can't fix people, you can't help them. Yeah, it's freeing to talk about it more. And now, I mean, I'm still not very open about all the details, but it does feel good to not feel bad about it. Yeah, because I get guilted for it all the time. His family told me I was enabling him, which in looking back, they might be right.

Brianne: I mean, sometimes the people we love, we try, like I said, to keep helping them and sometimes that hurts them in the long run. I love that they said you enabled them. So how do you move forward in the future?

Jaime: me or him?

Brianne: You. I'm talking about you.

Jaime: I m have to trust myself and I have to listen to myself and not put up with it. I'm such a people pleaser myself. And I think that has a lot to do with why he's able to get away with what he got away with. Because I was so just trying to keep the status quo m and be the good wife and look good on paper and instead of causing a ruckus and having a voice and speaking up. So I think in the future I have to trust myself and if someone tells me something I don't believe them, then I just have to say fuck you and leave.

Brianne: I think the main thing, which I love, and you said it a million times already, but we have to trust our intuition and that's the point blank period. Moving forward, I will trust my intuition, you will do it. And hopefully anybody listening and ask for help.

Jaime: I think that's really important too. I didn't reach out and a lot of my friends at the end were like, why didn't you tell me? And it's because I was so embarrassed and so prideful. Like you said, the seven deadly sins. I think the more we talk about it, like you said, it's not such a stigma. It's okay to not be perfect, it's okay to have these crazy flaws and have people around you and just have these things that make you seem so fucked up. But in the scheme of things, we all are and, we can help each other.

Brianne: Yeah, it's to get rid of the shame, because once it's not a secret anymore, there's no shame.

Jaime: Yeah, it's definitely shameful of him. Like him doing it felt like he was my other half. So crazy. It's so crazy to think about it now.

Brianne: Well, I am so grateful. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story and getting to the other side of it and entrusting your instincts. Now. That is the key.

Jaime: It is so key. Listen to yourself and ask for help like you ask for.

Brianne: Yeah. Well, thank you for listening to Secret Life podcast. I'm Brianne Davis Gant. If you have a past secret that you've gone through that you're on the other side and you want to share it or a present one that's still buried deep inside of you, please reach out to me, message me below or email me at secretlifepodcast@icloud.com. Until next time. Bye. Thanks again for listening to the show. Please subscribe rate share or send me a note at secretlifepodcast. And if you'd like to check out my book, head over to secretlifenovel.com or amazon to pick up a copy for yourself or someone you love. Thanks again. See you soon.

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