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  One minute we were fine, and the next it seemed like John hated me. The chaos of it was unsettling after I had worked so hard to choose consistent things I was accountable to. I couldn’t understand why he could treat me so poorly, in part because it was so obvious that I was so in love with him in return. I just kept telling myself that things would get better, but I was constantly worried about my appearance around him, and I felt like if I looked good enough, he might love me more. If I looked like I was confident, I thought that would make him respect me. Before I knew I was in the midst of a challenge, I had led myself into a cycle from my past of making an addiction out of seeking attention. This led to verbal and mental abuse, which were things that I had not experienced before in a relationship. That stuff wasn’t physical abuse, so it was hard to decide I was being abused and just walk away, even as a part of me told me that John was abusing me and that I should have walked away so many times in the relationship. He made me feel crazy for wanting to be treated well, though. I was making a decision to be a first-class citizen in other areas of my life, yet when it came to John I just let him walk all over me and lost myself in the relationship.

  The dysfunction in the relationship quickly became apparent to everyone around us. My counselor approached me and confronted me about the relationship and my lack of interest in the group because of it. The counselor told me it was an unhealthy imbalance. This criticism felt horrible. I wanted to continue to be a leader, but the decision that I made to stay with John was not a good example for the other group members. The decision demonstrated that I cared about my relationship more than my sobriety. The glimmer of hope I had been following felt like it was dimming at this point, and fearful questions came back into my head, just like they always did when a challenge would put me in front of a big choice between two types of lifestyles. How could I continue to help others when I didn’t even want to help myself? I chose John eventually. We were both asked to step down from the steering committee. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I didn’t even want to be around my friends anymore. When I turned eighteen, I left the steering committee and then moved up to meet with the twelve-step center’s older group, where I didn’t know too many people.

  John was three weeks younger than I was, so when I was at the older group he couldn’t go. It was hard to be at the new group without him. I felt so lonely and vulnerable, and worst of all I had been stripped of my leadership role. I lost the place where I was putting my positive energy. I started skipping out on meetings and functions just so that I could see John, and before long he and I were asked to leave altogether because we were such an unhealthy example to the others. The last straw was when John and I spent the night together on the couch at another group member’s home. I was asked to leave after that by a counselor from the older group. A different counselor from the younger group approached John. We were told that our relationship was unhealthy, of course, but that we were being asked to leave the group as a result of having disregarded the advice of the counselors that we break it off. They gave us a chance to get it right and come back if we did, but I felt bullied and pushed into a corner by the counselors. On one hand, they had told me early on that John and I would make a great couple and the next minute told me I had to break it off or else I was no longer welcome.

  On the other hand, I can see now that counselors knew they would not be able to help me grow anymore given the choices I was making to meet a challenging time in my life by using an emotional addiction. If I continued to meet challenges like that, the poor decisions I was making would probably lead me away from being sober eventually. I felt like the pride of sobriety had crumbled all around me that night. The sober path looked dark, and my heart felt so empty. I just wanted to be with John after that, because he was what was left for me. I wanted to make him happy so much. I changed some of the choices I made about what people to keep in my life and what places I would go after that. I had turned eighteen and also moved out of my mom’s house by then, and I was living in an apartment that I shared with three other girls from the twelve-step program. After being asked to leave the group, I had to find a new place to live. Only girls from the group could live at the apartment. My mother had the same rule for me, so I couldn’t go home. I eventually found a place to stay with a girl who had recently left the group on her own. She had her own apartment and was attending a different twelve-step program, but the apartment was filthy when I came to share it with her and located in a horrible part of town.

  This was not my first choice for a living situation, but I had nowhere left to go after I picked my relationship with John over my role as a leader at the twelve-step program. My parents wouldn’t help me out of the consequences from this choice, and my friends were no longer talking to me as a choice they were making to stay sober themselves and stay surrounded by people making better decisions than I was. There was a huge following of people that left our twelve-step center right along with us when John and I left, and this is the group I began to hang around with. I tried to keep up with meetings around town at new places. Going through all of this just added to my challenge of handling stress. The mental abuse and games were getting worse with John. He would break me down until all I could do was cry and plead for him to be nice and just love me. It was as if John really resented the situation and wondered if he even wanted our relationship at all. I had no car at the time, and I relied on John to pick me up when he could. I needed him and was back to the power dynamic in which I let somebody else have the upper hand because that person gave me the things I had to have. I would hang out all night and sleep all day with nothing else to do.

  I found out I was pregnant when I was living like this. I had taken a home pregnancy test and then gone to a crisis pregnancy center to confirm that I was actually pregnant. I was not ready to be a mom, of course. I couldn’t even figure out my own life. John just sat on the couch and cried when I told him the news. Talk about hitting a different kind of bottom. I was sober still while facing these facts, and I had nothing to numb away the feelings that came up. My first instinct was still hope, which was a good sign, but I hoped for John and me both, and that wasn’t part of what I had learned. The choice to hope is made by the individual person. I still felt like the pregnancy was finally the thing that was going to change John. He would have to be decent to me if I had a baby. Things just got worse following the news instead.

  I cried constantly and became more depressed. John would tell me that he was on his way to pick me up but fail to show. I sat by the window all night sometimes waiting for him to appear only to find out he was with all of our friends and had just decided not to come get me. It was like a wrench on my heart. I would confront him, and that’s when he would break down and beg for forgiveness, which was the normal emotional chaos he brought into our lives. It left me confused and helpless. I let that mental torture continue, and I continued to be the one thing that John grew to hate. He hated me so much by the time I was a few months into my pregnancy that during a fight he pushed me, and I fell and hit my stomach into the arm of an overstuffed chair. When I hit, I felt a pain inside of me that I had never felt before. The chair hit me right where the baby was. I knew something was wrong. This was not how I wanted my life to turn out. John just continued to yell at me. I grabbed my things and ran out of the place.

  Once I got back home to my apartment, I tried to lie down and rest. I called a friend to pick me up and thought that after calming down I would be able to see how everything was going to be okay. My roommate didn’t see it like that. She encouraged me to walk away from John when she heard what had happened, but I didn’t think I had the strength to go through the pregnancy without him. I had no idea that my mom had been in the same shoes once during her life. We both accepted a man in our lives who constantly hurt us because we doubted ourselves. I was losing the self-confidence I had gained to be a powerful person. By the evening I had started bleeding, and when I called my roommate into the bathroom to see what I saw, I told her
I was scared. All I knew was that the blood couldn’t be good. She called the hospital for me, and they told her what to do.

  We were supposed to go to the emergency room if I was running a temperature or the bleeding was abnormally heavy. I couldn’t tell how much I was bleeding. Worse, we didn’t have a thermometer at the house. My friend called to borrow one, and sure enough I had a fever that was rising, so she and the friend who had loaned us the thermometer helped me into the back of a car and drove me to the emergency room. They called my parents and told them about the situation. They also called John to tell him to come be with me. At the emergency room, John and my parents all showed up, along with countless other friends and family. My blood was taken, and I was given a catheter and an ultrasound to see if the baby was okay. The doctor told me he could not find a heartbeat. Once the bleeding was stopped, I was told I could go home because nothing about the baby was conclusive just then. To know what would happen I would have to come back two days later for another blood test. If the pregnancy hormone was dropping, it would indicate that I had miscarried. I was warned this was likely going to be the case.

  For the next day and a half, I lay on the couch at my apartment in constant fear that if I moved wrong, I was going to start bleeding again and kill the baby. All I wanted was for John to be there with me, and to him it was just too much to ask for. He never came. I was going through one of the scariest situations of my life, and I felt a loneliness coming back that I hadn’t experienced in so long. I didn’t know how to get through the emotion alone, and at this point all the courage left inside me was draining away. I was physically, mentally, and spiritually sick once again, even though I was on the sober path. John did decide to come and get me to stay the night at his place the night before I went back to the hospital, so we could go straight to the appointment together. When he picked me up, I told him that I needed to go straight to the house because I needed to continue lying down and resting. As we were on our way, he drove past one of our normal hangouts and stopped when he saw our friends gathered there instead of taking me to the house to rest.

  He pulled into the parking lot and instantly started to yell at me as he parked the car, demanding that it be okay if we stopped for just a little while. No matter what I said, he didn’t care, and the arguing kept escalating until we were out of the car in front of all of our friends having a screaming match. Finally, John started to kick the back of his car and get violent, which is when I raised the white flag and surrendered. I just kept repeating, “Whatever you want, John, whatever you want, John, whatever you want.” As he walked up to his friends, my girlfriends came running up to comfort me. They kept asking me why I was not in bed. They had been at the hospital and heard the directions I was to follow for rest. I told them that I was supposed to be in bed staying with John for the night, but he didn’t want to go straight home. When my friends asked what the fight was about, I had to admit I didn’t even know. At that point I just broke down and cried.

  I was too stressed out for any more of John’s drama, and I was beside myself at his behavior and lack of compassion. I couldn’t understand how a person could act like that. A girlfriend asked me to come with her into the bathroom to talk, and when I went in I decided to check to see if I was bleeding. Sure enough I had started gushing blood. I became really scared and shook-up once again, and I went out to tell John that we needed to go the hospital. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “No.” I stood there begging him to take me to the hospital, humiliated and ashamed, as all our friends watched. My best friend jumped in and said, “Lauren, I’m taking you to the hospital. Let’s go.” I wouldn’t go with her, though. I was convinced I had to have John to make it okay. I called my mom and Bob from a pay phone and told them John had refused to take me. Bob told me to put John on the phone. After he and Bob argued back and forth, John slammed the phone down as hard as he could and told me to get in the car. I felt such a sense of relief as we drove away. I would instantly forget about all the horrible things that John had ever done after he was there for me. My mind would dismiss all the unforgivable behavior, and I would lie to myself that everything would become normal.

  On my way to the hospital with John, I told him that I couldn’t take all the mental abuse and torture. I told him he was about to lose me. That was when he slammed on the brakes, which spun the car around. He pulled over and repeatedly yelled at me to get out of the car. I kept saying no, but he eventually pushed me out. After he drove around for a few minutes, he pulled back up to where he had dumped me and said to get into the car. All I knew was that I needed to get to the hospital, and I didn’t want to be alone, so I did get in. John then drove to a friend’s house instead of the hospital, and I repeated the fact that he needed to take me now, but he refused to take me anywhere until we talked and worked everything out.

  This one challenge with John was made up of several smaller challenges that I was learning how to face during early sobriety. I needed positive places to put my energy, but the pride I was taking in my leadership to newcomers at twelve-step stopped being available for me. I needed to remain accountable to other people, but because of my choice to stick with John, I was no longer welcome at supportive places like my first apartment and my house. I needed to choose options for my free time that encouraged a consistent application of the twelve steps I had learned. The apartment where I lived was disgusting, and I had nothing to do all day but think about the mess there that was a reflection of the chaos in my life. John was the one thing that I could use to fill up all the loneliness I had created for myself, yet the longer I stayed with him, the more alone I felt. I didn’t know another reason why I had made the choice to hijack my sober walk by believing that this person’s attention was good for me except for the fact that I had given up on the trust I had built for myself. I felt so beaten down mentally after the attention of the group was gone.

  My mind was racing so fast with emotions when he took us to his friend’s house to talk. I just kept telling him that I didn’t want to talk anymore. One minute he was telling me he was sorry, of course, and the next minute he was telling me that I had ruined his life. I always wished John could just make up his mind. The next thing I remember I was in pain, waking up on the floor at his friend’s house. I thought that from so much shouting and so many emotions, John and I had fallen asleep. When I woke up I had a horrible pain in my abdominal area. I could tell something terrible was happening at that moment because it felt like I was going to die. I shook John to wake him up and mumbled that I needed to go to the hospital that instant or that he should call an ambulance. He told me to go back to sleep. I could go to the hospital in the morning for the appointment I had scheduled anyway. In the end I found out I hadn’t fallen asleep. I had passed out from blood loss. John had decided to take a nap after seeing me fall to the ground.

  The voices of Mom and Bob came to me that day. They had actually been driving around and had found me. They came in the room where John and I were, and my mom helped me to my feet. Bob stood over John, yelling at him, daring him to find a reason good enough for not having taken me to the hospital. I kept telling Bob to stop yelling at John out of instinct to do anything I could to make John happy enough to stick by me, though I knew he never would. I never stopped wanting him, even though he didn’t want me. Before I left with my parents, I went into the bathroom. I pulled down my pants and saw something lying on my blood-soaked pad. The miscarriage had happened. I panicked and asked my mom to look and tell me if she thought it was the baby. She said that she thought it was, and she wadded it up so that we could take it with us to the hospital to show the doctors.

  The doctors confirmed that I had miscarried and told me that they would perform an autopsy to determine what went wrong. One after another, my friends and family flooded the waiting area in the emergency room. I was shocked to learn how many people were out there waiting to hear how I was. It was difficult to see that I was worth something to other people. I had believed I was wort
h something for a time at the beginning of my sobriety. That was what had made me decide to try, in fact. I wasn’t treated like that with John. After a while I went back to believing I wasn’t worth anything. It used to be like that with my dad, but even he came down to be with me from his house in Cottonwood. He came in the room and held my hand and told me that he was there for me. It was one of the first times that I ever felt like my dad had come to protect me. He was sober and finally able to be the father that I needed him to be. It was a first for us. I was so grateful for his being there. My dad said straightaway that there would be trouble if John showed up at the hospital. Even with all my family and friends there for me, all I wanted was John. I made my dad promise that he would not do anything to him.

  I was hoping so much that John would come that day and be the knight in shining armor that I needed him to be. Why not him, too, I thought, since my dad had shown up. The nurse brought in a phone and told me somebody had called. It was John, so I told him to come to the hospital. “Yeah, but what about your parents?” he asked. He was silent when I said the baby was dead. He may have been in shock, but eventually after I told him it was okay to come down, he said he was on his way. I waited for him while having tests performed and getting a prescription. John wasn’t there when it was time to leave. His brother was there in the waiting room, and when he found out I had lost the baby, his brother cried for the loss of the niece or nephew he was never going to have. It was sickening to me that John’s brother could show up and reveal this kind of concern but John could not. It wasn’t a surprise to everyone else. I was the only one who believed in John by then. Why did I believe? I had been kicked out of my twelve-step program because I had prioritized John. I had been kicked out of my apartment because I had prioritized John. I had lost a baby because I couldn’t stop John from prioritizing himself. He had never given me any of the same sentiment.