What you do speaks so loudly...

I have a favorite quote by Emerson:

What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.

AMEN!  I feel the truth to this quote immensely as the wife of an addict.  I HEAR my husband say things that I like to hear.  He loves me, he's trying really hard to be good, etc.  What I SEE is a slightly different story.

I realize the flaws in the statement "If you loved me you would just stop."  I KNOW that's not how it works.  And yet....

I still feel that way.  It's a fight I battle everyday to separate the man I love from the addiction.  It's so much easier to see them as the same and hate it all. 

And I have one more question that I can't answer.

If he's abused drugs consistently for >8 years, what hope is there of ever seeing the person I married again.....even if he gets clean?  At this point, is that person lost forever?  Does the seething blindness to anyone other than themselves ever go away?  What does "recovery" actually mean and am I holding out hope for something that is impossible?  How do you know what the damage is, so that you can have realistic expectations? 

And this is all dependent on his ability to get clean and stay that way....  and we all know how that goes.