The Journey with Mark Astor

Ep. 17 Why Loving An Alcoholic Harder Won't Save Them with Becky Ogden

• Mark Astor

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What happens when someone you love disappears into addiction while you're still living in the same house? Becky Ogden thought she could save her marriage by loving her husband harder, giving him more understanding, and believing that connection was the cure for addiction. For over two decades, she watched the man she married slowly transform into someone she didn't recognize, finding hidden alcohol stashes throughout their home and making excuses for increasingly dangerous behavior. Her story reveals the painful truth about hope, the mythology around loving someone out of addiction, and why emotionally healthy people don't stay in relationships with active addicts.

Becky's journey from devoted wife to protective mother spans gambling addiction, hidden drinking, job loss, financial betrayal, and ultimately a crime that forced her to call police on the father of her children. Her raw honesty about the slow decline, the manipulation, and her own codependent patterns offers a lifeline to families silently struggling with similar situations. She shares what finally gave her the courage to leave, how she's rebuilding with her three children, and why she now speaks openly about experiences most people keep hidden in shame.


Contact Mark Astor:

Website: https://mentalhealthaddictionlawfirm.com/

Phone number: 561-517-9405

Email: mark@astorsimovitchlaw.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markastor

TikTok: Mark G. Astor (@astorsimovitchlaw) | TikTok


Contact Becky Ogden:

Website: https://conversationstocontent.com/

SPEAKER_00

Emotionally healthy people themselves do not get into and stay into relationships with people who have substance abuse disorders because emotionally healthy people will not tolerate the behavior of that the person that's in active addiction will exhibit. And I loved this man and I didn't want to live life without him. And I wanted our family intact. And I thought all the messages that I was getting at the time about addiction recovery is like they're the opposite of addiction is connection. And so I'm like, okay, I just have to love him enough. And so I I would try to love him more, try to give him more understanding, try to give him more patience because recovery is possible. Yes, it is. And hope is a nasty, horrible hag. It kept me tethered to a very unhealthy position much longer than I should have stayed.

SPEAKER_01

It's the journey with drug and alcohol attorney Mark G. Aster.

SPEAKER_02

Welcome to the journey with Mark Astor. I'm your host, Mark Astor. I've spent a lot of years sitting across the table from people during some of the most challenging moments of their lives. As an attorney, an advocate, and as someone who understands that the road isn't always straight. What I've learned is that success, recovery, and growth rarely look the way we expect them to. There are detours, hard conversations, and moments that change everything. On this podcast, I talk with people who are willing to be honest about their journey, what has worked, what didn't, and what they wish they knew sooner. Today I am joined by the only way I can describe you, Becky, is that you are amazing. Okay. Becky is a mom. She was a wife, she's a warrior, she's a survivor, she's brave, she is powerful, and she's a guest on the podcast for really just a very different reason, I think, than I've had anybody else on, and that is to share her story, her journey in dealing with an ex-husband who unfortunately developed a horrible substance use disorder, specifically alcohol, and what it did to her family, and how she has really embraced the struggle and for lack of a better word, she's been able to save herself and her family. I really I'm so humbled that she was willing to come on here and just and have this conversation because hopefully there's some families out there that are gonna hear Becky's story and they're gonna and they're gonna say, Holy beep, this is us. This is us, and we don't want this to happen to us. So, Becky, thank you for coming on. It's so good to see you again. Likewise. So let's go back a little bit to the beginning. Where do you live? I'm in Tampa in Florida. That's right, we're practically in neighbors. We talked about this the other day. Where did you grow up?

SPEAKER_00

Mostly western Washington in the Pacific Northwest.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. And what has been your career of choice?

SPEAKER_00

I spent most of my adult years raising children and homeschooling. I taught English language arts for homeschooled kids for a number of years. I was a freelance writer in my very early 20s. Uh, and now I am running a grand experiment. Most business advice assumes that your life is stable. I'm looking at what works when it's not. I'm not a coach, not a therapist. I'm just using my own podcast, collaborative income streams, and some structured interviews that pull clarity out of people in order to get things done.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So I know that you're a mom. How old are your children?

SPEAKER_00

My kids are 27, 24, and 17 now.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. And when did you get married?

SPEAKER_00

I got married, let's see. I was 22, so that was in 1996.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so sounds like I'm not the only one who's getting a little bit older every single day. I look at the mirror and I'm like, yeah, I got older. Yeah. Okay. Your ex-husband, when did how did you meet him?

SPEAKER_00

We met at his fraternity house when I was actually going to see another guy.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

But I had no attachment to the other guy. I was just like, oh, he's cute. So I was just going over to visit this other guy with a friend of mine. And the guy that I was looking for wasn't there, but there I knew a bunch of the guys from the fraternity. There were a bunch of them that were sitting in a room and watching a movie. And so my girlfriend and I decided we would join them. They invited us in, and the guy that I would eventually marry was in there. And it was instant, I'm like you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1990, and I wasn't involved in the Greek system policy, but I had a roommate that was, and so I went to all the fraternity parties. And even then, alcohol was a very large part of the Greek system. Right. It was almost like part of a rite of passage. So when you were in school, was it the same way?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, definitely. I was the only sober person I knew most of the time. I I don't drink because I'm no fun when I drink. I get tired, and then I just want to go home. And I don't particularly like the taste. Like anything that can be made with alcohol is typically better without it. And so I just don't drink. But my ex-husband was probably already a high-functioning, low-level alcoholic when we met, and we just didn't know it. I don't think he knew it. His parents were high-functioning alcoholics as well. And so it was normal for him. But it wasn't really impacting his life much in the Greek system or anything like that. He was going to school, he was holding down a job, he was dating me, he had friends. It was he was a binge drinker for sure, but so was everybody else.

SPEAKER_02

So it just seemed like that was normal. That's it.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

And where were you in college?

SPEAKER_00

The University of Washington in Seattle.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. And when did you guys get married?

SPEAKER_00

So we got married in October of 1996, a couple months after I graduated.

SPEAKER_02

My notes reflect you guys met in 92 in college, and then you got married in 96, and then you were divorced in 2021.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

So let's talk about what happened in between. A lot has happened. Because I think when you met him, everything for a long period of time was good, no?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we had from 92 until maybe 2014, things were overwhelmingly good. He was a good boyfriend, he was a good husband, and he was a good father. It's particularly important to me that our kids know that, even though they don't really remember him much like that. I just don't want he did some pretty terrible things, as you know from our pre-recording call, but he he wasn't always like that. And we had periods of time that problems would spike and then they'd go away. And they those periods were very long of good, and then then we'd have another blip, and then a very long stretch. And what happened as inevitably does that I just didn't know, those periods of good get shorter and shorter, and the spikes of bad get more frequent, and then the bad stays bad longer.

SPEAKER_02

When I was talking to you, I made some notes here, and I wrote down a slow decline at first, talking a little bit about that. Because it wasn't something like it was he was good, then he was bad. This was an evolution sort of thing. Correct. He shed a little light on that.

SPEAKER_00

I was mystified, actually. What I was seeing in him as he was starting to circle the drain very slowly was more frequent bouts of either complete withdrawal or anger. And somebody asked me once, could he be depressed? And I'm like, everything that people tell you about depression, it's sad, weepy people, right? He wasn't sad and weepy, he was angry. And it wasn't until I started doing some research into depression and how it presents typically in males that I was like, yeah, maybe he is depressed. We had a discussion. I cannot remember what precipitated this, and my memory for the last decade that we were together is spotty at best. Like, I can't place things in a timeline. I had a conversation with him at one point where I it was like, you need to get some help. And he admitted at that point that the only reason that he was still alive was that he didn't want to saddle our children with the suicide of a parent. And I was like, Oh, yeah, let's call the crisis hotline here and let's get some help. The system utterly failed, both of us. It did not help him. That was the beginning of the uptick in drinking and the continual slide of him and increasing hostility. I could always tell how much he'd been drinking by how he would speak to me, how he'd treat me, the topics that would come up in conversation, and his tone of voice. When he'd been drinking a lot, he would lose any ability at all to be introspective, self-reflective, and compassionate, and any awareness of how his behavior was affecting me or our kids.

SPEAKER_02

When did you say to yourself, there's a problem here?

SPEAKER_00

We had a a big spike uh in 2020, where I found out that he was gambling uh and lying to me about it. And I took our kids who were then very small and left. I should have stayed gone, really, but I didn't. And he did clean up his act with the gambling. He never gambled again that I was aware of anyway. Instead, he's okay, then I guess I'm gonna drink, is apparently what his thought process was. I don't know. But I was very aware that was a problem. And when it became a problem that I could not keep excusing or offering compassion for and kind of kick in the can down the road, was 2018.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, when you say kick in the can down the road, what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so emotionally healthy people themselves do not get into and stay into relationships with people who have substance abuse disorders because the emotionally healthy people will not tolerate the behavior uh that the person that's in active addiction will exhibit. And I loved this man, and I didn't want to live life without him, and I wanted our family intact. And I thought all the messages that I was getting at the time about addiction recovery was like they're the opposite of addiction is connection. And so I'm like, okay, I just have to love him enough. And so I I would try to love him more, try to give him more understanding, try to give him more patience because recovery is possible. Yes, it is. And hope is a nasty, horrible hag. It kept me tethered to a very unhealthy position much longer than I should have stayed.

SPEAKER_02

Up until the point where you said, okay, there's a problem here. Had he been a social drinker, I mean, obviously in college, a lot of people were social drinkers. So had that continued until the point where you said, There's a problem here.

SPEAKER_00

He was both a social drinker and a binge drinker in college. And if I had known what the binge drinking involved and the concerns that several of his friends had actually expressed, uh I would have maybe taken that more seriously. I don't know. Because, like I said, I was not a particularly emotionally healthy person myself. He would go long, long stretches of time without drinking at all. And so I'm like, surely he can't have an alcohol use problem because he's not drinking. And I come to find out much later on that's common for people who are struggling with alcoholism. It can go long stretches of time initially without drinking, and they do it to prove that they don't have a problem. But people who don't have a problem don't need to prove that they don't have a problem.

SPEAKER_02

You said that you moved out and then you came back. What motivated you to come back?

SPEAKER_00

He knew exactly what buttons to push in me to play on my tenderness and sympathy for him and my love for him. And I was pregnant and we had two young kids as well. And I didn't, I'm like, I don't want to do this by myself. And at that point, that version of him would have fought me tooth and nail for custody of our kids. And I didn't want our kids alone with him when he was unstable like that. And so I thought it was a better deal for me to be around where I could buffer and run interference and stuff when the problems spiked. The problems were few and far between at that point. It's just the gambling was a big deal financially, as it was a big hit for us.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. One of the things I when we have worked with families where somebody in the family has an alcohol use disorder, they tell me that their loved one does everything they can to try and hide the alcohol use. And I made notes here when we spoke that he was doing the same thing. Like he was tell us about that.

SPEAKER_00

Let's see here. Our kids and I would find his hidden stashes of alcohol all over the house, in the garage, and in around on the property. Uh, I remember finding uh cans of beer. So we had a square dining room table and it had a leaf in it. And the leaf was in the garage. There's like a little ledge on a leaf so that you can snap it into place. In the garage, sitting on that little ledge in the leaf were a couple of cans of beer. And I'm like, what are they doing here? He hid a jug of vodka in our dresser. I'm like, did you not think I was gonna find that? It's our dresser for crying out loud. He wasn't sneaky, but he was putting things in in really odd places. It was very bizarre, and I did not like it. And I did not think it was healthy for our kids either. But I didn't know what to do about it. There are no resources that tell you what to do about this other than leave. It's not that simple.

SPEAKER_02

I wrote down here he was functional in 2018, and then there was a period of time where he was not he was not going to work.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so his father died in in 2018, and he went up to see him. We had a very contentious relationship with his parents for many years. His parents were alcoholics themselves, and we did not want our children with them unsupervised, and they took issue with that and hated me for it. He went up to see his father, and he did not come back the same man. I do not know other than what he told me, what transpired there, but in the weeks that followed, he just he would leave like he was going to work and come home like he'd been at work. And one day I get a phone call from his boss. Is do you know where Clinton is? I'm like, what do you mean? Isn't he at work? No. Oh, okay. And he got a letter from his employer saying that he needed to provide a doctor's note to um extend his ADA protection because he was diagnosed with depression, and so he had some ADA protection. But since he'd missed so much work, four weeks, four weeks of work he'd been missing and letting me think that he was going to work. Yeah, and he was ultimately fired for that same thing again later in the year.

SPEAKER_02

Was there a time when you learned that he had been abusing the family credit card?

SPEAKER_00

That's another casualty of my memory at this point. I don't remember when that happened, but yeah, that was a big problem. He had accrued $16,000 of debt without my knowledge or consent. I was not on the credit cards. So the credit card companies, even though it was a community property state and I was on the hook for the bills, wouldn't even talk to me about lowering the monthly payments or anything. So yeah, that that was rough.

SPEAKER_02

My understanding is that at some point you did a family intervention. Yes. Tell us about that when you did that.

SPEAKER_00

Uh so that was at the end of 2018. So my kids at that point were 20, uh, 17, and 10. And our oldest had been trying to enlist in the Coast Guard and was running into some roadblocks, and also had told me that he didn't know why, but he felt like he needed to be home. And as it turns out, this is why. I would never have asked him to stay. If he had been able to go and enlist right out of high school, I would have let him go. Without I wouldn't have said anything. But he he just he's I can't explain it, Mom. I feel like I need to be here. And I said, if that's how you feel, then you need to honor that. But don't do that because you think I need you to. Anyway, at toward the end of 2018, I had several instances where I had wondered if my ex-husband was gonna hit me. And then I found out that our oldest daughter had also had a couple of instances where she had wondered the same thing. And then I found out that our son had a couple of instances where he wondered if he was gonna need to step in to protect us from their dad. At that point, I was still more about my kids than about me. I apparently was not enough to get me to act. But the fact that he could potentially hit our oldest daughter or our son would have had a very violent encounter with their dad was unacceptable to me as soon as I was aware of it. If I had been aware of it and it ignored it and it happened, I would never have been able to forgive myself. And so the kids and I said, basically, you need to get help or you need to get out. And he chose neither. And so I took our kids and went to a hotel that night and to the courthouse the next day to file for an order of protection because I was afraid of him. And the order of protection was granted. Our son was part of that as well because he was an adult and able to testify and stuff. My ex-husband was served, and I had the police take him for an emergency mental health evaluation at the same time because here he was, he didn't have a job anymore. His wife had just taken their kids and kicked him out of the house. He didn't have anything to lose. And I was worried about him because I still loved him. I still love the guy that I married. I don't care at all about the guy that I divorced, but I didn't want anything bad to happen to him. And he lied his way out of that and was released. And a couple weeks later, he asked me if it was okay, if he went to rehab, could we put things back together? And I was maybe, maybe, I don't know. I should have gone through with the divorce then, and I didn't because of all those things. He went to rehab for 30 days, so it was enough to dry him out, but not enough to uh to make any meaningful change, and I knew that, and so I would not let him come home. And it wasn't long before I was right that he was drinking again. It was rough, it was really rough.

SPEAKER_02

So when did you get divorced?

SPEAKER_00

So we divorced in 2021, uh, and that came on the heels of him getting a DUI in 2020 that I found out about from our insurance broker who called me and said that my auto insurance rates would be going up in the new year because of the DUI. And I'm like, what DUI? He and my ex-husband had told me that that the car had been towed because he parked in somebody else's spot. And so as soon as I found out about the DUI, and by the way, my ex-husband worked in insurance, so I'm not sure how he thought that I would not find out. I think that's just another delusion of alcoholism.

SPEAKER_02

Somehow he rationalized it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. But I was like, it was by the grace of God that you didn't hurt somebody or kill somebody. Because if you had your daughters and I could be out on the street, we could have lost everything. You need to give me all of the all of our assets to protect them from the stupid stuff you're doing while you're supposedly getting yourself together. And we did that. He did agree to that. Uh, it was not meant to sever our relationship. He did that on his own later, but it was meant to protect me legally and financially from any more.

SPEAKER_02

What happened in 23? Because I know that there was some type of attempt at wreck reconciliation.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so in in 2022, he got a job. He was living in housing for people with diagnosed serious mental illnesses at the time. So they thought he was bipolar. I never thought he was bipolar. I thought he was an alcoholic with CPTSD. But he got a job. And he kept that job through some circumstances that I wouldn't have. And he was doing well, and I was seeing more and more of the guy that I married. And I was like, oh, hope. Yes, we can put this back together. Just the single mom who gets a job and has subsidized daycare, who gets a raise, and then she now makes too much for the subsidized daycare, so they yanked that, and then she can't, she doesn't make enough to cover daycare. Yeah, he was doing so well that the estate decided that he didn't need their help anymore. And he needed to find other housing, and he was certainly wasn't making enough money for other housing. And because we had seven months of of pretty darn good, I was like, okay. Against my better judgment, I let him move back again in February of 2023. And it went well for the first. A couple weeks. That was ahead of our daughter's wedding in March. And he bent over backwards to make that wonderful for everybody. And he did. But addiction did what addiction does. And it was right back, only worse to where we were when we separated.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, I'm sure that must have been heartbreaking for you.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, it was awful.

SPEAKER_02

What has transpired since then?

SPEAKER_00

He committed a crime in our home that I called the police for and had him arrested. He was arrested at gunpoint, and I went no contact with him that night. That was almost three years ago. Because I had gone through with the divorce and the house was in my name, I was able to sell it. And so that's what I did. I sold the house. I got his permission to take our youngest daughter and move. I would have been able to do that anyway, but I would have had to go through the court to force it. Probably the only decent thing he'd done in months was to give me permission to take her and go. And so we traveled for a couple of months and then settled in on a barrier island in the Tampa Bay area in July of 2024, right before Helene and Milton rolled through in September. And we lost the cute little beach cottage we'd been renting and all of the stuff we still had from the move. Oh my gosh, yeah. So we were like, I don't know where to, I don't know where to go. And he had trashed my credit, and so finding a place to live was hard to begin with. I rented a villa in Mexico for five weeks after the hurricane to let everything settle down here in Florida again. Uh, and I found another place, and it was in Orlando, and we moved to Orlando and hated every second of it, and we're now back in Tampa.

SPEAKER_02

And how are your children doing?

SPEAKER_00

As good as they can be. I think they had the benefit of having a good father for their very early years. My oldest was 14 when their dad started spiraling, so he had more, but things were not good. They my kids have damage. They seem to be doing well though, and I don't I yeah, they all have their own stories to tell.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so you've had no contact with him, and I presume that the children have had no contact with him either.

SPEAKER_00

No, children have had no contact with him, they don't want any contact with him. What he did got child services involved, and they told me you need to make sure that he doesn't have access to your youngest, who is our only one who was still a minor. And to be clear, what he did was not to her. But just that alone was enough for all three of them to go, yeah, we don't want to talk to him anymore.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. So I know the sort of part of your story now is that you're an advocate. Tell us a little bit. How do you spread the word? How do you help people?

SPEAKER_00

I do things like this. This is not my business. Like I have not built a business around addiction recovery or anything like that. And I don't want to because I don't want this defining my life in any more ways than it already has. But what I do like to do is talk to people like this and share my story because I can. It doesn't cost me to share my story. I have enough support and I'm okay. Uh, I'm not in it anymore. And so there are people who are struggling silently, who can't speak out, who feel alone. I did. I was a homeschooler. My youngest is almost graduated another year, but I've been a homeschooler since 2003. And gosh, my husband didn't go to work for four weeks because he was in the park drinking, isn't exactly the conversations you have with other homeschooling moms at the park while your kids are playing. And so I felt like a fraud. I felt very isolated and very lonely, uh, and nobody actually really knew me while I was keeping it quiet. And as soon as I started just sharing pieces, and initially while we were still married, my ex-husband was like, go ahead and talk about it, share about it. Maybe it can help other people, because that's who he actually is, or who he was. I think he's got so much brain damage now that it's who knows. But he was very supportive of us sharing our me sharing our story and stuff, as long as I didn't make him out to be some horrible monster. And I try not to do that. He has many or had many good qualities. As soon as I started sharing my story, I got private messages from people that are like, I didn't know that there were other people that were struggling with this in the homeschool community or whatever. And I'm like, okay, that makes it a little bit worth it. Like, I wouldn't choose to do this over again if I didn't have to, but to help somebody else feel a little less alone is redeeming, I guess, is what I would say. It makes it less awful.

SPEAKER_02

Can people still reach out to you, Becky?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm not a therapist and I'm not a coach, and and uh yes, if somebody wants to talk to me, sure, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02

How do they find you?

SPEAKER_00

Well, I'm on Facebook and I am on LinkedIn and let's see. My website is conversations to content.com. And if they are building a business at the same time as they're navigating all this, my resources would probably help them in that instance, but with business, not with the struggle with the addiction.

SPEAKER_02

I appreciate you coming on. I enjoyed getting to know you a little bit. I I think you are a very brave woman. I do. Not just for having gone through this, but for being willing to share your journey. I'm very humbled and grateful that you came on and spent a lot of time with us today. I really am for that.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for the uh opportunity and for the work that you do for people.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you. I appreciate that. And so for folks who are watching this, if you want to have a talk to Becky, he's a wonderful listener, and hopefully that if there's a family out there that's hearing this that are motivated to maybe do something about it, you don't have to suffer alone. You're not alone, and I think that maybe that's the message here. And for folks that want to find out more about what we do, our main website is mental health addiction law firm.com. That's mental health addiction law firm dot com. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the journey, and until next time, take care.