[MUSIC PLAYING] My ex-wife was a beautiful woman. Just a great wife and a great mother. She misdialed me, and she was at a doctor's office trying to get more pain medication.

And I remember screaming in the phone, hoping she would hear me, "No, no, don't do it! You don't need those!" I watched this disease progress. I watched her start to lie and start to cheat and start to sneak around. And there was nothing that I could do to stop it. I would watch her take 10, 20 pills a day. And she tried, five or six times, to quit taking those pain pills on her own. I got to a place where everything that I was doing and everything that I was thinking about--all my focus, all my power, all my energy--was directed at what she was doing, or what she wasn't doing, and what I could do to stop her from doing that. It was maddening.

I came home and found her on the floor with her purse open and all these things all over. And I said, "Hey, what are you doing?" What? Give me them. It got really bad. I thought you were done with this. No! You don't need that. Give it to me. Give it. No. No! There was some name-calling and yelling back and forth, back and forth. And she said, "You know, I can't take this anymore." And I said, "I can't take any more." And she left. My kids knew their mom had a drug addiction. We didn't talk about it openly. But I don't remember exactly what I said to my kids. What do you say to two young kids when their mom abandons the family? There's no manual for that. I felt alone. I felt like nobody could understand. There's this denial, and there's the shame, and there's a fear that nobody's going to understand what it is you're going through.

[HORN BLARES]

I didn't hear anything from her for a month. [PHONE RINGS]

She called me up and told me that she was never coming back. She can't handle being a mom. She can't handle being a wife. She wants a divorce, and she's never going to see us again. And she told me that over the phone. And it felt like I was stabbed. I didn't know how I could go on, how I could continue to work, how I could take care of my two kids by myself.

I was--I was in shock. And this was the first time that I started to say, "Maybe I have a problem with this, and maybe I should do something to help me. Because my ex-wife isn't here anymore, I can't possibly do anything for her." It was at that point that I talked to a family friend, and she suggested that I could go to a recovery meeting for friends and family members of drug addicts and alcoholics.

I guess I must have had the look of a deer in the headlights, because I looked at her and just stammered out, "Am I in the right place?" And she could tell, from the look on my face, that I was just in crisis. And she said, "Oh, yeah. I think you're in the right place." When the people started sharing, I just listened. And I felt something. They were sharing these stories, and it was amazing because every story that I heard that first day in that room sounded a lot like my story. And the day before, I thought there was nobody who could possibly understand what I was going through.

I went back to another recovery meeting the very next night. I wasn't brave enough or comfortable enough to share. But I just sat down in a chair and listened. I heard stories of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and family members of people who had problems with alcohol and drugs. And these people were talking about the help that they got for themselves, what they were doing for themselves--not what they were doing or trying to do to change an alcoholic or drug addict, but what they were doing to try to help themselves. And I started then to look at myself and to ask myself, "What's my part of this? What is it that I can do to change? If I'm not OK, I can't possibly do anything for anybody else." I remember what it was like when I had no hope. And I remember what it was like when I reached out to others who had been there, and they put that feeling of hope in my heart. It feels amazing to be in a place to offer encouragement and new hope to people that are discouraged and downtrodden and brokenhearted. It's one of the best things that I have in my life right now, to be available and to be willing to give people hope. [MUSIC PLAYING]