You are worthy.
An answer to a question recently posed to me: how do I heal from being betrayed and lied to?
There is nothing quite like the pain of being betrayed. Or lied to. I think that is the heartbreak itself. When we have been betrayed we learn that our person did not put us or the relationship first--something else was--in your case that something else was drugs. And speaking of that, one thing to know about people who struggle with using drugs is that lying and blaming others are a part of the disease. They know that what they are doing is wrong and don’t want to take accountability for that so they will do almost anything to avoid feeling responsible. I recommend finding a local Al-Anon group or start reading about co-dependence. People who struggle with feeling worthy of love will attract people with addictions or otherwise “unavailable” people because they themselves don’t feel worthy of more— it reinforces the story they already believe about themselves. I suggest that you begin to challenge the belief that you are worth any less.
There are micro-betrayals that lead to the macro-betrayals.
I think of betrayal more broadly than “cheating.” It’s any time we don’t present our fullest Self to our partner and to the relationship. It’s anytime we say we’re “fine” when we actually aren’t. It’s anytime we ignore the urge to initiate sex when we’re feeling sexy, it’s anytime we withhold our affection, or the truth of our love. “Cheating” is the final step in a series of micro-betrayals. Beyonce asks Jay-Z in one of her songs, “You said you were fine, but you lied.” And that is the hurt—he didn’t tell her he was struggling.
All of us in our heart of hearts want to hold our partner—that is the essence of attachment and the science of connection. But so many of us have been conditioned to share our need to be held in dysfunctional ways, OR we don’t even acknowledge the need in the first place.