TL;DR: My fiancé is going back to school to get his CDL, but he has to get drug tested. If he stops smoking, he gets horrific nightmares and it stresses him out mentally. I recommend psychiatric help, but he doesn’t think it’ll help and he doesn’t need it. We both don’t know what else to do to address his mental health and not put a strain on the relationship.
I’ve never made a reddit post before so I’m sorry if I do something wrong.
I recently graduated nursing school in May and started working med-surg shortly after. Seeing me graduate and get into this career has encouraged my fiancé to get his CDL to get out of his current dead end job and start a new career as well.
However, the issue we’re facing is that he has to be drug tested and he smokes weed. He smokes because he has “horrific nightmares of the most gruesome things” and it leaves a lingering effect on his mental state. He was raised and homeschooled until high school by a very strict religious family and grew up on a farm slaughtering animals starting when he was around 6. Suffice to say, he saw a lot of fucked up shit and the way his parents addressed it would be taking him to “therapists” which were really just super religious zealots.
I completed my senior practicum in behavior health and although I’m in med surg now, I want to go back into behavioral health and eventually become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Therefore, I feel very strongly about people seeking genuine psychiatric help and getting on a medication regimen if needed.
When I recently recommended seeing someone to him, he quickly dismissed it and said he “doesn’t need anything synthetically made” and how “all those people are quacks”. What he fails to realize is that he has been increasingly more reactive and lashing out, and it’s starting to affect me mentally. I’ve mentioned how it affects me in the past and he feels incredibly remorseful for that. He is open to couples therapy because I told him I want us to make that a regular thing before we are even married.
We were friends before we got together and so it hurts seeing my best friend hurting so much. I just feel like I’m at my wits end and we both don’t really know what to do.
I suppose the question I’m asking at the end of the day is: What is our best course of action to help him address his mental health and not put a strain on our relationship?