Living With An Addict

Living with an addict is challenging, and whether you are a spouse, a sibling a parent or a child; it’s hard to live with a person that puts getting drunk or high ahead of your happiness or welfare, and it’s difficult to live with the instability that always surrounds the behaviors of addiction.

Yet, although loving someone who struggles with addiction won’t ever be easy, there are some things that you can do to encourage treatment (and hopefully change) and to minimize the negative consequences of a loved one’s addiction on your own life.

Enabling

Anything that you do to protect a loved one from the consequences of their drinking or drugging only serves to perpetuate the substance abuse.

• When your wife is too hung-over to go to work and you call in sick for her – you are enabling
• When you bail your son out of jail after a drunk and disorderly charge – you are enabling
• When you make excuses for a loved one’s erratic behaviors to the neighbors, you are enabling

We enable because we love and we care, but ultimately, in doing so we do more harm than good - sometimes tough love is the best love.

When living with someone whose behaviors affect you intimately, you have every right to intervene and to demand change.

Interventions can work well to convince addicts to get the help they need, and there is no need to wait for any kind of rock bottom before taking action – rock bottom might never come, and addicts don’t need to wait for the worst to happen before getting life-changing addiction treatment.

You have the right to save a life (as you better your own) and since those that get pushed into a treatment program do just as well as those that enter of their own accord, forcing a loved one to get help can be a life-saving act of love and kindness.

Addiction treatment works very well to induce periods of remission and/or periods of less harmful use. Some people may need to go through the addiction treatment process more than once in a lifetime. This doesn’t mean that treatment doesn’t work. It works well to help people get control of their symptoms; but no cure yet exists for the disease of addiction.

The Power of Persistence

A person with diabetes or cancer may need multiple bouts of treatment over a lifetime to get symptoms under control – but people would never say that such treatments don’t work or aren’t necessary – and addiction treatment is very similar in nature.

Don’t give up hope!

Getting Support

Because addiction affects the family so deeply and because the battle against the disease is so lengthy, it can be helpful to get outside support from others who know and understand what it’s like to live with an addict.

Some support options include Al-Anon a 12 steps group for the loved ones of alcoholics and drug addicts, or meeting privately with a therapist or family counselor, to discuss ways of coping effectively.

Children especially need support when growing up in a household with addiction. Children can take this self test to find out if their mom or dad might have an addiction, and if so, they should be encouraged to talk to a trusted sober family member about finding the support and stability they also need.

Staying Safe

You can make a difference and help a loved one break free from addiction, and if you get the support you need and if you learn how to assist without enabling, you can keep your sanity while doing so.

Sometimes though, the behaviors of addiction become darker, and simply by living with an addict you place your life, or the lives of those around you, at risk. Addiction can never justify violent or abusive behavior and anyone living with an abusive family member needs to put their own right to safety and happiness first, calling the police for assistance and safety if necessary.