Control your partner’s addiction – It’s NOT your fault. When your partner is in the grip of an addiction, you feel like your world has collapsed. Nothing else in your life feels so important, yet nothing you try ever helps! Keeping track of his or her use doesn’t do anything but get you branded as a nag. Cleaning up the messes by lying to yourself and others keeps you spinning in a descending spiral. Attempting to reason with your partner may be the most frustrating thing of all, because an addict will promise you anything to get you to back off.
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You still love this person, though. You want things — your love! — to get better.
While calling addiction a disease may be useful in your partner’s recovery, this distinction doesn’t help you. At all.
When people are sick, you take care of them, right? If your partner had pneumonia, you’d obviously be at their bedside doing everything you could to help.
But if you look at a partner struggling with an addiction as “sick” and treat them kindly, you’re now accused of enabling their addiction. Just what you needed — another voice saying that YOU are somehow to blame!
You. Are. Not.
You are not to blame for an addict’s problem.
Unfortunately, the good news and the bad news are the same: you have played a role in the destructive cycle.
That’s bad news, because you don’t get off scot free, and it’s good news, because there arethings you can do to change the dynamic.
While you can’t change your partner, here are 4 ways you can change your relationship with their disease and the grip you’ve allowed it to hold over you as well.
1. Inform yourself.
Our society has a disconcerting number of ideas about addiction, most of them not very useful. Since we see the addict behaving unlike themselves when under the influence, it must be the drug’s fault, right? Or maybe your partner just has a weak character and can’t control themselves. Or it’s the fault of their friends and their bad influence. Or they come from an alcoholic family, and learned it from them (that one, at least, has some validity to it.) Or, God help you, YOU drive them to it!
It’s only in the last 50 years or so that addiction has been studied as a condition that might be treated. Before that time, addicts, like the mentally ill, were thought of as black sheep and generally hidden from public whenever possible. An alcoholic was a Bowery Bum, not a society matron. Now we know that it is both genetic and environmental. An addict can be of very strong character and still suffer — and so does their family.
When you learn about the disease and the family dynamics involved in it, you may not like everything you find, but you gift yourself with knowledge about what you can and can’t do, as well as the risks you take for yourself by staying in the relationship.
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