When someone you love is struggling with addiction
It can grip you.
You may wake up with knots in your stomach and spend your days in a fog of obsessive thinking and preoccupation, bracing for the next crisis.
You may not be able to sleep or concentrate.
Your life may become organized around managing the chaos, anticipating what might happen next, and simply trying to survive.
You may be dealing with the trauma of discovery—the fear, powerlessness, and grief that come with realizing the unimaginable is happening.
The betrayal that can come with lies and deceit.
The walking on eggshells as you try to manage unpredictable or volatile moods.
The pain of watching someone you love disappear right in front of your eyes.
The cycles of hope and despair.
As a partner, you may feel afraid, alone, angry, or resentful. You may be grieving the person you love and the life you imagined you would have, while suddenly carrying responsibilities you thought you would share together.
If children are involved, that weight can feel even heavier. The fear is greater and the grief deeper. You may suddenly find yourself parenting alone, trying to protect your children from the instability and unpredictability addiction brings. No one starts a family expecting addiction to take hold.
Addiction doesn't only affect the person using substances. It affects the entire family system, and it can create conflict and division even among people who were once close.
Different family members may respond to the same fear in very different ways.
Some become angry and pull away, struggling to stay connected to the person lost behind addiction. They may feel frustrated, resentful, or unwilling to continue participating in what they see as a destructive cycle.
Others try to help in the only way they know how. They may rescue, protect, make excuses, provide financial support, or try to manage the consequences of the addiction—sometimes unintentionally doing things that allow the addiction to continue.
From the outside, these responses can look completely opposed to one another.
But underneath both may be the same thing: fear of losing someone they love.
Fear can lead one person toward control, anger, or distance, while leading another toward rescuing, protecting, or over-functioning. Each response can then reinforce the other, creating more conflict, resentment, and polarization within the family.
Understanding why these responses make sense in the context of addiction can help family members see one another differently. Instead of fighting over who is helping and who is making things worse, families can begin working toward a shared goal: supporting recovery while protecting the relationships and people affected by the addiction.
That doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
It means finding a way to move forward together.
Building stability and connection
Addiction creates an enormous amount of uncertainty. Before a family can make thoughtful decisions about boundaries, consequences, or how to respond to the person struggling with addiction, family members often need support themselves.
We begin by helping you understand what is happening—to you, to your relationships, and within the family system.
I can help you understand how addiction functions, how it affects the brain and relationships, and how you can care for yourself amidst the chaos and confusion.
We can also look at the ways fear and love can become intertwined with behaviors that unintentionally support the addiction.
This may include rescuing, covering for someone, taking over responsibilities, providing financial support, or repeatedly protecting someone from the consequences of their choices.
We work toward greater clarity and choice—learning how to hold compassionate boundaries while remaining connected to the people you love.
As you become more resourced and supported, we can begin addressing the larger family system: the polarization, resentment, mistrust, and patterns of interaction that may have developed around the addiction.
What helping an addicted loved one looks like
You may be struggling with guilt, shame and self-blame, believing you caused this or that your inability to fix it is a personal failure. The stigma of addiction, the isolation it brings and powerlessness that comes with not being able to fix this problem leads many loved ones to take on a mistaken sense of responsibility.
You did not cause this and you can't control, you can't fix it, you can't make someone else make different choices. You can't make them stop using, you can't make them seek treatment and you can't make them choose recovery.
But you can influence the environment and your part in the system. This is where your power lies.
Sometimes a crisis like addiction reveals patterns that aren't not entirely new. We may just be hitting a wall with the survival strategies that you've relied on for a long time. Families can carry unresolved trauma, protective adaptations, and ways of relating that have been passed down across generations—often without anyone realizing it or intending to pass anything on. Compassionate understanding of these patterns creates opportunities for meaningful change on the individual and family system level. When these generational patterns are identified and healed, the environment becomes growth and recovery-supporting.
You don't have to navigate this alone...
I have both professional and lived experience with the dynamics that addiction can create within families and intimate relationships.
Whether you're a partner trying to make sense of what has happened, a parent struggling to know how to help your child, or a family trying to bridge the growing divide between you, therapy can provide a place to slow things down, understand what's happening, and find a way forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are questions you may have about this work. If you don't see your question here, reach out to me directly.
Does my loved one need to participate in therapy for me to get help?
No, not at all. If your loved one is in active addiction (i.e., is still using their substance of choice), their ability to participate in the process is likely to be limited. They may require their own specialized treatment.
The focus of this work is on helping you understand addiction, its impact on you and your relationships, and how you can care for yourself in this very challenging situation.
Can I come to therapy on my own if my loved one is still actively using?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, I encourage you to do so. You may feel isolated and alone. You may be having difficulty managing your life and responsibilities. Therapy can provide much-needed support to protect against the negative effects addiction can create. Right now, your life might revolve around addiction. Therapy can help you reclaim your life and start to feel happiness and joy again.
Do all family members attend therapy together at the same time?
Not necessarily. In many situations, I will initially meet with individual family members before bringing everyone together.
Addiction can create an enormous amount of fear, confusion, resentment, and conflict within a family. Having space to talk individually can give each person an opportunity to process what they have experienced, feel heard without having to manage someone else's reaction, and begin developing greater stability and clarity.
Individual sessions can also help us understand each person's perspective, identify what may be contributing to the family dynamic, and clarify what each person needs in order to participate productively in family work.
When it is appropriate, and everyone is comfortable moving forward with a shared plan, we can begin bringing family members together. The goal is to create enough understanding and common ground that the family can begin working together rather than against one another.
What if some family members don't want to participate?
Therapy can still be beneficial if some family members aren't willing to participate. Families are systems; when one person in the system changes how they engage and respond, other parts of the system change, as well.
What does family therapy look like when family members have very different perspectives about how to respond to the addiction?
Different perspectives actually increase the resources your family has available to approach this problem together. Each person's perspective is a potential tool. We will work to identify the strength in each perspective, while also addressing barriers to collaboration (e.g., communication patterns, underlying fears).
How do I know when helping has become enabling?
Enabling happens when we take on responsibilities for someone else that do not belong to us and that they are capable of managing themselves, or when we protect someone from the natural consequences of their choices in ways that prevent or interfere with learning opportunities.
Your addicted loved one may have increasing difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities. They may lose a job or their driver's license, be unable to pay their bills, or have legal problems. Partners and family members see someone they love struggling, and they want to help. Intuitively, we can sense that our loved one may not be able to fulfill their usual responsibilities while they are in active addiction.
At the same time, losing a job, having no money, or getting into legal trouble can be natural consequences of the self-defeating and destructive behaviors that occur in the context of addiction. Losing meaningful and important things in their life may ultimately motivate someone to seek help.
Imposed consequences—those we create with the intention of pushing someone into treatment—rarely work. There is an important difference between trying to control the outcome and allowing natural consequences to unfold.
Sometimes this also means setting boundaries to protect yourself and your family. You may refuse to give someone money that could be used to buy drugs or alcohol, end conversations when they become verbally abusive, or change living arrangements to protect yourself and your family from the chaos, dishonesty, or instability that addiction can create.
Helping can look like supporting someone in getting to treatment, sending words of love and encouragement, or letting your loved one know that you're there and that you believe in their ability to get well when they're ready.
Helping can also mean setting boundaries that protect you and, ultimately, your relationship with your loved one.
When we over-function and enable, we often begin to feel resentful, used, or taken advantage of. We may become so focused on managing someone else's life that we stop taking care of our own.
Learning to recognize the difference between supporting someone and taking responsibility for them can help you stay connected without losing yourself in the process.
Boundaries protect you and your relationship, and indirectly, they can protect your loved one as well.
People caught in addiction can become caught in a vicious cycle. They may do things they feel deeply ashamed of—lying, stealing, blaming, or manipulating people they love to obtain the substance they believe they need to survive. Then they may continue using in an attempt to escape or quiet the shame those behaviors create.
While you can't stop your loved one from engaging in these behaviors, you can protect yourself from the harm they cause. You can also remove the support or enabling that may be helping to sustain the cycle.
The guilt you feel when setting boundaries is often connected to an undifferentiated sense of responsibility for other people's emotions and well-being. You may worry that setting a boundary means you're abandoning someone you love, particularly when you know they are struggling.
Therapy can help you begin to differentiate what belongs to you and what belongs to your loved one. It also provides the support you need to process what happens when you begin setting boundaries and your loved one protests, becomes angry, or blames you.
It's easy to question yourself in those moments. As you gain your footing and begin stepping into your differentiated power, someone else's dissatisfaction or blame can feel scary and overwhelming.
I'm there to help you stay steady through that storm—to hold onto compassion for your loved one while also protecting yourself and honoring what you need.
Therapy is for you. You can—and I recommend that you do—attend therapy because you need support, too.
A big piece of this work is helping you get your life back. Addiction can become all-consuming, making it difficult to take care of yourself, do things you enjoy, connect with people, or simply live your own life.
You can't control your loved one's choices, and your life doesn't have to stop until they decide to get well.
There is often a process of letting go and grieving that happens as loved ones begin their own recovery from the effects of addiction. You may need to let go of the hope that you can make them change, the responsibility you have taken on for their choices, or the vision you once had for your life together.
That doesn't mean you don't still love them. And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop having them in your life.
Accepting that recovery is a choice your loved one has to make can bring up a lot of different emotions—grief, anger, fear, relief, guilt, or even hope. Therapy can make space for all of those emotions so that you can process them and find your way through them toward greater clarity and peace, even when your loved one isn't ready for treatment.