When it is someone you love

Who this is for

Partners. Parents of adult children. Adult children of drinking parents. Siblings. Anyone who has spent months or years watching someone they love do something they cannot stop, and has quietly organised their entire life around it.

You are allowed to get help for yourself. That is not a betrayal, and it does not require their permission or their knowledge.

What tends to be happening to you

• Hypervigilance. Reading their face when they walk in. Counting bottles. Checking statements. Listening for the tone of the key in the door.
• Managing everything. Covering, explaining, apologising, rescheduling, holding it all together so nobody else finds out.
• Hope and collapse, on a loop. The good week where it really seems different, and the fall afterwards, which gets worse each time.
• Anger you feel guilty about. Because they are ill, or struggling, and you are supposed to be understanding, and you are so tired of it.
• A life that has shrunk without you deciding it should.

None of that is weakness. It is what sustained proximity to addiction does to people, and it is why families often need support more urgently than the person using does.

What we work on

1. What is actually in your control — a shorter list than you would like, but a real one, and clarifying it is a relief.
2. Boundaries that hold. Not ultimatums you cannot enforce. Limits you can actually keep, which is what makes them mean something.
3. How to respond to a lie, a broken promise, a bad night — without it costing you your whole week.
4. Rescue and its costs. Paying the debt, ringing the employer, clearing it up. All done from love, and all sometimes removing the very consequences that might have prompted change. This is difficult, delicate ground and we go carefully.
5. Your own life. Which has probably been on hold for a long time.
6. Deciding what you want, including the possibility that the answer is to leave. That is discussable here without judgement in either direction.

Children in the house

If there are children living with this, they are noticing more than you think and almost certainly saying less. That does not mean the situation is hopeless — children are remarkably robust where one adult is honest and steady with them. It does mean it is worth talking about deliberately rather than hoping it passes over them, and we can work on how.

If they are ready, and you are here first

That is a common way round. If the person you are worried about later decides to get help themselves, I would not usually work with both of you individually — but I will help you find someone good for them.