If your partner is using substance use, you probably live with a wide range of emotions concerning your relationship. Anxiety and deep concern are likely constant. Conflict and anger are probably no strangers either. Distrust and despair may cycle through your connection routinely as well. The strain of addiction weighs heavy on a partnership.
Is there any way a couple can survive it all? Is there any way to know if all that you are saying or doing can make a difference in your life together?
Consider the following questions to determine whether your current approach is the best way to move ahead.
Are Your Actions Helping or Hurting Your Partner?
What Do You Know? Challenge Your Education
Often, we try to help loved ones in trouble with what we think we know instead of appropriate and accurate information.
Consider your understanding of your partner’s addiction. Are you leaning on second-hand information or what you’ve witnessed in another loved one? Is your education based on informed and proven recovery methods for couples? Or have you woven in opinion and stereotypes to arrive at your current perceptions of what is or isn’t possible?
Assumptions are hurtful and counterproductive when trying to support your partner and rebuild your connection.
Research your partner’s substance use, how it alters their reasoning and behavior. Talk to trustworthy sources for couples in your situation.This supports more compassion and less judgment without being unrealistic or routinely wounded by the realities you both need to face.
What Do You Communicate? Listen to How You Interact
Your words are the overflow of your heart. How your speak to your partner communicates a wealth of information in just a few exchanges. It’s important to recognize and address negative or toxic patterns in your attempts to interact.
Pay attention to blaming and shaming language. Watch out for angry, abusive, or punishing words that arise from the stress of life with an addiction. Even language you believe is positive or motivating can reverberate with resentment, judgement, and pressure to recover sooner rather than later. Substance use is excruciating for all involved.
Try focusing less on your partner and more on what you’re feeling. Honor your experience and your relationship. Pay attention to your inner responses before they become harmful reactions. The most helpful way forward is to show yourself and your partner as much dignity as possible without forgoing the necessary steps toward recovery. As recovery happens , forgiveness will be more possible if there are as few damaging interactions as you can manage.
How Are You There For Them? Question Your Version of Support
Making your partner’s substance use the center of your life may feel like the thing to do. Certainly, you need to deal with the truth. However. to operate as though your partners’ struggles, needs, wants, problems, and consequences are the focus of your life and relationship is a disservice to you both.
Codependency is not unusual in your position. You are not helping if you are making your partner more comfortable by inventing excuses, meeting their obligations, or absolving them of responsibility. This only furthers their denial and impedes accountability. It is infinitely more helpful that you look inward and determine why you enable and how you may be living in your own form of denial.
Who Are Your Helpers? Reconsider the Path Toward Recovery
You may want to take your partner’s recovery on your own shoulders but their path is their own. You can encourage and love them. Still, their choices remain their own too. Helping them is not being present at all times or giving in to their substance use. Helping is setting healthy boundaries for yourself, your relationship, and your home. The first order of business is to require that they seek help from a qualified therapist. You both need the proper support individually and to be in active recovery before to facing substance use as a couple. With that accomplished, empathy, acceptance and patience are more available between you.
Please don’t go on suffering. If you and your partner are ready to move forward, make sure you have helpers who can guide you toward improved trust and intimacy. We are here for you, we want the best for you and your partner, through and beyond the substance use. Read more about couples therapy and contact us for help soon.
If you’re looking for couples counseling for substance use, call 917-273-8836 or email us. We are currently providing Online/Virtual Video Counseling to our clients with HIPAA based platforms.
