Loving an Addict: Holding On While Letting Go

Loving someone who struggles with addiction is like living in a storm that never passes. Some days are calm. Some are chaotic. And no matter how tightly you try to hold everything together, it always feels like you're losing control.

The Chaos of Addiction Isn’t Just Theirs — It Becomes Yours

When you love an addict — whether it’s a partner, child, sibling, or friend — you are pulled into a world of instability, broken promises, sleepless nights, and emotional whiplash.

You may find yourself constantly:

• Walking on eggshells to avoid triggering a spiral
• Cancelling plans, missing work, or covering for them
• Checking their location, searching for signs, praying they’re safe
• Offering support… then tough love… then support again

This cycle leads to deep emotional burnout, a feeling of powerlessness, and sometimes, losing yourself completely in the process.

The Book That Changed Everything: If You Loved Me, You’d Stop

One of the most powerful tools in my own healing was the book If You Loved Me, You’d Stop by Lisa Frederiksen. It opened my eyes to something critical:

Alcoholism is a brain disease.

This isn’t about willpower, character, or love — it’s about neurochemistry. Drinking at an early age disrupts the development of the executive function, which governs decision-making, impulse control, emotional regulation, and future thinking.

When someone starts drinking in adolescence, their ability to reason, plan, and cope becomes impaired — sometimes permanently. Understanding this helped me move from anger and blame… to clarity and acceptance.

But acceptance doesn’t mean enabling.

The Hardest Truth: You Can’t Save Them

You can support them. You can love them. You can hope, encourage, and offer every resource available — but you cannot do the work of recovery for them.

That realization often leads to grief. Because you’re not just losing who they are today — you’re grieving the future you dreamed of, the person they used to be, or could have become.

So How Do You Cope When You Love an Addict?

1. Take Care of Yourself First

   • You can’t pour from an empty cup.
   • Get therapy. Join a support group like Al-Anon. Find healthy outlets.

2. Remove Yourself from Toxic Situations

   • If their behavior is harming your physical or mental health, you are allowed to walk away.
   • Loving someone doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, manipulation, or chaos.

3. Set Boundaries — and Stick to Them

   • This is the single most important tool.
   • Every time you allow an addict to push your boundary, you’re teaching them where the new line is.
   • Next time, they’ll start from there… and keep pushing.
   • Boundaries are not punishments — they are acts of love and self-respect.

You’re Not Alone

If you’re in this space, reading this now — take a deep breath. You are not alone, and you are not crazy. You’re just someone who loves deeply, and who’s been caught in something bigger than you.

Healing starts with you.

Need help building boundaries or finding support resources?
At Addiction Treatment Consultants, we help families navigate this painful process with compassion and guidance.

You can love someone and still choose peace. Let us help you get there.

Addiction: A Symptom of Deeper Wounds

When people think of addiction, they often picture the physical dependence — the withdrawals, the cravings, the inability to stop. But addiction isn’t just a chemical hook or a physical illness. At its core, addiction is often a symptom of deeper, unresolved pain.

Addiction Is a Coping Mechanism

Most individuals struggling with substance use aren’t chasing a high — they’re running from something:

• Childhood trauma
• Unresolved grief or loss
• Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
• Feelings of shame, anger, guilt, or abandonment

In many cases, the drug, drink, or behavior is not the problem — it’s the solution they’ve found to soothe emotional wounds that have gone unhealed for too long. It becomes a way to numb the pain, distract from inner turmoil, or temporarily feel in control.

The Undiagnosed Causes of Addiction

Trauma, especially when undiagnosed or unacknowledged, is a major underlying cause of addiction. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study shows a strong link between early trauma and later substance use. But trauma isn’t the only culprit. Other root causes include:

• Undiagnosed mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, or PTSD
• Family dysfunction or emotional neglect
• Chronic feelings of low self-worth or identity confusion
• Internalized shame or anger that has no healthy outlet

Many people living with addiction have never been asked, “What happened to you?” — they’ve only been asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

Why Treating Only the Physical Side Fails

Detox alone is not treatment. While managing the physical dependency is important, true recovery requires addressing the emotional, psychological, and spiritual wounds underneath.

Treating addiction solely as a physical illness is like putting a bandage on a bullet wound. Without exploring and healing the root cause, relapse is likely — because the pain that led to the addiction in the first place still exists.

The Path to Real Recovery

Healing starts when we stop asking why the addiction, and instead ask why the pain.

Lasting recovery comes from:

• Identifying and processing core trauma
• Building emotional resilience
• Developing healthy coping mechanisms to replace self-destructive behaviors
• Creating safety and connection in relationships
• Learning to sit with emotions instead of escaping them

At Addiction Treatment Consultants, we believe in a holistic, trauma-informed approach. We help treatment centers design admissions and program strategies that recognize addiction as a complex response to suffering, not a moral failure or weakness.

A Final Word

Addiction doesn’t mean someone is broken — it means they’ve been carrying pain without the tools to heal. The work of recovery is about more than sobriety — it's about becoming whole again.

Need help optimizing your program to support this kind of deep healing?
We specialize in helping treatment people find centres that build trauma-informed, client-centered systems that actually change lives.

Let’s talk.

Free Yourself.