I Still Love the Person Beneath the Disease

By Lisa Franco Alexander

There are losses that happen when someone dies. And then there are losses that happen while someone is still standing in front of you. Addiction can create that kind of loss. The person you love may still be there physically. You may still recognize the face, hear the familiar laugh, feel the arms that have held you a thousand times.

And sometimes—sometimes—you see them. The person you remember. The person beneath the disease.

A familiar expression. A moment of tenderness. A joke. A kiss on the cheek. A love letter written in handwriting perhaps nobody else could decipher, but you could.

And something inside you says:

There you are.

Then the disease pulls them away again. That is a particular kind of grief. Because you are not simply grieving who someone has become. You are grieving the person you still believe is in there.

And when you love someone through addiction, people standing outside the relationship often want the story to be much simpler than it is.

Why don't you leave?

Why do you keep helping?

Why did you forgive that?

Why are you still answering the phone?

After everything that happened, how can you possibly still love him?

But complicated love does not produce simple answers. The terrible things do not erase the beautiful things. And the beautiful things do not excuse the terrible ones.

Both happened.

Both belong to the story.

A Man Can Love You and Still Hurt You

This may be one of the hardest truths I've had to accept. People sometimes want me to choose. Either he loved me, or he hurt me. Either he was a good person, or he did terrible things. Either I recognize what addiction did to my life, or I'm making excuses for him. But human beings aren't either/or. And neither is complicated grief.

A man could deeply love his wife and terribly hurt her.

A wife could deeply love her husband and eventually be unable to save him.

Friends could love them both and still not understand what they were witnessing.

And addiction could exist right in the middle of all that love and still destroy things love alone could not protect. Maybe that's why this grief can be so difficult to explain. People want the story to resolve itself.

If he hurt you, stop loving him.

If you love him, forgive everything.

If you left, move on.

If you stayed, don't complain.

But sometimes there is no but.

There is and.

He loved me and he hurt me. I loved him and I could not save him. I can understand some of what happened inside him and hold him accountable for what happened to me. I can grieve the man beneath the disease and grieve the woman I became while desperately trying to reach him.

None of those truths cancels another.

If You Loved Me, Why Wasn't I Enough?

I think many people who have loved someone through addiction have asked some version of that question.

I certainly have.

If you loved me, why did you need the alcohol?

Why the drugs?

Why the constant stimulation?

Why the attention?

Why did there always have to be something else?

For a long time, those questions felt personal. And then, after everything fell apart, one of my husband's friends said something to me that I haven't stopped thinking about. He talked about how much stimulation my husband seemed to need. The phone was constantly in his hand. Television could be playing while he simultaneously watched his phone. Even surrounded by people, he seemed to need something else coming in. And then his friend said something else.

“But my God did he love you...everyone knew how much he loved you.”

Everyone knew how much he loved me.

They saw it.

They heard him talk about me. They watched us together. And they couldn't reconcile those two realities either.

If he loved his wife so much, why did he constantly need something more?

Perhaps because I was never what he was searching for. And I don't mean that the way it sounds. I don't mean he wanted another woman or another life. I mean perhaps love wasn't the thing he was desperately trying to find.

He already knew I loved him.

Maybe what he was searching for was something love alone could never provide.

Relief.

Stimulation.

Validation.

Belonging.

Escape.

Something capable, even momentarily, of changing whatever was happening inside him.

We didn't live separate lives where I stayed home while my husband went looking for excitement. We went out together.

We laughed.

We danced.

We held hands.

Many of the people who eventually became his friends were people he met through me. There was a place in Panama that had become almost like family to me—a relaxed, backyard kind of gathering place filled with music and people from many different countries. I had been going there for months. When my husband arrived in Panama, I took him there. People welcomed him immediately.

Some have since told me something that touched me deeply:

We loved him at first because he was your husband. We loved you, so of course we welcomed him. Then they came to care about him for himself. But they also watched him change. They watched addiction begin consuming more of him. We could arrive somewhere together, holding hands. Then the men would gather and he would join them. I had my own friends. I talked. I laughed. I danced.

But every time I turned around, he seemed to be watching me. He might text me from across the place. Walk over and kiss my cheek. If I got up to dance with one of my girlfriends, sometimes he would come over, cut in and dance with me.

The love was still there.

That's what makes this so difficult to explain. Because the same man who had just crossed the room to kiss me could disappear with the guys. Sometimes he took our rental car. I would wait for him to come back. Sometimes closing time arrived before he did, and eventually I would take a taxi home alone. Meanwhile, he might be buying bottles for entire tables with money he did not have, believing somehow that the bill would eventually find its way to me.

For a long time, I interpreted so much of this through the eyes of a wife:

Why are you leaving me?

I see something different now.

He wasn't always running away from me.

He was perpetually running toward something.

And perhaps, sometimes, away from himself. I cannot know everything that happened inside him. But I know what I witnessed. There always seemed to need to be something.

A drink.

A cigarette.

A screen.

A message.

A drug.

Attention.

People.

Noise.

Validation.

Something to anticipate.

Something to chase.

Something that might change the way he felt for another minute. And eventually my question began changing.

Instead of:

What was missing in me that made me not enough?

I began wondering:

What was happening inside the person I loved that made nothing ever feel like enough?

Those are very different questions.

The Wounded Person Beneath the Addiction

I knew things about my husband's history that made it impossible for me to see only the behavior in front of me. I knew something about the frightened little boy who came before the man. The child who learned that some emotions weren't safe to express. The child who experienced punishment, rejection, abandonment and the feeling that there might not be anywhere he completely belonged.

I knew how desperately the adult man wanted to feel liked.

Accepted.

Important.

Wanted.

I could see connections.

But this is where I need to be very clear:

Understanding is not absolution.

A painful childhood does not make violence acceptable. Abandonment does not excuse betrayal. Trauma does not give someone permission to traumatize another person. Addiction does not eliminate accountability. And understanding someone's wounds does not obligate you to allow them to continue wounding you. But I also refuse to believe that accountability requires me to erase the wounded human being underneath the behavior.

Both can be true.

When Everyone Thinks They Know What You Should Have Done

There was another layer to loving my husband through addiction that was harder to explain. We came from different countries, different families and different cultures. And sometimes we had very different understandings of marriage, mental health, addiction, loyalty, intervention and what it meant to help someone you loved.

Over the years, my mother-in-law sometimes told me that perhaps I had done too much. I had given her son things he had never had before. I loved him so completely that he knew I wasn't going anywhere. She believed that because he knew I would always be there to rescue him, he could continue doing “stupidness,” as she called it, knowing I would eventually catch him.

I understood the fear underneath what she was saying. But inside me lived another history. I knew about the little boy who had been afraid. The little boy who learned that crying, anger, sadness and even ordinary childhood curiosity could bring punishment. I knew about abandonment.

Rejection.

Bullying.

The experience of feeling unwanted. I knew about the boy who had learned very young that some feelings were safer to numb than to express.

There were so many times I wanted to say:

You think my love created this?

I didn't.

Because blaming his mother wouldn't have healed him either. And because her story was complicated too. She loved her son.

She still does.

Years later, when his addiction became dangerous and he hurt me, she was the person who told me to call the police. Today she can tell me that he cannot return to her home or to the family while he is like this.

And in the next breath she can say:

He's my son. I love him. I pray for him.

I understand that completely.

Because so do I.

But our differences around mental health were real. Years earlier, after alcohol contributed to my husband hurting me, I stood in a courtroom and asked that he receive psychiatric help. The judge ultimately told me to take him for that help. He willingly went with me. But when his mother learned where we were, she was horrified. Her fear was that people would see her son entering a psychiatric hospital and believe that he was “mad.”

To her, bringing him home protected him. To me, getting him help was protecting him. Neither of us believed we were abandoning him. We had radically different ideas about what helping him looked like. And somewhere in the middle stood the person with the addiction.

And me.

The Emotional No-Man's-Land

This is something I rarely hear discussed when people tell families what they should have done. Sometimes loving someone through addiction leaves you standing in an emotional no-man's-land.

One family thinks you did too much.

Another thinks you interfered too much.

People who saw the addiction may not understand the love. People who saw the love may minimize the addiction. People who saw the harm may ask why you stayed. People who watched you desperately trying to intervene may decide you were controlling. One culture may interpret something as loyalty that another interprets as enabling. One family may consider a private matter something that should never leave the home, while another believes outside intervention is desperately needed.

People can disagree about treatment.

Marriage.

Mental health.

Masculinity.

Family obligation.

Privacy.

Consequences.

Forgiveness.

What it means to stay. What it means to leave. And what it means to love. Eventually you can find yourself standing in a bizarre emotional no-man's-land where nobody seems capable of understanding the whole story. And almost nobody knew the man I knew. The one before things became so bad. The one underneath it. That's why finding someone who can hold two truths without demanding that you choose between them can feel almost sacred:

“I know how deeply you love each other.”

And:

“I recognize what I'm seeing.”

One truth doesn't have to erase the other.

When Love Becomes Something the Disease Can Use

This may be one of the hardest things I've had to admit. Every time I forgave him, I believed I was giving the man I loved another chance.

Sometimes I was.

But sometimes I was unknowingly giving his addiction another opening.

I had resources.

I had credit.

I had transportation.

I had the ability to solve problems.

And, perhaps most importantly, he knew something with absolute certainty:

I loved him.

There was a time before addiction consumed so much of our lives when I would travel to the United States and call before returning home.

I'd ask:

What do you want me to bring you?

His answer was always the same.

Just you. I just want you. I don't need anything but you.

That was the man I knew. Later, addiction changed what he was capable of doing to obtain money, substances, attention and stimulation. The person who once wanted nothing from me but me could eventually take from the very person he loved. And that is devastating to reconcile. But perhaps this is one of the cruelest lessons addiction teaches the person standing beside it:

Sometimes helping the person you love means refusing to help the disease that is hurting them.

Love and access are not the same thing. Love and money are not the same thing. Love and rescuing are not the same thing. Love and absorbing consequences are not the same thing. I could love the human being beneath his disease without providing his disease unlimited access to me. It took me far too long to understand that.

The Door Can Remain Open Without Leaving Yourself Unprotected

Recently, I listened to a man in long-term recovery talk about the damage his addiction had caused throughout his family. He spoke about his father—the person who, despite everything addiction had done, never stopped loving him. But there was an important distinction in the way he described that love. His father didn't remove the consequences. He didn't excuse his behavior. He didn't release him from accountability.

He simply never made the loss of his love one of the consequences.

The message remained:

When you are ready to come back, the door is open. I still love you.

That stopped me.

Because perhaps unconditional love has been misunderstood in conversations about addiction.

Unconditional love does not mean unconditional access.

It does not mean unlimited money. It does not mean rescuing someone from every consequence. It does not mean allowing yourself to be lied to, betrayed, financially devastated or harmed. It does not mean pretending the disease isn't destroying things around it.

Sometimes love has to say:

I cannot participate in this.

I cannot finance this.

I cannot rescue you from this.

I cannot allow this inside my home.

I cannot allow you to hurt me.

And still:

I love you.

There is a difference between refusing to abandon someone and refusing to abandon yourself. I understood that man's description of his father immediately. Because there were times when I had to walk away from what my husband's addiction had become. But I did not stop loving the person beneath it. I kept answering when he reached out. I kept offering help if he became ready to accept it. Eventually, addiction carried him somewhere neither of us had imagined.

Prison.

And when so much else had disappeared, I went to him. During one of those visits, he said something I've never forgotten. He told me that nobody else in the world would still be there after everything that had happened. Nobody else, he believed, would still want to help him. Nobody else would still love him. And then he told me that I was the person who had always cared about him.

Not the addiction.

Not the chaos.

Him.

I don't hear those words as proof that I should have tolerated everything that came before them. I hear them differently now.

Sometimes loving the person beneath the disease means refusing to abandon their humanity without surrendering your own.

But Who Helps the Family Recover?

So much of our conversation about addiction understandably centers on

the person using.

Did they get help?

Did they become sober?

Did they relapse?

Did they recover?

Did they rebuild their life?

Those questions matter.

But there are other people standing just outside the frame.

What happened to the spouse who spent years living from crisis to crisis?

What happened to the parent who became frightened every time the phone rang?

What happened to the children whose home changed around somebody else's substance use?

What happened to the person who learned to monitor moods, money, disappearances,

promises and warning signs? What happened to the person who became so focused on keeping somebody else alive that she gradually stopped noticing what was happening to her own life?

Sobriety can end active substance use. It cannot travel backward through time and make everything that happened during addiction never have happened.

The family has a recovery story too.

And perhaps we need to ask them something more often:

What happened to you while everyone was trying to save the person you loved?

Please Stop Telling Me to “Move On”

Long before anyone used those exact words, I had already experienced the assumption behind them. Over the years, whenever my husband got himself into trouble and hurt me, men who knew us would approach me.

“I'll be your next husband.”

“I'm going to be your boyfriend now.”

They weren't joking.

And those words upset me far more than they probably understood.

Because I wasn't standing there thinking, Well, this husband didn't work out. Who's next?

I love my husband.

I could be furious with him. I could be devastated by what he had done. I could know that something had to change.

And I could still love him.

Yet people sometimes seemed to believe that because he had hurt me, another man could simply step into his place. As though attachment worked that way. As though history could be transferred. As though the person with whom you had built a private language, shared years of memories, made promises, survived hardships, laughed until you couldn't breathe, and imagined growing old with could simply be exchanged for somebody else.

Love is not a vacancy.

And grief is not evidence that you haven't yet found the replacement. Maybe that's why the words move on have always bothered me so much. Because “move on” is one of those phrases people use when they want grief to have a destination.

But where exactly am I supposed to move?

I am still married. I still love my husband. And loving him does not mean that I deny what has happened. It does not mean that I excuse the harm. It does not mean that I know what our future will look like.

It simply means that love did not disappear because our lives became complicated.

You don't move on from years of loving someone as though you're closing a browser tab. You don't wake up one morning and decide that because a relationship became destructive, complicated or impossible—or because someone died—the years before it are suddenly meaningless.

Move on.

Sometimes it sounds like an instruction to abandon something.

Stop loving.

Stop remembering.

Stop wondering.

Replace the person.

Close the chapter.

Be finished.

But some chapters become part of us.

We don't need to rip them out of the book to keep writing.

Perhaps I don't need to move on. Perhaps I need to learn how to move forward while carrying something that mattered—and still matters. I don't want another relationship right now. I can't imagine another relationship right now. Maybe I never will.

Or perhaps one day something changes.

Never say never.

But that's tomorrow's question.

I don't have to decide the rest of my life tonight.

I don't need another partner to prove I've healed. I don't need to stop loving someone to demonstrate that I've learned. I don't have to replace the future I once imagined in order to create a future that still has meaning.

Moving forward simply means recognizing:

I am still alive.

I can carry memories forward. I can carry grief forward. I can carry love forward. I may even carry unanswered questions forward. But perhaps I can learn to carry them without allowing them to carry me.

You Don't Have to Stop Loving Them to Start Saving Yourself

For years, so much of my life became organized around trying to save someone I loved.

What haven't I tried?

What haven't I learned?

Who haven't I called?

What haven't I understood?

What if this time is different?

What if I can finally reach him?

I spent years searching for the person I loved beneath his disease. And somewhere along the way, there was another person disappearing too.

Me.

Perhaps that is where Life After Complicated Loss™ begins.

Not with:

How do I stop loving him?

But:

How do I begin loving my own life again too?

I don't have to turn the person I loved into a monster to acknowledge what his disease did to my life. I don't have to erase the beautiful years to acknowledge the terrible ones. I don't have to erase the terrible years to prove the beautiful ones were real. I can grieve the person beneath the disease. I can grieve what happened to me. I can grieve the future I thought we would share.

And I can begin looking for the woman who spent so much time trying to find him. You don't have to stop loving the person beneath the disease in order to rediscover the person beneath your own grief. Maybe I cannot rescue him. Maybe I never could. But there is still someone here whose life deserves my attention.

Me.

Life After Complicated Loss™

Perhaps healing isn't forgetting. Perhaps moving forward doesn't require abandoning love. Perhaps wholeness doesn't mean getting everything back. Peace doesn't mean deciding everything that happened was okay. Purpose doesn't require finding a silver lining in suffering. And healing doesn't require forgetting, replacing, forgiving on command—or moving on. Maybe healing means learning how to carry a complicated story without disappearing underneath it.

There can be love and accountability.

Grief and gratitude.

Anger and compassion.

Memories and boundaries.

Loss and life.

All in the same heart.

I spent a very long time asking:

How do I save the person I love?

Today, I am learning to ask something else:

How do I build a life that can hold what I've lost without allowing the loss to become all that I am? I don't have the entire answer yet. I don't need to.

I don't have to decide the rest of my life tonight.

For now, perhaps it is enough to know:

My life is still here.

Come Sit Beside Me

If you have loved—or still love—someone through addiction, you don't have to defend your grief here. You don't have to explain why you stayed. You don't have to explain why you left. You don't have to explain why you still love them. And you don't have to make the person you loved entirely good or entirely bad before your experience is allowed to matter.

I would rather ask you something different:

What do you wish someone had understood about what it was like to love the person beneath the disease?

And perhaps an even harder question:

When was the last time someone asked what all of this has done to you?

Come sit beside me. You don't have to explain why you still love them.

Love and loss can live in the same heart.

— Lisa Franco Alexander

Founder | Heart's Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

Rediscover Peace · Purpose · Wholeness