When Someone Else’s Addiction Becomes Your Life

Life After Complicated Loss™: Loving Someone You Cannot Recover For

By Lisa Franco Alexander

Maybe your phone has a different sound now. Not literally. It rings the same way it always has, but somewhere along the way, hearing it became something different. You see their name on the screen and before you even answer, your stomach tightens. What happened this time? Are they okay? Do they need money? Is the story they are about to tell you true? Is someone hurt? Is this finally the call you have spent months—or years—being terrified you would receive?

And still, you answer. Of course you do. You love them. Perhaps that is one of the hardest things to explain about loving someone who is living with addiction: the love can remain completely real while the life surrounding that love becomes almost unrecognizable. You can miss someone terribly even while protecting yourself from what being close to them has begun to cost you.

Sometimes they sound like themselves again. They ask about a memory. They remember something beautiful you shared. They say something thoughtful that makes you wonder whether they are finally beginning to understand. For a little while, you aren't talking to the addiction, the crisis, the lies or the chaos. You are talking to the person you remember, and hope—sometimes despite everything you have told yourself—begins filling the room again.

That may be one of the cruelest parts.

Because hope can make you reach toward someone again. It can make you think, There you are. I knew you were still in there. And when the familiar pattern returns—the request for money, another story that doesn't make sense, another broken promise, another crisis you are expected to solve—the disappointment isn't simply disappointment. It can feel like losing the person all over again.

We talk so much about what addiction does to the person experiencing it. We ask how to help them, how to encourage treatment, how to keep them safe and how to get through to them. Those questions matter enormously. But there is another person in this story whose life can slowly disappear from view: the person who loves them.

When Their Addiction Begins Living in Your Life

You may have spent years talking, pleading, reasoning, forgiving, investigating, helping, paying, rescuing, waiting and hoping. You may have said, “This is the last time,” only to discover that fear has a remarkable ability to renegotiate promises we made when we weren't afraid. You may have covered a bill, repaired something, made an excuse, apologized to someone, replaced something that disappeared or answered another desperate call because the alternative felt unbearable.

Eventually, you become skilled at things you never wanted to know how to do. You listen for changes in someone's voice. You notice pauses other people wouldn't notice. You read a message three times looking for inconsistencies. You wonder whether you are hearing the truth, part of the truth or the version of the truth designed to get you to say yes. You may begin keeping mental records because you no longer trust your own memory after hearing so many different explanations.

Then there is the waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the next crisis. Waiting to see whether treatment will last. Waiting to find out whether this promise is different from the others. Waiting for the person you remember to return.

Without realizing it, you may begin organizing your own life around someone else's addiction. Your sleep changes. Your finances change. Your relationships change. Your plans become tentative because you don't know what tomorrow will bring. Even on a peaceful day, part of you may remain alert for the thing that will end the peace.

Sometimes complicated loss isn't losing the person you love. It's slowly losing pieces of your own life while desperately trying not to lose them.

The Exhaustion of Hope

We usually talk about hope as though it can only be good. When you love someone with an addiction, hope can be more complicated than that.

There may be moments when you see the person you remember. Perhaps they acknowledge something they have done. They talk about wanting to change. They apologize. They remember something meaningful. They tell you they understand something they didn't understand before. For a few hours or a few days, you allow yourself to imagine what life could be if this really were the beginning of something different.

Then something happens.

The pattern returns.

And the emotional distance between maybe this time and not this time either can be devastating.

That repeated rise and fall can become its own form of grief. You aren't only grieving what addiction has already changed. You may find yourself grieving possibilities over and over again: the conversation you thought meant something, the promise you wanted to believe, the glimpse of the person you love, the future you briefly allowed yourself to imagine.

This is one reason loving someone with an addiction can be so difficult to explain to people who haven't lived beside it. They may see one crisis. You are carrying the accumulated weight of hundreds of them, along with hundreds of moments when you thought perhaps the crisis was finally ending.

Fear Can Begin Making Your Decisions

From outside the relationship, someone may say, “Just stop giving them money,” “Stop answering,” or “Let them deal with the consequences.” Inside the relationship, none of those decisions feels simple.

What if I don't answer and something happens? What if they really are hungry? What if this emergency is real? What if refusing this one request puts them in danger? What if they think I have abandoned them? What if I say no and never hear from them again? What if something terrible happens and I spend the rest of my life wondering whether I could have prevented it?

Those aren't insignificant fears. They can become powerful enough that we do things we already know we don't want to do simply to make the fear stop for a little while.

An informal poll I recently saw in an addiction-support community asked people which part of loving someone with addiction felt hardest. Of the 121 people who responded, the largest number selected “the constant fear and uncertainty.” Others chose the lies and not knowing what was true, waiting and wondering what would happen next, and the guilt of questioning every decision. It wasn't scientific research and cannot tell us what all families experience, but the responses captured something painfully recognizable: addiction can leave the people around it living in a near-constant state of uncertainty.

Sometimes what looks like rescuing from the outside began as a frightened person thinking, If I can just fix this one problem, maybe everyone will be okay.

But there is always another question worth asking: What is all of this costing me?

When Helping Becomes Doing Their Work for Them

This may be one of the hardest distinctions a family ever has to make because helping is so deeply connected with love. When someone we love is hurting, our instinct is often to move toward them. We want to find the answer, explain what they're not seeing, help them understand themselves, locate the right treatment, give them another chance or say the magical combination of words that finally reaches them.

Sometimes our help truly is helpful. Families can play an important role in supporting treatment and recovery. But supporting someone's recovery and attempting to perform their recovery for them are not the same thing.

You can spend hours explaining why they behave as they do. You can point out patterns. You can encourage reflection. You can tell them what they need to forgive, confront, understand or change. They may even agree with you. They may have a moment of extraordinary insight.

But insight is not recovery.

A beautiful conversation is not recovery. An apology is not recovery. A promise is not recovery. A single honest moment can be meaningful—it may even be the beginning of something important—but the people who love someone with addiction eventually learn to look for something beyond words.

They look for sustained action.

That can be heartbreaking because words are often where hope gets in.

Believing in Someone Is Not the Same as Carrying Them

During a resilience program I attended, someone said something I haven't forgotten: “Somebody believed in me before I could believe in myself.”

I love that idea because people struggling with addiction are still people. They are not their worst decision, their worst day or the worst thing addiction has caused them to do. Recovery is possible, and sometimes another person's belief helps someone remember that another life is still imaginable.

But there is an important difference between believing in someone and becoming responsible for making their transformation happen.

You can say, “I see something in you that you cannot see right now,” without saying, “Therefore I must do the work of finding it for you.”

You can encourage someone to seek help without becoming their therapist. You can support treatment without becoming the treatment. You can listen without accepting every explanation. You can love someone without financing every request. You can recognize their pain without surrendering your entire life to managing it.

Perhaps one of the deepest expressions of belief eventually becomes this: I believe there is still a person inside you capable of choosing a different life. I believe in that person enough to stop doing for you what only you can ultimately do for yourself.

What Is Actually Mine to Carry?

There is a question I return to again and again in complicated loss: What belongs to me?

When addiction has been running through a family for a long time, those lines can become difficult to see. Their emergency feels like your emergency. Their debt feels like your problem. Their missed obligation becomes yours to repair. Their conflict becomes yours to mediate. Their emotional state determines whether you are allowed to have a peaceful day.

So perhaps we begin there. What is actually mine to do?

Their recovery is theirs. Their honesty is theirs. Their willingness to seek treatment is theirs. Their decisions are theirs. Their relationships with other people are theirs. Their promises are theirs to keep or break.

Your choices belong to you too.

You get to decide what you will pay for, what behavior you will remain around, what conversations you will participate in, when you will answer your phone, what you need to feel safe and what kind of relationship you are willing to have.

That is what a boundary is supposed to do. It isn't a secret strategy for forcing someone into recovery. It isn't punishment. It doesn't guarantee that someone will change because you finally said no.

A boundary defines your participation.

That distinction matters because if we use boundaries to produce a particular response from another person, our lives are still being controlled by what they do next. If the boundary exists because this is what I need in order to live safely, honestly and with integrity, something shifts. Their reaction still matters to us—we love them—but it no longer determines whether the boundary was legitimate.

Sometimes the Family Needs Recovery Too

We talk about people recovering from addiction. We don't talk nearly enough about families recovering from what addiction has done to their lives.

Perhaps your recovery begins with sleeping through the night again. Maybe it is looking at your bank account without calculating the next rescue. Perhaps it means telling one trusted person what has really been happening instead of protecting the family secret. Maybe it means returning to something you once loved doing before crisis became your primary occupation.

It may mean noticing how much of your emotional life has become dependent upon someone else's condition. If they are doing well, you breathe. If they disappear, you panic. If they sound clear, hope floods back. If something feels wrong, your entire day collapses.

That is an enormous amount of power for another person's addiction to hold over your life.

Reclaiming some of that life can initially feel cruel. How can I go to dinner when they are struggling? How can I laugh? How can I travel? How can I buy something for myself? How can I enjoy today when I don't know what is happening to them?

Because your suffering cannot recover another person.

Your exhaustion cannot make them sober. Your financial destruction cannot create their insight. Your isolation cannot produce their willingness. Your refusal to experience joy cannot protect them from the consequences of their choices.

You are still here too.

And your life matters too.

The Person You Love May Still Be in There

Perhaps this is what makes everything so difficult.

You remember them.

You remember their laugh before everything became complicated. You remember trips, ridiculous private jokes, ordinary mornings, music, meals, plans and the version of the future you once imagined together. You may occasionally hear that person again, even now.

And your heart says, There you are.

It is possible to believe that person still exists without pretending the addiction doesn't exist too. You don't have to erase every beautiful memory in order to acknowledge what is happening today. You don't have to decide that none of the love was real simply because the relationship has become painful.

Hope and reality can exist in the same heart.

You can hope they find recovery while recognizing that they haven't found it yet. You can celebrate genuine steps forward without turning one good conversation into proof that everything has changed. You can love who they have been, see who they could become and still make decisions based upon who they are showing you they are today.

That isn't giving up hope.

It is refusing to let hope require you to abandon reality.

Life After Complicated Loss™

There is a particular grief in loving someone who is still here while missing the person they once were, the relationship you once had or the future you thought you would share. There may be no funeral, no clean ending and no socially recognized moment when everyone gathers around and acknowledges what you have lost.

Instead, grief and hope keep meeting each other.

One day you may feel certain you cannot continue. The next day something happens that makes you believe again. Then another disappointment arrives and you wonder how many times one heart can make that journey.

Perhaps this is why the family needs recovery too.

Not recovery from loving the person. Recovery from allowing their addiction to become the organizing force of your own life.

You can love them and say no. You can believe in them without rescuing them. You can hope for their recovery without making your life dependent upon it. You can remember the person you love while responding honestly to the person standing in front of you today.

And you can begin asking questions that have nothing to do with what they will do next. What have I stopped doing? Who have I stopped seeing? What parts of myself have disappeared? What have I postponed until they get better? What would it mean to make one decision today based upon the life I am still allowed to have?

Because sometimes Life After Complicated Loss™ isn't about learning to live after someone has gone.

Sometimes it is learning how to live while someone you love is still finding—or still refusing to find—their own way home.

You do not have to stop believing that they can recover.

But perhaps you can finally stop believing that you have to recover them.

LISA FRANCO ALEXANDER

Founder, Heart’s Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

Peace · Purpose · Wholeness.