Someone you love is using

For the people around it. The partner, the parent, the adult child, the sibling.

Why this is a separate thing

Almost everything built for addiction is built for the person with it. What exists for everyone else is mostly support groups, which help enormously and are not the same as one hour that is entirely about you and your specific situation.

Meanwhile the load on the person nearby is real and nobody counts it. You are the one doing the calculations. You are the one who knows which voice on the phone means what. You are the one deciding, weekly, between helping and enabling with no reliable way to tell them apart in the moment.

What I have actually seen

I worked at a rehabilitation centre with adults in addiction. What that gave me is not the ability to treat anyone. It is a clear-eyed view of what it does to the people around it, and a total absence of shock. You will not have to manage my reaction while you tell me what happened, which people in this situation do constantly without noticing.

The things that are true and that people hate saying

• You have wished they would just go, and you have never said it to anyone.
• You are relieved when they are gone and terrified when they do not answer.
• You have started lying to people about how it is going.
• You cannot tell any more whether you are helping or making it easier for them to keep going.
• You have organised your whole nervous system around one other person's behaviour and you do not know how to get it back.
• You love them. That has not gone anywhere, and it is a large part of why this is so hard.

You do not have to fix someone else in order to understand them. And sometimes fixing something in yourself changes the trajectory of everything around you.Jessica

The thing this work is actually built on

You cannot make another adult stop. You already know this, you have probably been told it in those words, and being told it did not help, because the problem was never that you lacked the information.

What does move is your own position. What you do, what you stop doing, what you are willing to carry, what you say out loud, where the line is and whether you keep it. That is genuinely available to you and it is not nothing. Households change when one person in them changes, more than the literature about willpower would suggest.

How we work on it

1. We get the actual situation out of your head and into words. Most people in this position have never told the full version to anyone, because every audience they have needs something from the telling.
2. We separate what is yours from what is theirs. This sounds simple. In practice it takes weeks, because after a while everything feels like yours.
3. We work out what you can actually decide. Not what you can make them do. What is genuinely in your hands, which is usually more than it feels like and less than you have been trying to control.
4. We build a line you can actually hold. A boundary you cannot keep is worse than none, because breaking it teaches everyone involved that your lines are decorative.

What I do not do here, clearly

I do not work with the person who is using on their substance use. I do not give medical advice, advise on detox, or tell you whether or when to pursue treatment for someone. Those are questions for licensed professionals, and in some states this work is specifically licensed. The full boundary is here. If you are in danger right now, safety comes before any of this.

Placeholder A resource list including family support programmes will go here.

Common questions

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