Addiction is devastating because it not only can destroy the life of a person struggling with substance abuse, it can inflict devastating pain on everyone around that person as they must deal with the wrack and ruin of addiction in the life of someone they know and love. While the pain of watching someone you love deal with addiction can never be as acute as the pain of actually being an addict, it can still be a terrible ordeal.
Coping with the emotional impact of a loved one’s addiction requires a great deal of courage and fortitude.
Addiction is an awful disease that can tear lives apart and it can be destructive to those around the addict, as well. Much like a cancer diagnosis for one person can impact the life of an entire family, addiction isn’t just something the addict has, but an ordeal for everyone in the addict’s circle.
Watching a loved one deal with addiction is painful in its own right. You can only observe as drugs or alcohol ravage their body, change their personality, push them to do terrible things and bring devastation in its wake. You can offer to help, but sometimes they don’t want help. They only want to maintain their addiction, at nearly any cost, and any attempts to thwart that aim will be rebuffed, immediately and definitively.
Eventually, you and others in the addict’s life will have to make a choice, whether to stand back and let addiction consume your loved one, or whether you will take a stand, stage an intervention and push them to get help before they destroy their life completely.
But until that point comes, you will have to cope with everything that comes in the wake of your loved one’s substance abuse problem. You will potentially watch your loved one lie, cheat and steal to feed their addiction. They will betray your trust and that of others. You will see any efforts to help either repulsed or repurposed to instead further their addiction.
You will feel sadness, anger, perhaps even despair at times. You will look for help and worry there is no help to be found. There, luckily, you will be wrong.
Eventually, if you and others are persistent and courageous, you will break through the addict’s defenses and convince them they need help lest their addiction consume them. You will tell them they need rehab. And Good Landing is there for you when that time comes.
Good Landing Recovery is a faith-based rehab facility that can help the addict find recovery from substance abuse and discover a new way of living after leaving addiction behind. And by helping the addict, they also help the addict’s loved ones find release from the emotional fallout of addiction and its terrors.
There is no true comparison between actual addiction and being a bystander to another’s substance abuse. No matter how much empathy and love you have for another, you will not experience the same impact as the addict does themselves.
But that is not to minimize the emotional trauma of having to watch someone you love succumb to the scourge of addiction. It takes fortitude and love to maintain that watch over the addict’s struggles and make it out the other end to continue supporting them into recovery.