This is a serious post.
It’s a serious topic. Addiction is one of the greatest evils I’ve seen on the face of this earth.
If you are facing a situation in which your loved one is struggling with an addiction, my heart goes out to you. You should know that you are not alone, and also that no matter how bad things are, or seem likely to get, there is hope.
So, your girlfriend is an addict . . .
It doesn’t matter whether she’s addicted to alcohol, drugs, or both / all. As soon as it becomes clear that she has a real problem, there are a few things you need to get into your head immediately, and keep there.
First, you should know it’s not your fault.
Second, you should know and come to accept — as soon as possible — that she may never change.
Third, you should abandon even the slightest sliver of hope of “fixing her”. You never will, and your efforts to fix, “help” or “heal” will likely only make things worse for you both.
If she beats her addiction, it will be on her own terms, on her own time, because of her own efforts.
Fourth, you should get yourself to a local Al Anon meeting as soon as possible. NOTE: This is not the same thing as an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (an easy mistake that I made when I was going through this myself). It is a separate group, that is based on AA principles, but is designed for the family and friends of those affected by addiction (the literature refers mostly to alcohol, but the underlying issues are the same).
It would be most appropriate for your girlfriend to attend AA (or NA) meetings, herself, while you are attending Al Anon meetings — but don’t try suggesting this to her. If she is going to attend a meeting, she needs to do it for her own reasons.
Seeing a pattern yet?
The difficulty with addiction and relationships is that quite often, addicts are drawn to people who wish to be drawn to people they can save from addiction, and this forms the basis of what has come to be known as the Codependent relationship dynamic.
(For more on codependency, please buy or borrow a book like Codependent No More or anything else by Melody Beattie.)
In order for the addict to fully enter recovery, they must face the consequences of their actions — consequences that they are usually shielded from when they are in codependent relationships.
In exchange, their codependent partners get to externalize all their own problems, deny they have their own issues to work through, and feel morally superior to their partner, who is always such a screw-up and always getting in the way of the happiness they could have together, etc etc etc.
If any of this is sounding remotely at all like your relationship, get the book — or get to an Al-Anon meeting, stat.
But I only date Quality women
I know, I know. I thought the same thing. And when I found my Queen — the athletic, sporty, intelligent, beautiful chick I was so sure I’d been waiting for all these years — what do you know, her past wasn’t as Quality as her present. In fact, it wasn’t even her past.
It’s easy to say, “Oh, I’ll just screen for women who don’t do drugs” or “It’s easy to stay away from alcoholic girls, they’re transparent” but reality isn’t always so clear-cut. The difficulty with advanced addiction is that frequently, the addicted individual is incredibly adept at subtle manipulation, lying, and misdirection.
This is principally because they have been practicing these skills on themselves for years.
If you’ve ever met that alcoholic who could be six drinks in and perfectly coherent, well, it’s the same thing.
In addition, if you have any codependent relationship patterns in your attraction schema (translation: your parents were the slightest bit codependent, one or both parents drank heavily, etc) I can almost guarantee you will at one point or another find yourself inexorably drawn into a relationship with a woman who is codependent, addicted, or both (or otherwise matches your dominant attraction schema).
As a bonus, this will keep happening to you until you work your way through it.
What’s meant by “work your way through it”? Simply acknowledging it is not enough. You will have to do the hard work of redefining your own mental program, re-wiring yourself so that such patterns no longer arouse and attract you. You will have to learn how NOT to be Captain Save-a-Damsel-In-Distress; how to NOT take responsibility for someone else’s problems; and how to take care of yourself (among many, many others).
It’s a long, hard road, but if you have this pattern in you, you will have to traverse it sometime, so you might as well do it sooner as opposed to later.
Notes on Terminology
When I say “drugs”, I am referring to any manufactured substance that is designed principally to be habit-forming. This would put cigarettes in the same category as meth, cocaine and black tar heroin.
It puts alcohol in a slightly different class (since alcohol is not formulated for the express purpose of forming habits), although alcohol is still hugely habit-forming for many people, principally because of its effect on people’s prefrontal cortex.
Alcohol is, on the other hand, literally poison for your body. So even though that G&T is delicious — and trust me, I know better than most just how delicious a good G&T on a warm summer’s night can be — it’s worth it to ask yourself, in the interest of banishing cognitive dissonance, just prior to your first sip — “Just exactly why do I feel drawn to poison myself right now?”
I don’t mean to sound like a teetoler or self-righteous here. I still have the ocassional G&T and, even more frequently, the (ever-so-defensible) glass of wine with dinner. It’s a matter of being aware of what’s actually going on and not fooling yourself about it, but instead calling a spade a spade — “the poison that kills slowly” as it is known in genteel circles.
Okay, drugs are bad, but . . . evil?
The line that separates “this substance may be harmful to you” from “this substance is pure fucking evil” has to do with manufacture and intent.
It’s the manufactured drugs — the man-made ones — that I see as crossing that line. The fact is that these substances are designed deliberately with the express purpose of destroying the brain — and in the process, eroding the brain - body - mind - soul connection to the point that the divine presence in each person is so choked off that they become little more than a meat puppet.
You may argue that these substances are simply designed to produce a specific mood effect — a high — and that is also true. But chocolate, caffeine, a back rub and good sex all produce a high of the same kind, if not the same degree. It is the absurdity of the degree to which we have sought to elevate our highs that produce the self-destructive evil inherent in this class of substances.
It’s not that people with addiction are evil people. It is that these substances literally wreck your brain. They destroy existing healthy neuronal pathways and build new ones, inhumanly strong ones, that directly link “life” and “drug” in the drug addict’s psyche. They do this with brute chemical strength. And re-wiring that much wetware is a major effort that has to be tackled from all angles to have any hope of success.