“My first husband was my great love. I was addicted to him; he was addicted to something else. Do yourself a favor, honey: Don’t marry an alcoholic.” Addiction is messy. Loving someone with an addiction is even messier. When you have an addiction, you lose sight of everything else. Nothing is more important than that which you’re addicted to, whether it be alcohol, drugs, sex, ect. You have a one-track mind set for self-destruction. When you love someone with an addiction, no one is more important than that person. You are constantly putting them first, worrying for their health, trying to take care of them - even before yourself. You romanticize them, you romanticize the problem. The person you love transforms into a liable, high risk investment. But, with high risk comes high reward, right? This can become as destructive as the addiction you’re trying to curb. It can be physically and emotionally draining to pour yourself so vivaciously into a person and not feel the favor being returned.
I used to think that there was no such thing as being too kind, especially in regards to a loved one. But the more I give, the more I realize that if I’m too generous to others I’m not generous enough to myself. You have to be selfish sometimes in life. You have to be selfish to guarantee your own health and well-being. You have to be selfish to guarantee that you don’t find your identity in someone else. This doesn’t justify being rude or callous; it is simply saying that at some point it is smarter to walk away than stay and try to help.
But at what point is it smarter to walk away? This is perhaps the trickiest part to pinpoint. It always feels like there is something else you can do, one more effort you can make. But there comes a definitive point in addiction where the dependency has completely consumed an individual; who they once were is lost and buried in their addiction. They become unresponsive to your efforts, the lows grow more frequent than the highs. At this point the only person you can save is yourself.
It’s hard to standby and watch the person you love dissolve into nothing more than a dependency. But at the end of the day, you have to realize you can’t save everybody. It’s not your responsibility to save everybody. This comes back to the principle of detachment with love. Detachment with love means caring enough about others to allow them to learn from their mistakes. It also means being responsible for our own welfare. Because an individual cannot learn from their mistakes or overcome an obstacle if they are being overprotected.
At the end of the day, you can still love the person, but you can hate the disease. And you have to be able to recognize the point in which the person becomes so overcome by their disease they become it. And at this point, you have to realize who you can save, and who you cannot. At this point, the only person you can save is yourself.
