If your or your partner’s drinking or drug use is causing issues in your relationship, eventually it’s going to need to be addressed.
Excessive substance use prevents us from true intimacy.
Perhaps fights arise during or because of one’s intoxication, or one partner is left not knowing where the other is or what they’re doing when they’re drinking.
This sucks…
The important thing in terms of the relationship is that if it’s a problem for one of you, then it’s a problem for both of you; it’s a relationship problem.
It’s easy to get defensive: “I don’t have a problem. It’s my partner’s worry about my drinking that’s the real problem. I’m going to keep drinking how I want to drink.”
This sort of thinking might be fine if you were single. But if you were in couples counseling with Dr. Phil, he’d probably say, “How’s that working out for you?”
Ignoring an ongoing conflict doesn’t make it magically go away; to the contrary, it often exacerbates it.
Of course, it may well be there is no serious addiction, and both partners need only agree on parameters around substance use.
In this case, we might devise an agreement or a contract around drinking – for instance, to limit yourself to one beer during the week and two on the weekend. If the contract is breached, then we’ll have a different conversation, perhaps about receiving treatment or attending recovery meetings.
Once the elephant in the room (drinking and drug use) has been or is being sufficiently addressed, then we can work more formally within our framework for couples.
If your relationship has been affected by substance use, please reach out to Jason Polk on our team. He's a Licensed Addiction Counselor.