Dallas Bragg talks to a therapist about treating couples where one partner uses substances. The using partner typically hides their behavior out of fear, but without honesty, therapy stalls. Each hidden use is like a slow morphine drip of paper cuts, each revelation adding fresh pain.
So when you're, when you're therapizing couples, um, one's using, one isn't, where do you start?
The first thing is often the hardest, and that is the honesty piece. The person who's using is not being honest and transparent about it because their partner maybe has set a boundary and said, if you use again, I'm out. Or, you know, um, there's usually some fear that's at bay for, for the person who is not being honest. But until you're honest, it's very difficult to do any of the other work because the worst thing that happens with with this kind of stuff is when it's the slow drip, like a slow morphine drip, where, you know, one thing comes up and then you discover something else and then the partner discovers something else. And so each time it's like a series of multiple paper cuts that eventually ends up making you really, really, really, really in a lot of pain.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So honesty is the foundation for the rest of it.
Yeah, honesty starts and, you know, the biggest thing that I often see is the trust gets broken. And
