Is Someone Else's Addiction Making You Crazy?

Loving someone who has an addiction will destroy your life. Not only is the addiction a terminal illness for them, it's a terminal illness for you. It can and will ruin your whole life if you let it. But there are some things you can do to keep yourself from being sucked down into the black pit of horribleness. But before I tell you what to do not to get sucked into that pit, let's talk about what's in that pit. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth. I've been helping people overcome addictions and their family members for 20 years now. And I can tell you from all those years of experience, the person who's suffering most, it's usually the closest family member. Addiction will destroy you the same way it destroys them. It brings you to a point of desperation. Now, we know that the addictive person is desperate to continue the addictive behavior, and they do all kind of crazy things to keep that going. But as the family member, you are desperate to help your addicted loved one. And you will also make some really crazy bad choices. And during that process, a lot of people completely lose themselves. They turn into people they don't even recognize anymore. They're like super spies. They're mad and resentful and angry and desperate and scared all the time. It's just so hard to focus on yourself when someone you love and care about is destroying their life. But it really is the first step in the process. In fact, if you don't get control of your own emotions and your own spiral, there's a high chance that you could be making it worse. I know you don't mean to, but it could be happening. I've got other videos about that. When you're in this situation, you find that you constantly think about it. You find that you're depressed, you find that you're anxious, and you worry all the time. You might even be engaging in, like, compulsive checking behaviors, like checking their phone, checking the bank account, checking their car mileage, checking to drive by to see that they're where they said they were going to be, checking the home security cameras, all the checking behaviors. You'll notice that those behaviors and feelings begin to consume more and more and more of your life, and it's time to get a hold of it. The first thing you need to do to get a hold of it is what I'm going to call Stop. Stop your own bleeding first. A lot of times when you're in the situation where you're trying to support and you love Someone who has an addiction. Some people who have an addicted loved one will find themselves in a situation where they're feeling unsafe or not secure in different ways. So let's talk about what that looks like unsafe might mean. If you care about someone who has an addiction and they are abusing you in any of the abuse kind of ways, that is an unsafe situation and you need to deal with that immediately. You're never going to be able to get control over this anxiety and this depression if you're in an abusive situation. Another type of unsafe situation is if person is putting you in some kind of financial jeopardy, either because they're stealing from you or because you've literally like remortgaged your house five times to pay for their treatment, or because you just keep trying to financially keep them up, but it's destroying your own finances that is an unsafe situation. You're not going to be able to get control over your own anxiety, your own resentment, your own frustrations as long as you're in that position. And another way you could be being in an unsafe situation is if you are physically and financially dependent on this other person. So this happens a lot in the case of spouses. So if you're the stay at home person and the other person is the one that provides income or goes to work or something like that, you can feel very, very trapped and unsafe. As you can imagine, that's a very vulnerable position to be in. First things first, you need to control the bleeding. You need to get yourself in a safe situation. If you're leaking money, stop the leak. If you don't have your own money, find a way to get your own money or get some kind of financial independence or at least have a backup plan in case like if I had to get out of situation tomorrow, here's where I'd go and here's what I do and I have a safe place to do it. Those are basic human needs that you need to get some kind of stability on for you to be able to do the next step, which is the one that actually helps you feel better. And that step involves shifting your focus from of all these things that you're scared about, all these resentments that you have, all the beating yourself up. I mean, you're full of negative emotions and negative thoughts. You know, I've heard a lot of people say things like, well, you can't help how you feel. And that's actually not true because feelings are always the result of focus. For example, if you watch a sad movie, you will begin to Be crying. You will feel sad. Even though that's not even real in your own life. You're watching it, you're focused on it. You feel that feeling. Or you can be watching something on TV that makes you feel embarrassed or makes you laugh. It's because it's what you're focusing on. In the case of having addicted loved one, you're probably focused on what they're doing or not doing all the time. In fact, it's actually really hard not to do that. But you got to remember there's like the good kind of focus on it, like learning, education, making a strategy, a plan, deciding what to do. And then there's the not so good kind of focus. The obsessive thoughts, the rumination, the going into the dark rabbit hole. None of that is productive or helpful. You're thinking about what's not going right, what could go wrong. All of these negative things which is keeping you stuck. Not only is it making you miserable, but you feeling that way also feeds into their addiction. You're gonna have to change some things in your life. That might mean not talking to certain people who trigger a lot of negative emotions or bring it up all the time. It distracting yourself. It might mean getting a new hobby, an interest in activity, but whatever you got to do not to go into that negative dark rabbit hole. Now, I'm a realist, so I know it will happen to you from time to time, but you got to get control of it the best that you can. In our membership group, we actually pick a topic for the month every month, and we focus on it. Topics like trust, relationships, anxiety management, honesty, communication. So instead of saying, like, don't focus on this, we're saying, hey, let's focus on this and start. Instead, we're focusing on being a better person. We're focusing on how can I feel better about myself, how can I relate better to others? That shift in focus will change your feelings, and eventually you start to feel like you might be getting back to yourself. Now, a lot of people will tell you to do things like, you know, join a support group. And I do think that's helpful. In fact, we have a free family Facebook group that you can join. And those things are helpful to get advice to feel validated and listened to. But too much of that can be harmful because it sucks you into the pit of negative thinking. So you want to find ways to counterbalance that. Be involved in other things, think about other things, bring other stuff into your life. If you're having trouble doing these things and you need a little help, then you might want to consider becoming a member. Now, our membership program is very different than like our Free Family Facebook group because it is focused on these other things. Instead, it's focused on growing as a person. It's focused on action steps and changing things in your own life, as opposed to just being focused on the problem. I'll put a link in the description in case you want to check that out. Do not let someone else's addiction destroy you. That doesn't mean you can't love them and help them and support them. To learn more about this process, I want you to watch this video next because it's going to help you understand why you're experiencing all that negativity.