Today we meet S who is married to a functioning alcoholic. He has been that way since they met and despite her protests, has never looked to change or to respect her wishes. In therapy, she constantly complains about him and how he treats her but will enable him and his issues by avoiding talking…
Anyone who is a regular reader of my work will know that I work with a lot of codependents who generally share a similar set of behaviour patterns with each other. Codependents are generally very nice people who have often been taken advantage of many times but have also been in situations where they have…
There is a storyline that runs in the well-known tv series Breaking Bad when one of the main characters rents a house from a woman who he develops a relationship with. As he is an addict, she also falls into the same addiction “because she loves him”. In the end this “love” proves her downfall…
There is much written on the internet (including by me) about the “new codependency”, the “love addiction”, documenting poor souls trapped in relationships with “narcissist”, emotionally distant partners. In therapy, we quite rightly talk about how to fix the broken childhood of neglect and abuse that created the situation in the first place. We always…
Over the years as a therapist, I have seen the rise in alcohol abuse among patients and in the environment around them. Many of them can only feel good when they can escape their problems through a drunken haze. Many of them deny they have a problem with drinking and some of them deny that…
I live in a country where alcohol is seen as an essential part of any social activity. It is generally not possible to take part in any event, private or public, without masses of the stuff being consumed, leaving many people unable to care for themselves afterwards. It is a blight on society and family…