What brings someone here
You're not the one with the addiction — but you're living inside it. The unpredictability, the worry, the cycle of hope and disappointment. The way it reshapes your whole household. You may have spent years trying to manage it, fix it, or just hold things together while something in you quietly erodes.
People in this position often come to therapy last. They're focused on someone else. But what's happening to you matters — and there's real work to do here, independent of what the person with the addiction does or doesn't do.
What this work focuses on
We look at the patterns that develop around someone else's addiction: hypervigilance, over-functioning, the loss of your own needs and identity in the effort to manage someone else's. These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations — parts of you that learned to operate this way for good reason.
I draw on the Recovery 2.0 framework, which understands addiction as disconnection — and recognizes that those close to the person struggling often carry their own disconnection, their own trauma, their own parts that need tending.
The IFS lens on family systems and addiction
In IFS, the family system around addiction develops its own protective parts — the manager who keeps the peace, the firefighter who reacts to crises, the exile who holds the grief and helplessness underneath. This work helps you understand your own internal system and find more room to respond rather than react.
This isn't about detaching and moving on. It's about building the capacity to love someone while also taking care of yourself — which is both harder and more possible than it sounds.
How we track what changes
Depending on what you're carrying — anxiety, depression, trauma — I use validated measures to get a clear picture of where you are and track real movement over time. Your wellbeing is the focus here, and we'll know when things are genuinely shifting.
Ready to take the first step? Schedule a free 15-minute consultation — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation to see if we're a good fit.