Detachment is key when it comes to dealing with a loved one’s drink problem

'Twelve years ago I got emotionally involved with someone who had a drinking problem," writes Anne Morshead, in the introduction to her new book, Blind Drunk.

Morshead, who is a relationship counsellor by profession and lives in Wicklow, goes on to describe in honest and candid terms how her partner's drinking impacted on her life and how she subsequently came to the slow realisation that she needed to look after her own health first, before considering her partner's.

This approach, which she describes as “compassionate detachment”, was key to her being able to deal with the issues her partner’s drinking created in her life and also to bring her partner to the realisation that he could not live with her and with alcohol. He had to choose one over the other and, thankfully, he has been sober for eight years now and, it should be added, is fully supportive of her book.

Often, when we talk about addicts, the focus is on the person in active addiction and the impact their addiction has on their friends and family is dealt with in a fleeting or passing way.

There are support groups and counselling services available to those living with an active addict, but too often family and friends modify their own behaviour to accommodate the addict unwilling to arrest their addiction, rather than detach fully from that person.

It’s an understandable human response, but Morshead is arguing that without detachment, loved ones may continue to enable the behaviour of an addict.

"It took me a long time to come to this realisation," she says. "In the process I lost myself and became a stranger to myself and alienated a lot of my friends. I started to get physically ill. I was obsessed with my partner's drinking. I ended up doing what one can only do and that is to change my own behaviour and my own life. I firmly believe that because I decided to take the focus off my partner, it actually enabled him to recover and become sober."

Era of social drinking
Morshead says she grew up in an era of social drinking in the 1960s and 1970s. Her father was a wine merchant, and 13 years ago she moved to Ireland from the UK and met her partner who is Irish.

“I thought he drank more than I did. It took me five years to cop on and realise that I couldn’t stop him and control his drinking,” she says. “However much alcohol I poured down the sink or tried to monitor what was going on, I was powerless over his addiction. It is an illusion I was under that I could make a difference by sheer willpower.

“The way I solved it was to detach, and to adopt a stance of tough love. What I hope and argue for in this book is for people to detach with compassion.”

In her own case, Morshead confronted her partner and took the decision to end their relationship until he did something about his addiction to alcohol. She says she was prepared for the fact that it could have meant the end of the road for their relationship, but she was determined to follow through on her threat if he didn’t stop drinking.

“I told him I didn’t want to see or speak to him until he decided to stop drinking. I knew if that could not happen, I would have to accept the end of our relationship. I also had to accept he could have died easily through an accident or something like organ failure. Thankfully, he gave up soon after and that then becomes his story so I don’t talk about that in the book.”

Minding my own business
Her partner lives with a disability, which Morshead believes made it even more difficult for her to detach herself from him. "I still find it very hard to mind my own business when it comes to my partner. I want to help before I am asked and also one of the other things is that my partner is visually impaired. That covered up the drinking problem and made it longer before I did anything about it."

While the approach of detachment with love worked for Morshead, I ask her how it might play out if say a mother or father are worried about their teenage son or daughter’s drinking or drug taking. Surely they can’t abdicate parental impulses and walk away from the active addict?

“The approach is extremely hard for someone with a child who has a problem. It is the most difficult situation and it goes against the grain of what you believe you need to do to look after them and care for them. You think you’re doing your best by sorting everything out, but in fact you’re doing the opposite. In my case, all I did was enable my partner to carry on drinking by not letting him take responsibility for his own life. For any parent, it is agony to let somebody’s addiction play itself out, but that is what they are going to have to do.

“There is evidence that if the family stops trying to stop the addict, the addict often stops themselves.”

Relationship counsellor
As a relationship counsellor, Morshead was able to work through some of the issues in her relationship herself, but in terms of the impact addiction had on her life, she also engaged with Al Anon, a confidential organisation that supports families and friends of addicts. "The difficult thing is to start the process," she says. "There is guilt about what if I don't pick up the pieces, then the addict in my life will think I don't care about them. We need to stop thinking that way, put the focus back on our own lives, and realise that we don't have to accept unacceptable behaviour."

Blind Drunk: Light at the end of the tunnel for anyone living with a loved one's alcohol problem' by Anne Morshead is published by Balboa Press