The Complicated Grief of Addiction

1. The Complicated Grief of Addiction However, the kinds of losses that are part of losing someone to the disease of addiction can present unnatural challenges. Having an addict in the family is not a onetime event that can be named and mourned, it is a gradual eating away of the person and the relationship with that person. It is a series of, many small losses such a loss of healthy intimacy, a loss of respect or reliability.

2. Losses through addiction are often confusing and even shameful, they leak out into the family system like a poison gas that everyone inhales to one extent or another. Spouses learn to explain away drunkenness to “protect” the addict, the children and themselves with a million little excuses designed to lessen immediate pain. Siblings become suspicious of each other forming covert bonds with each other or one parent and leaving out or labeling others as the “problem.” Losses can remain hidden for long periods of time, we’re defended against seeing what we are seeing and coming to terms with exactly what is going on—is alcohol really the problem? After all, we have such a pleasant social life and alcohol is just a part of it. Are drugs what is changing the person I love? I cannot see them, I cannot smell them and when I confront my loved one they deny taking them. So why should I be suspicious and mistrustful? Over time the kinds of “small losses” that surround addiction get so systematically squashed, denied, rewritten or repressed that when the large losses come along, there is little template for dealing with them. We simply haven’t developed the skills; we have fallen out of practice; the little losses are so woven into the fabric of everyday life that we have learned not to see them. This habit of sweeping things that are painful under the rug can mean that healthy mourning does not occur when it needs to. Pain makes us feel vulnerable, pain takes inner strength to face. When there has been too much daily pain we often learn more about how not to feel it than the reverse. We learn instead a thousand little ways to shut pain down, to go numb inside. Feeling pain and processing it takes a level of trust that things will get better. If we’re worn down by the trauma of living with years or decades of addiction and the mistrust, and the resentment and disappointment that follow in its wake, chances are we do not have the faith, that if we feel and face our pain it will get us anything but more pain, so we learn to deny it rather than deal with it. Content Source