If you or your partner have started using controlled drugs for recreational use, you face more than health and legal problems. Substance abuse inevitably wreaks havoc on relationships on many levels.

A healthy relationship depends on trust, openness, and honest communication. Drug use makes people unpredictable, withdrawn, emotionally unstable and manic. The end result is a life marked by constant fear, mistrust and unpredictability.

Meanwhile, drug abuse leads to a host of social, legal and physical problems. It disrupts everything including social, family and work life.

Rare is the relationship that can survive all this.

As with alcohol, drug abuse can also lead to a condition known as co dependence. This is marked by one partner virtually supporting the other’s drug behaviour. It happens when the co dependent partner is so terrified of losing the other that they enter into a Faustian pact. Such behaviour is doomed as it based on falseness and coercion.

First Steps to Freedom

As you soon as you realise you have a problem, you need to seek professional help in the form of a couples counsellor. Auckland professionals can offer insight and a compassionate assessment of your situation. Then you can work together to improve things.

The first stage in resolving relationship problems involving drugs is to acknowledge the problem and assert the willingness to do something about it. This inevitably requires professional help such as counselling. Auckland relationship specialists
can help you refine and confront your drug problems as a couple.

Then you can sit down with your counsellor and work your way through the issues that you’re facing. Together you’ll be in a much stronger position.

The exact solution depends on the state of the drug behaviour. In some cases, some form of detox or withdrawal treatment will be needed before any counselling can begin. Some drugs like heroin require sustained detoxification. Your counsellor can advice you on these matters and also recommend resources such as support groups.

In some cases the drug taking might be the symptom of a relationship that’s already in serious difficulties. In such cases, the need for the solace or sensation provided by mind altering drugs indicates a hole in your relationship that your partner is trying to fill.

Or perhaps your partner takes drugs can point to an inner problem which left unsolved will probably destroy your relationship just as surely as the effects of the drug taking will.

Counselling can help identify the root cause of the need for drugs and help you deal with it.

In everyday life, it’s hard to deal with these problems as you’re too close to the action. Plus without professional help, it’s easy to slip back into denial and apathy if the pain of honesty and is too strong and reality is hard to bear.

That’s why to discuss you problems in a safe and neutral setting as offering by couples counsellors. Auckland is home to skilled and compassionate professionals who can help you communicate, face your issues, and thus gain the resolve to deal with them.  Contact us now.