Thanks, Robyn! I will certainly check out your website resources. I appreciate your response. Best wishes!

Hi Katherine. Thank you so much for sharing about yourself and your friend. I am sorry to hear of so much suffering. I do have a few articles on my website about loving someone struggling with using alcohol and substances or other self-harming mechanisms to dissociate or alleviate the pain. I would encourage you to check them out and see if they can assist you. It is so hard to watch someone you love be in pain. Take good care of yourself!

Thank you for your article. It makes so much sense now, as I think of a former, dear friend, who no longer wished to connect with me, because I wouldn’t enable his alcohol use. My family and his family are good friends. My mother and his mother are BEST friends, but our mothers are of an older generation, where speaking about emotions, trauma, etc., were either taboo or simply too uncomfortable. Now, my friend has turned 57, and continues his pattern of drinking at night because he says he cannot tolerate the loneliness and silence of the house (his children have graduated college and are out of the home, and he is divorced). We live in different states, but at first, he would call me at night, and be able to talk openly about his emotional pain over the loneliness, but also of a childhood pain over losing his mother’s attention when his brother was born. He says he learned that during divorce therapy. He said many romantic things to me, too. It took some time for me to realize that the next day, if I would reference our conversation, he had no knowledge of what he had said to me. So, I feel that I know him, far better than he knows that I know him… My question is this: his mother, and children, are deeply concerned about his drinking, but lack the knowledge and the courage to confront him. Btw, he is a retired pediatrician! So, while I would love to send them your article, I know from trying before that nothing will happen. How do loved ones of an alcoholic, who are in some denial and lack the knowledge of addiction, reach the suffering loved one?

Thank you..