The Corrosive Impact on Relationships and a Path Forward
I once knew a man who was a heavy cocaine user.
By heavy, I mean regular binge episodes titrated with Johnny Walker Red, stretching out for days until either the money ran out or his nervous system could withstand no more poison. Then came weeks-long crashes of days asleep and nights haunted by depression and desperation.
Cocaine is not a cheap substance to binge. To sustain his habit, he took out loans from his parents, friends, and even his wife’s family members.
He, of course, concealed the true purpose of these loans with elaborate lies about fabricated emergencies and down payments on what he billed as an illustrious future.
One day at Celebrate Recovery — where I met him — he told a story about how he’d left his wedding reception to go “check on their pet.” He instead raced across town to his cocaine dealer.
His is a cautionary tale to everyone mired in the steeled of addiction. Sometimes the lies, manipulation, and broken trust leave no room for relationship repair.
The Wreckage of Addiction
Addiction can fuel a level of relationship damage and destruction that is hard to comprehend for those without direct experience.
By the time clients enter outpatient recovery program, their behavior has often transformed their relationships into a war-torn battlefield, complete with hidden landmines, razor wire, snipers and violent insurgents.
A single word can trigger an onslaught of resentment, anger, blame, hostility, and shame.
When they meet with my clients’ family members, they often say that the substance use wasn’t what caused the most damage.
What nuked their relationships was all the lies and deception.
This is one of the painful truths of addiction: To preserve easy access to our substance, we begin to manufacture the reality we inhabit.
The web of lies I spun was magnificently thick and all-consuming. It blotted out the sun above and left me traveling through life in a shadowland of duplicity, double speak and broken promises.
Once our veil of secrecy is inevitably pierced and the full extent of our lies and manipulation becomes clear, it can unleash a trust-shattering earthquake that shakes the reality of our loved ones to its very core.
The Tangled Web We Weave
To enable an addiction to take root and thrive, individuals must often weave a tangled web of lies, excuses and denial.
One simply can’t drink or take drugs around the clock without living a double life.
During my active use period — particularly at the end — I felt like I was living in a spy novel. I would go to extraordinary lengths to hide my behavior, sneak around, create distractions, dodge accountability, cover up my tracks, combat suspicions and turn the tables on all accusers.
The shadow game of lies and deception was paradoxically somehow both desperate and exciting. On the one hand, the ever-looming threat of withdrawal produced a consistent state of panic and fear. On the other, it was a thrill to flirt with certain disaster and get away unscathed. Or so I thought…
To protect my addiction, I would say whatever I needed to help me slip out of social or professional commitments so that I could be alone with my trusty bottle of booze, drinking the way I wanted without the watchful, judgmental eyes of others.
It didn’t matter if you were my mother or my local liquor store salesman. No relationship was safe from my duplicitous tongue.
I’d regularly justify purchases of multiple handles of vodka with “I’m having a bunch of friends over.” Like many others, I’d even rotate the liquor stores to avoid feeling judged or, worse, potentially being cut off.
If these were the lies, I told to a transactional acquaintance (someone whose business literally profits from my alcoholism), then you can only imagine what lies I told to those closest to me.
Looking back, depths of my deception are mindboggling.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my deceptive behavior was fracturing the interpersonal connections I had with everyone in my life.
Every single lie, omission, deception, and secret widened that fracture — until finally it grew into a yawning abyss.
That’s the thing about lies and deception: They carry a corrupting force that slowly starts to corrode and compromise every part of our connections with others. There can be a chain-reaction of negative consequences.
Typically, the “big lie” (the nature of our substance use) is built atop a foundation of trust, which has often been a lifetime in the making. Once we start lying about our use, we try to maintain that lie by doubling down, layering ever more complex and intricate lies on top of the initial untruth.
But the house of lies is incredibly difficult to maintain. As we progress further into the addiction and fabricate more and more falsehoods to conceal the extent of our use, it becomes an unmanageable struggle to remember who we told what, when where and why.
Predictably, the foundation of trust begins to crack.
When we are focused on maintaining the façade, we are diverting our attention and energy toward protecting our untruth. This drains us of the capacity to be present, emotionally available, caring, empathetic and even honest about unrelated matters.
We begin to position people who genuinely care about us as a threat to what we’re trying to hide. When another person is perceived as a threat, then any ethical qualms about our deception flies out the window.
The Resentments Are Valid
“What they don’t know will never hurt them.” This is the lie I told myself during my active use days.
It was my trusty go-to rationalization, filed right alongside: “The only one I’m hurting is myself.”
Well, those are both 100% false, 100% of the time. To a family member legitimately questioning the depth of our secrets, the pain of not knowing can be worse than knowing what our nefarious behaviors involved.
The imagination can be a dangerous thing, particularly when one is desperate, downtrodden, and dejected.
When — not if — the lies start to unravel under the messy, erratic behavior of heavy substance use, family and friends naturally begin to question what else that person has been lying about.
They think: Well, if you lied to get out of our child’s elementary school performance, a family holiday gathering, or our wedding reception, what else did you lie about?
And they’d be right. Full stop.
Frankly, it’s understandable that they would question our every statement, be suspicious when our behaviors remind them of the old times, or be skeptical when we promise we’ll change.
We reap just what we sew.
But, when viewed from a slightly different angle, their resentment is a gift. If our friends and family members weren’t resentful, they wouldn’t really care about our relationship.
Indifference can be a fate much worse than anger. If there’s resentment, there’s at least a chance at repair — however slim it may be.
Words Can’t Fix Broken Trust
For many of us, words were our last line of defense in the battle to protect our addiction.
We used them to deceive, deny, deflect, minimize, rationalize, gaslight, and justify. I even weaponized my words, manufacturing arguments to give me an easy excuse to head to the bar.
It should come as no surprise that our words have lost meaning to those in our lives.
Our lies trampled all over the credibility of our promises and commitments. Others have, quite rightfully, lost faith in our ability to do what we say.
For some though, it is possible to build back the credibility of our word and restore the faith once granted to us. I’ve experienced it personally, and I’ve seen my clients rebuild the connections in their lives.
It’s truly a special moment to see clients tear up as they share that their partner allowed them to return home or that they were finally able to spend a weekend with their child.
Repair really is possible, but there’s never a quick-fix solution.
I often tell people something I’ve heard in the rooms of AA: “We spent 5, 10, 15 years walking into the forest. We can’t just walk out in 5, 10 or 15 days.”
No number of fancy words, creative pledges, or groveling guarantees will get us to the promised land of restored trust and repaired relationships.
What does lead to change is action. Not talking, just doing.
When others see us take consistent, predictable, open, and honest steps forward, a tiny seed of trust can begin to sprout.
Just as every lie we told fractured our relationships, every positive action taken toward recovery can close the fracture between us and our loved ones.
We become safer to trust when others see us regularly attend recovery meetings, make smart decisions to avoid triggers, focus on our mental health, be vulnerable about our feelings and struggles, prioritize our physical well-being, and consistently show up for others.
Since our addictive behavior was steeped in lies, secrets, and shadow games, seeing really can lead to believing.
If our loved ones graciously decide to place their faith in us once again, this is truly a gift. And everyone in recovery would do well to remember it could just as easily disappear if we violate that trust again.
Michael J McCluskey 