I want you to think about something: Are you truly seeing your relationships clearly? Are you taking on more than you should? Are you carrying the emotional weight for everyone else again?
Many of us grew up watching our parents in unhealthy relationship dynamics. Maybe Dad was a covert narcissist, cold, manipulative, and cruel behind closed doors. Perhaps mom was the ever-giving caretaker, the one who sacrificed everything to maintain peace.
If that was your reality, you probably learned early on that love means doing more, giving more, proving your worth. You might’ve thought, If I can just be good enough, maybe they’ll see me. Maybe they’ll love me.
That’s where codependency starts, from the belief that your value is found in how much you give, fix, or put up with.
Fast forward to adulthood, and you may notice a pattern:
You keep ending up in relationships where you give and the other person takes. You try to love them into changing, but the cycle repeats.
Why do I keep attracting this?
It’s because what you saw as love growing up became your definition of normal. You learned to mistake pain for passion, inconsistency for excitement, and chaos for connection.
But the truth is, you can’t see clearly when you’re in the middle of it, especially when alcohol or drugs are involved.
Why Sobriety Changes Everything
If you really want to see your relationships clearly, you have to see yourself clearly first, and that starts with sobriety.
Alcohol and drugs numb the truth. They blur the lines between love and manipulation, hope and delusion. They’re the Band-Aid that covers a wound that desperately needs to heal in the open.
Clients often say that their relationship makes them want to drink. It’s the only way they can deal with the stress.
Which is understandable. You come home to criticism, chaos, or coldness, and a drink feels like the only relief. But that drink, that hit, that escape, it’s what keeps you stuck.
It keeps you believing in the “maybe one day” fantasy.
It helps you tolerate what you should be walking away from.
It keeps you believing their future faking.
Future faking is powerful. It starts small, a promised trip, a talk about moving in together, maybe even marriage. But none of it ever happens. The narcissist keeps you holding on with hope, and the alcohol keeps that hope alive.
Drugs and alcohol make you forget the reality that the promise was never real. They keep you replaying the “good days,” the love-bombing phase, the illusion of what could have been.
But every time you numb out, you give away more of your power. You stay in a relationship
Ask yourself honestly:Â Is this the life I deserve?
The only way to break free is through clarity. Clarity only exists in sobriety.
When you stop numbing, you start noticing:
The manipulation.
The lies.
The gaslighting.
The way they use sex, substances, or promises to control you.
When you get sober, you can finally see what’s real. You see the patterns, the truth, and you stop believing the fantasy.
It can be terrifying at first, because you have to face what you’ve been running from. But it’s also where your power lives.
Sobriety isn’t just about not drinking or not using; it’s about choosing yourself.
When you do that, you start building self-esteem. You start reconnecting with your real self, the one that’s been buried under anxiety, substances, and self-doubt.
You realize that the fear of being alone was never the problem; it was being disconnected from yourself that hurt the most.
If you’re reading this and you’re still in that relationship, the one that keeps you small, anxious, or medicated, you can get out. It’s not easy. It takes courage, honesty, and support. But you can do it.
Listen to the Podcast here:
