Content Warning: This episode discusses active substance use, relapse, psychosis, emergency room visits, overamping, codependency, family conflict, and the fear of losing a loved one to addiction. If you are a family member or partner of someone in active use, some of this may land close to home. Go slowly, and reach out for support if you need it.
If you or someone you love is in crisis or thinking about self-harm, call or text 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, US). For substance use support any time, call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. Outside the US, contact your local emergency or crisis line. Al-Anon (al-anon.org) offers meetings for families and friends of people with addiction. You do not have to carry this alone.
What This Episode Is About
For years, listeners have asked Dallas Bragg the same questions: my son, my partner, my brother, my best friend is using. What do I do? How do I help? When am I actually hurting? Dallas started this podcast partly because of his own mother, who had no idea what chemsex was when he was arrested and, after a lot of mistakes, finally did the right thing and helped him toward recovery. In this episode, Dallas finally found the right person to answer those questions.
Charlie Bray is a counselor, former treatment center clinician, and family and loved ones recovery coach with 18 years of recovery. Charlie has facilitated multi-day family intensives (including years of work alongside Mell McCracken), grew up in a family marked by addiction and mental health struggles, and now works primarily with people who love someone in addiction and are caught in codependency and dysfunctional family patterns. Charlie's core insight is that family dynamics exist long before anyone picks up a drink or a drug, and the substance use is often a symptom of how the family already operates.
Together, Dallas and Charlie redefine what "help" means, unpack codependency and where self-worth actually comes from, and walk through the hardest scenarios loved ones face: lending money, letting someone back in the house, the emergency room call, and the partner who keeps disappearing on a binge. This is part one of a two-part conversation, and it previews a Holiday Healing webinar series for addicts and the people who love them, launching in November.
Key Ideas to Sit With
1. No word, no sentence, no paragraph can change your loved one. Charlie borrows this from Al-Anon. Loved ones spend enormous effort trying to convince, coax, educate, and manage the person who is using, and it is unsuccessful, depleting, and tragic. Al-Anon helps people let go of that efforting. Charlie takes it one step further: there is still something you can do, but the focus turns inward. How you are inside yourself, how you behave and think, changes what happens between you and your loved one.
2. Redefine help. Dallas puts it plainly: as a family member, you might think help means convincing them to stop or getting them into rehab. But you cannot make someone stop using, and you cannot make someone go to treatment. Help has to be redefined as something that is good for you and for them. Charlie points out that the strategies loved ones use to "help" are often shaming, condescending, or simply unskillful, and they create the exact disconnection that makes the person less likely to reach out when they finally are ready.
3. Anger is fear wearing a mask. When we are terrified for someone we love, we get angry. "Why are you doing this? Don't you see what you're doing to us?" The person in active use cannot see through that anger to the love and fear underneath. All they feel is that they have disappointed you again. Dallas offers HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) as a check-in for the loved one before approaching the person who is using. If you show up from any of those states, it will probably go badly.
4. Change your metric. If your measure of whether you are a good parent, partner, or friend is whether your loved one relapses, you are setting yourself up to feel worse and worse. Manage the expectation. Their recovery is not your report card.
5. Codependency, at its core. Charlie works within Pia Mellody's framework (the book Facing Codependence is highly recommended). Codependency is a way of relating where you lose sight of your own self, individuality, and worth, and try to gain worth by helping, managing, or fulfilling a need for someone else. It becomes a cycle where both people gain their esteem through the relationship instead of two people who already know their value coming together to enjoy each other. Dallas shares how this played out in his own marriage: he hated himself, so he became the savior for everyone, and his own needs went into a closet.
6. We are attracted to what is familiar. Charlie's blanket statement: almost everyone is attracted to traits in a partner, good and bad, that remind them of their parents. That instant sober connection with someone who then disappears for a week on a binge is often a nervous system recognizing an old pattern from the family of origin. Dallas names his own version: chasing aloof men who mirrored his father, and feeling repelled by men who were warm and available. This does not doom a relationship, but it does call for reflection.
7. Attention is the most valuable commodity in relationships. We dismiss attention-seeking as childish or gross, but attention is how we know we are loved. The problem is not wanting attention or validation. The problem is needing it to feel worth anything at all.
8. Your worth does not shrink because you are suffering. Addiction does not take away your worth and value. Loving someone in addiction does not take away yours. Charlie's clients hear this and treat it as revolutionary, because everyone assumes something is wrong with them for having the problem or for loving someone who does.
9. For parents: it does not matter why they are suffering. When your child is suffering, it does not matter whether you caused it, someone else caused it, or addiction caused it. Guilt, past fights, and unskillful moments can be dealt with later. Right now, do not make it about whether you were a good enough mother or father. Create a space that is open to helping ease the suffering, so that when your child is ready, they might come to you. If you are wrapped up in evaluating your own parenting, you will not be able to extend a hand.
10. Loving someone does not mean funding their slow death. Love, in Charlie's definition, encourages life, expansion, and energy. If what you are calling love makes things narrower and more bogged down, it may not be love. Real love in these situations takes boundaries. With money: "I can't lend you cash, but I will pay for treatment or sober living." Or simply: "I don't have money to lend, but I have my love, my care, and my couch for a night or two." This puts the choice back in the person's hands, where it belongs.
11. Boundaries communicate belief. When a loved one holds a boundary, they are saying without words: I believe you can figure this out. The person in use often does not believe that about themselves, and underneath everything is "I need someone to save me." Being treated as capable can make them wonder, maybe for the first time, whether they actually are. Dallas adds his own shorthand: as long as they have a man, a meal, and a mattress, there is no consequence and the using continues.
12. "You can't come in my house" is an act of love. When someone uses in your home after you said no, or steals, or turns abusive after 24 hours, the honest boundary is: "I love you endlessly, and I will not let my house be a place where you hurt yourself and hate yourself more." Charlie remembers going home during active use, sleeping for 30 hours, lying, and feeling so ashamed that the visits themselves became unbearable. Keeping the home safe means making sure the person cannot hurt themselves in it, even when that is terrifying.
13. The emergency room call. First, thank God they made it to the emergency room. Then: "I'm here, I love you, you're not alone." Sit with them. Do not preach, manage, or convince. Say once, and only once, that the offer to help them get help still stands. Let the emergency room do the heavy lifting.
14. For partners: what do you want your marriage to be? Charlie asks partners to get clear on what they hoped the relationship would look like long term, and to name deal breakers honestly. Abusing me is a deal breaker. Abusing our child is a deal breaker. Is continually abusing yourself in front of me, and refusing help, a deal breaker? The relationship is a third living thing that both people have to care for. Standing by while someone hurts themselves turns the marriage into a place where self-harm is quietly permitted. Once you are clear on what you want, the using partner has a real decision to make. And a boundary is not a boundary if you do not hold it. Staying after every broken promise tells them, without words, that it never really mattered.
15. Addiction is a symptom. The substance is solving something: a relationship to pain, to tension, to intimacy. Charlie warns parents not to hear this as "so it is my fault." It is an invitation to zoom out, look at each person's family of origin, and ask how we all got here. It is workable and solvable, but it takes reflection.
Reflective Questions
- When I try to "help" my loved one, what am I actually doing? Convincing, managing, coaxing, or creating space?
- When I approach them angry, what am I really afraid of? Have I checked in with HALT first?
- Where do I get my sense of worth right now? How much of it depends on how my loved one is doing?
- What deal breakers have I never said out loud? What have I been tolerating that is slowly narrowing my life?
- What dynamics were already present in my family or relationship before the substance showed up?
Journal Prompts
- "The ways I have tried to help that did not work, and what I think they cost the relationship, are..."
- "If I stopped measuring myself by whether my loved one relapses, I would feel..."
- "The traits that first attracted me to my partner, and where I recognize them from my family of origin, are..."
- "This is what I hoped this relationship (or family) would look like long term..."
- "A boundary I have set and not held is... What I have been communicating by not holding it is..."
Action Exercises
- Practice HALT before every hard conversation. For one week, check hungry, angry, lonely, tired before approaching your loved one about anything related to use. If any are true, wait.
- Rewrite one offer of help. Take something you usually do (giving cash, covering for them, cleaning up after a binge) and rewrite it as a boundary with a life-giving alternative: "I won't lend money, but I will pay for treatment." Say it out loud until it feels steady.
- Draft your emergency room script. Three sentences: I'm here, I love you, you're not alone. Plus one sentence offering help, said once. Keep it where you can find it.
- Name your deal breakers. Write them down honestly, including the ones about self-harm and refusing help. Then write what you would need to do if one is crossed.
- Get your own support. Find an Al-Anon meeting, a family recovery coach like Charlie, or a therapist. The in-between time after you hold a boundary is the hardest part, and you should not walk through it alone.
Going Deeper
- Charlie Bray. Family and loved ones recovery coach, currently accepting a few new clients and developing a codependency course. Contact information is in the show notes.
- Holiday Healing Support for Addicts and the People Who Love Them. A webinar series from Dallas and Charlie launching in November, meeting in November, December, and January. Watch social media and recoveryalchemy.org for details.
- Part two is coming. Friendships, siblings, more partner scenarios, and live listener questions.
- Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody. The foundational text on codependency and self-esteem that Charlie works from.
- Al-Anon. Meetings for families and friends of people with addiction.
- Recovery Alchemy coaching. Learn more at www.recoveryalchemy.org, and subscribe there to get study guides in your email.
You cannot love someone into recovery, and you cannot shame them there either. What you can do is take care of yourself, hold your boundaries with tenderness, and keep the door open. That is not giving up on them. That is believing they are capable of walking through it.
Love you!! Dallas 💚
© Recovery Alchemy, Inc. | www.recoveryalchemy.org
Responses