Opioids Affect Your Relationships With Others

                   By Driton Berisha

Silhouette of a person made of different opioids

How often do you think opioid overdoses really happen? According to KFF, since the opioid epidemic was declared a public health emergency in 2017, it has claimed 454,464 lives, with opioid-related deaths rising by 67% between 2017 and 2023. As an addict drags themselves down to new lows, their loved ones around them tend to suffer just as much. This is due to addicts having traits like deceptive behaviors, increased conflict verbally and physically, and being financial burdens. 

The base of most healthy relationships revolve around trust. With addiction comes a lot of untrustworthy behaviors. You can’t even trust them to stay alive, let alone trust what they say. Narconon states some common psychological traits of an addict. Addicts tend to lie about where they are and what they’re doing. They will also manipulate you into believing that they are clean, that the drugs are actually helping them, or shift the blame onto something else. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services states that family members are often blamed for the onset of their relative’s substance use. 

Addicts can become more confrontational verbally and physically on top of their deceptive behaviors. As stated before, addicts like to shift the blame, but once manipulation doesn’t work they can get extreme. The usual suspect is the spouse, but this leads children to be affected as well. According to Psypost, individuals exposed to more conflict between their parents during adolescence tended to have more sleep problems as emerging adults. Even if the addiction is short lived, there are long term problems that can come from seeing it all unfold.

Lastly, a trait addicts also have is they steal money for their next fix whenever they can. This leads to financial burdens, because now potentially multiple people are paying the price of the addicts' actions. Since the addict is someone you love you are also more willing to pay for their rehab or bail them out of jail if needed. All of these stack up and can cost a family thousands of dollars.

Some may argue to just simply prioritize helping the addict instead of the people around them. It just isn’t that simple. Addicts are not always ready to admit what they are, and can cause them to show a lot of the traits listed above. You cannot force help onto someone who doesn’t want to be helped, but we can focus on their family members who want to recover. 

Another argument is that addiction is a personal issue and nothing more. Since the addict chooses to do this to themselves, we should let them do what they want. If one of your loved ones was stuck in a house fire, would you let them burn because they happened to be asleep? You see a loved one struggling, it is human nature to try to pick them back up to where they were. 

None of these behaviors are ones of people you’d like to be around. However, it is easy to look past the negatives for someone you love. Not only are you watching an individual close to you become a bad person, but you are unintentionally enabling them when you feed into their lies, manipulation tactics, letting them keep stealing from you, or allowing them to be abusive. It is important to get your loved one help. It is also important to work together on recovery and communicate boundaries. But, that is only if the addict is willing to do so.