Loving Someone With Anxiety or Addiction? Why Individual Therapy May Be the Best Next Step
When You’re Loving Someone Who Won’t Get Help
When you love someone who struggles with anxiety, substance use, or simply avoids conflict, it can feel like the well-being of the whole relationship rests on your shoulders.
So, you worry constantly.
You try to soothe your partner, fix things, or pull them closer, but your efforts often feel invisible or misunderstood.
You try to prevent bad things from happening: helping them feel less anxious or trying to help them avoid triggers to use. You try to bring things up at the right time, but that moment feels few and far between.
Sometimes, you might blow up—lash out in anger and frustration—only to be met with their silence and feel even more alone.
And when you finally ask, “Will you go to couples therapy with me?” you’re met with shutdowns, excuses, or promises that never stick.
What Happens When You’re Loving Someone With Anxiety
If your partner struggles with anxiety or OCD, you might see doubt shape every corner of your connection.
They might:
Get stuck in loops of overthinking, unable to be reassured.
Pull away emotionally when they feel overwhelmed.
Avoid hard conversations out of fear of conflict.
Rely on you to soothe their worries one moment, then push you away when you try the next.
This push-pull dance often leaves you feeling like you’re spinning around, without stable footing. You’re afraid to upset them but desperate to feel close again.
More importantly, you just want some space for you in the relationship—your feelings, worries, fears, and doubts.
What Happens When You’re Loving Someone With Addiction
Similarly, loving someone with addiction—whether in treatment or not—can be incredibly taxing.
Due to their addiction, you might:
Hide or minimize their behavior to protect them or your family.
Do more than your share of emotional or practical labor to keep life afloat.
Wonder, “If I were just different, they would change.”
Think, “I can love them enough to help them heal from this.”
Feel guilty for wanting to set limits and shame when you don’t.
You might hear these patterns described as “codependent” in some circles, but from an Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) lens, this isn’t our first choice of words.
Instead, these patterns represent how your deepest attachment to your partner—who you can see is clearly suffering—has wired you to protect, rescue, or over-function so that you can stay connected. It’s not your fault; it’s how you’re wired.
When They’re Just Emotionally Unavailable
Maybe your partner isn’t battling an addiction or anxiety, but they may shut down when things get real.
They avoid hard conversations or being around you when you’re overwhelmed, saying that you’re “too much” or your feelings are “too big.”
They keep you at arm’s length when you’re hurting. They promise to do better, over and over, but nothing changes.
This emotional distance can be just as painful as addiction or anxiety, and it often triggers the same push-pull cycle in your relationship.
Even If Your Partner Won’t Join You, Individual Therapy Can Help
Here’s the truth no one tells you:
You don’t need your partner’s permission to change your relationship dynamic.
Individual therapy can help you:
Name the pattern. Understand what’s yours, what’s theirs, and what’s the relationship’s.
Practice self-soothing. Learn to calm the panic that flares when they pull away, use substances, or have an anxiety flare so that you can make wise, less reactive choices.
Stop enabling. Clarify the difference between supporting and rescuing so you can feel empowered even when your partner is in pain.
Set and hold boundaries. Decide what you’re willing—or unwilling—to carry alone anymore.
Explore your next step. Stay, leave, or rebuild with more clarity and self-trust.
While you might feel powerless to change your situation, individual therapy can help you see all the options you didn’t realize you had–or didn’t know how to act upon.
So, What Can You Do Until You Start Individual Therapy?
Until you get deeper into the therapy process, what can you do in the meantime?
Here are a few small steps to give you a head start:
Map your cycle. Notice when the conflict happens. What do you say? What do they do next? Naming it helps you see the pattern instead of feeling victim to it.
Clarify your goals. Ask yourself, “What do I want most in this relationship?” Is it peace, trust, connection, or a shared vision of the future? Defining this helps you measure what’s going well or struggling in the relationship, so you can identify what’s most pressing to address in individual therapy.
Practice self-regulation: A few deep breaths, a quick walk, or a pause before you react can have a tremendous impact over time. These small nervous system shifts build your resilience for bigger relational work and create space for shifting in your dynamic.
How Individual Therapy Helped Timothy’s Relationship
(Anonymized for privacy.)
When Timothy reached out to us, he felt like he was at the point of extreme relationship burnout. He and his partner, Marco, had been together for six years, but, after the loss of his father, Marco’s drinking had grown worse, and every attempt to talk turned into a shutdown or a fight.
Timothy thought, “If he won’t go to therapy, what’s the point?” But through individual therapy, Timothy began to see his part in the cycle: how his fear of losing Marco made him over-function, cover for lies, and stay silent to keep the peace. His compassion for Marco’s loss clouded how to set boundaries.
In individual therapy, Timothy had the space to truly face these patterns and sit with the grief, fear, and sadness of potentially losing Marco. From this place, Timothy felt clearer about his role in the relationship and took less responsibility for Marco’s drinking.
With support, Timothy learned to set clear, loving boundaries with his partner. He practiced staying calm when Marco denied the drinking was a problem, learned how to manage his own reactions to be more effective, and built up a plan for what he’d do if things didn’t change.
As things shifted, Timothy was able to understand when he was supporting Marco’s grief vs. enabling his drinking. The result? Timothy felt stronger, clearer, and more connected to his own values, knowing that Marco was on his own path that Timothy didn’t have to control or fix.
Enabling vs. Supporting: How Can You Tell?
Like Timony, if you love someone who struggles, you might wonder: Am I helping or just enabling?
From an EFT-informed framework, this question isn’t about blaming you for caring. It’s about understanding how your attachment instincts can sometimes keep an unhealthy cycle alive.
Supporting means you stand beside your partner, encourage healthy choices, and share responsibility for the relationship.
Enabling happens when your efforts unintentionally protect them from facing the consequences of their choices or keep you carrying emotional weight that isn’t truly yours.
Individual therapy for relationships helps you untangle this line—with compassion, not shame—so you can love without losing yourself.
How EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) Can Help Your Relationship
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a research-backed approach to relationship counseling that focuses on strengthening the emotional bond between partners.
Instead of simply teaching communication skills or problem-solving techniques, EFT helps you get to the heart of what’s happening underneath the surface, where the pain, longing, and fear live and cause relationship disruptions.
EFT helps partners see this pattern, understand it as something external (“the cycle”), and start responding to each other from a place of shared emotional truth rather than fear.
Individual Therapy To Help You Feel Like You Again
While you may think that our practice only focuses on couples, we deeply value and enjoy working with individuals, especially if their partners won’t go to therapy with them. We know powerful shifts can happen when even just one partner is working on their side of it.
Whether you’re navigating relationship anxiety, living with a partner’s addiction, or wondering how to set healthy boundaries, our therapists are here to guide you through this deeper work.
We offer individual therapy, EMDR Therapy, and EFT-informed support to help you build and sustain relationships that can weather life’s inevitable storms.
You Are Not Powerless: Individual Therapy Can Help
Just because your partner isn’t ready for therapy doesn’t mean your relationship is doomed or that you’re destined to keep repeating the same fight.
With insight, care, and support, you can interrupt the cycle and increase connection with your partner.
You can learn to love without over-functioning. And you can make choices that honor your longing for connection, starting with yourself.