Addiction takes over the brain in many ways. Areas which regulate judgment, rationalization, morality, decision making, and consequence are impaired by the regular inundation of drugs and alcohol. Additionally, the midbrain, the area where the brain stores its necessary functions of survival, is compromised by drugs and alcohol. Lying about addiction isn’t a self-serving behavior based in ego, immorality, and deceit. It’s the brain’s attempt at survival because alcohol and drugs, quite literally, become a matter of life or death.
They Want To Save Their Relationships
We often know the heartbreak our addiction and alcoholism causes the people closest to us. In our deepest intuition, we suspect that they know we have a problem. If our friends and family members don’t already know, we are terrified for them to find out. We don’t want to disappoint them, especially if we’ve tried getting sober before. We lie to save our relationships because we want to save ourselves in them. We don’t want the people to love to judge us, hate us, be afraid of us.
They Want To Protect You And People They Love
If the people we love know about lengths we’ve gone to to get high, the things we’ve done while drunk, or the number of times the answer for our behavior was addiction, we know they would hurt. We try to protect the ones we love from the horrors of our addiction because we cannot admit we are sick and need help. Instead, we get lost in the guilt and the shame of addiction, feeling like it would be the worst burden for our loved ones to find out.
They Want To Protect Their Addiction
One unfortunate truth is also this- we don’t want the people we love to get in the way. We don’t want to hear them tell us we have to stop or try to intervene, particularly if we aren’t ready to stop yet. We don’t want them to start stealing our drugs, hiding our bottles, and monitoring everything we do. We know what it takes to maintain a relationship with drugs and alcohol, which means maintaining a lie in our closest relationships. It isn’t something we are proud of. When we finally go to treatment and start the therapeutic process as well as the twelve steps, it is something we will lament over and make amends for, the rest of our lives.
Lakehouse Recovery is dedicated to helping clients redefine their lives in recovery and showing them how to have fun without the need for mind altering substances. Laughter is law in our beautiful residential home where our treatment programs provide clinical and integrative healing. For more information, call us today at 877.762.3707.