It's my experience that true sex addicts, love addicts, do not have the tools to have healthy, ongoing, ebb and flow relationships.

Generally speaking, women who've grown up with a battering father often get into battering relationships, sort of like an addiction. Or sex becomes a preoccupation.

It is generally not seen as a healthy preoccupation with another individual. It's seen as sort of a mechanical, almost using, of the other to get a particular emotional experience inside.

Your family has gone through a roller coaster experience with you; ups and downs, back and forth; they have been involved through the sobriety and falling off the sobriety, and involvement in treatment and non-involvement in treatment, and your mood swings.

It's disturbing when you become aware that your partner is abusing alcohol. Chances are the abuse and awareness both developed slowly and only when things got far out of control, did you notice. Most of us are good at not looking until we're forced to, it's called denial and mostly it's a healthy coping mechanism. However, with some conditions it's counterproductive. This is one of those conditions.

Enabling is any action by another person or an institution that intentionally or unintentionally has the effect of facilitating the continuation of an individual’s addictive process.

In many cases the addict is the first family member to seek treatment. Other family members become involved in order to help the alcoholic get sober. Many family members refuse to consider the fact that they also have a problem that requires specialized treatment.

Dysfunctional relationships are relationships that create more emotional turmoil than satisfaction. Relationships are part of the human experience. But what happens if one or both partners have never been involved in a happy relationship, or had one modeled for them as a child?

An addictive relationship is usually evident to outsiders, but when you are in the middle of it, seeing the situation can be difficult. An addictive relationship is almost always unbalanced.

There are essentially two different kinds of relationship problems. Either people do not have sufficient relationships (or sufficient quality of relationships), or they have relationships, but those relationships are conflicted in some manner so that they don't satisfy, or are a source of pain.