Reader’s Question

I am writing about my girlfriend. She comes from a “perfect” family. Her parents are still together. She is the middle child and has an older brother and younger sister. The various family members don’t fight and there is no “bad blood” between any of them. Naturally, they have some minor disputes from time to time, but nothing out of the ordinary at all.

My girlfriend has had problems. She is a former “cutter” and engaged in this behavior since her teenage years. Recently, she has started to use more and more drugs. Up until recently, the “hardest” drug she had used was amphetamine, which she tells me helped her to be happy and to talk to people. When she is not with me, she is usually home alone and feels depressed and tired of school. She seems “negative” a lot and seems to lack the energy to do things. On top of that, she’s using more drugs. I’m afraid that if this keeps up she will become an addict to escape the pain of reality. She doesn’t want to visit a doctor, even though there definitely seems something wrong. What can I do?

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

You are right to be concerned about your girlfriend. The abuse of drugs is a concern in its own right, even though it often co-occurs with other mental health problems such as depression, personality disturbance, etc.

Things are not always as they appear when it comes to someone’s background or environment. So, even though it appears that your girlfriend comes from a “perfect” family, there might still be scars from past trauma influencing her behavior. It’s also not uncommon for people who are self-medicating emotional pain and/or mood disturbances through substance abuse to shun attempts to get them into counseling or therapy.

You ask what you can do to help. You can actually do a lot. Let your girlfriend know that you want to support anything that will enable her to feel truly well. Set a limit that you do not support her use of drugs. Encourage her to get the help she needs. For any relationship to work well, both parties need to be emotionally healthy. Prepare yourself for the possibility that should this woman work through her problems, she may not view you or her relationship with you in the same manner as she does now. But if you really care about her, you’ll put the mental health of both of you ahead of your other desires. Prepare yourself also for the possible realization that your interest in this apparently very troubled young woman may stem from some relatively unhealthy emotional needs that you have. In any case, the situation you describe now is not healthy and some therapeutic intervention certainly seems warranted. Be there for your girlfriend, but hold firm to the limits that need to be set.