Everything about addiction works against healthy personal relationships. Where personal relationships call for reliability, addiction creates unpredictability. Where personal relationships require selflessness, addiction creates self-absorption. Where personal relationships require affection, addiction creates abusiveness. The sad but true reality is that it is the very nature of addiction to damage relationships. One cannot live with addiction and have healthy personal relationships. It is impossible for the two to go together.
There is nothing in your life that will remain unaffected by your addiction. However, your personal relationships are one of the things that will suffer the most damage due to addiction. This is not the addict’s fault, it is merely a fact. Living with or caring for an addict is incredibly taxing, emotionally, physically and psychologically. People who have close relationships with addicts often need as much counseling and mental healing as the addict does. There are times that a relationship with an addict will even go as far as to be traumatic.
The best thing an addict can do for those they care about is seek help for their addiction without hesitation. Addicts are generally good, caring people who have become lost down a dark road. They are often very pained when they realize the extent of the hurt they have caused their loved ones. If you are struggling with addiction, seek treatment and stop hurting yourself and those you care about.
Addiction makes a person unavailable to the people who depend on them at any level because addiction means being obsessed with one thing and neglectful of everything else. A spouse, significant other, children or family members may be in need of support, but the addict will not notice because their mind is solely on one thing: their addiction. Substance addictions put people far out of touch with reality, and make them extremely hostile when pulled back into it. A parent may snap at their child for needing them; something they would otherwise never do. Something like a sex addiction can lead to other traumatic experiences for those close to an addict. A sex addiction might drive the addict to objectify their partner and mistreat or abuse them.