Beverly Engel's When Your Partner Has an Addiction (A6)

When Your Partner Has an Addiction, by Beverly Engel and Christopher Kennedy Lawford, rejects the usual advice to detach or walk away and offers a third path: meeting a partner's addiction with compassion rather than blame, treating the shame underneath it as the real wound. Engel makes the case directly. In a Psychology Today article she writes, "Far from enabling your partner, compassion is the key to helping someone with an addiction problem." How readily you are moved by a loved one's suffering and drawn to ease it is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Being moved to ease a loved one's pain is the Sympathy facet

That facet is Sympathy (A6), under Agreeableness, how much you feel another's pain as something that matters and are pulled to soften it. A high scorer aches at a loved one's struggle and stays tender toward them; a low scorer hardens or withdraws. The book asks a great deal of high A6, since staying compassionate toward someone whose addiction is hurting you is among the hardest forms of it. Engel and Lawford argue that this compassion, aimed at the shame driving the addiction, does more good than blame or ultimatum. This post is about the partner's trait, not the addiction, which is a clinical condition and not a substitute for treatment.

What the book adds to the trait is a defense of compassion against the fear that it means enabling. Engel's point is that feeling with your partner and excusing their behavior are different things, and that the tender response can be the firmer one. That distinguishes A6 from simple Cooperation (A4), the tendency to yield and avoid conflict, since real compassion sometimes holds a hard line while still caring. The book's third path asks for warmth and steadiness at once.

For a reader placing themselves, your A6 is a fair read on how deeply a loved one's pain moves you and how readily you turn toward it rather than away. High on it and When Your Partner Has an Addiction will feel like permission to lead with the compassion you already feel. Low on it and the book is a challenge to soften toward a struggle you might meet with blame. Where you sit on Sympathy tells you how much others' suffering moves you to help, and we take the facet apart in Sympathy (A6).

Read the book: When Your Partner Has an Addiction: How Compassion Can Transform Your Relationship (and Heal You Both in the Process) by Beverly Engel.

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