Life With: an Alcoholic

He Got Sober—So Why Are You Still Angry? 5 Truths About Repair After Alcoholism Jennifer Randall Young hosts The Life with an Alcoholic and addresses why anger, fear, distrust, and exhaustion can remain even after a partner stops drinking. She explains that relief and resentment can coexist, that the body may not trust sobriety by the calendar yet, and that apologies are not the same as repair, wh...

Good Day Amnesia: Why One Peaceful Day Makes You Doubt the Pattern (Living With an Alcoholic) Jen explains “good day amnesia,” the disorienting effect of one peaceful, loving day making you doubt months of difficult experiences in a relationship with an alcoholic. She emphasizes that good days can be real, but problems arise when a single calm moment is treated as proof the overall pattern has cha...

5 Ways I Tried to Fix His Drinking (and the Question That Finally Helped Me Move Forward) Jennifer Randall Young introduces The Life with an Alcoholic, a show focused on the woman holding everything together while someone she loves is falling apart. She describes treating her husband’s drinking like a “customer service problem” and shares five approaches she believed would finally fix it—loving hi...

   Scared to Stay or Leave? The “Third Path” to Clarity When You Love Someone Who Drinks Jennifer, creator of Life With An Alcoholic, offers a “third path” for those who feel scared to stay and scared to leave: instead of forcing a life-changing decision while overwhelmed, she outlines a framework to rebuild clarity and self-trust by shifting your inner life away from someone else’s drinking. She...

SMART Recovery Family & Friends: Boundaries, Self-Compassion, and Healthy Hope Host Jennifer Randall-Young introduces The Life with an Alcoholic, focused on supporting women affected by a loved one’s drinking, then interviews Pete Rubenis, CEO of SMART Recovery USA. Pete explains SMART’s scope (nearly 1,500 U.S. meetings, including family and friends groups), his personal decision to end his r...

Damian & Alisha: 20 Years of Addiction, 6 Years Sober—Rebuilding Marriage, Trust & Recovery Together Damian Bloss shares how he spent 20 years in active addiction before getting sober six years ago, and his wife Alisha explains what it was like living through the first 10 years of their 16-year relationship while he drank and how she became numb, built a wall, and considered leaving until...

How to Set Boundaries When You’re Staying with an Alcoholic (Without Ultimatums) Jennifer Randall Young, host of The Life with an Alcoholic, speaks to women who aren’t leaving an alcoholic partner right now and want to stay without losing themselves. She reframes boundaries as decisions about your own behavior—not ultimatums, rules for him, or agreements dependent on his cooperation—and explains w...

The Night I Stopped Trying to Fix My Husband (Life With an Alcoholic) Jennifer Randall-Young introduces The Life With an Alcoholic, a show focused on women and partners living with functional alcoholism, and shares a pivotal moment when she sat in her driveway for 25 minutes mentally calculating what she’d walk into at home. That night, she recognized she could not fix her husband because she did...

Is My Husband a Functional Alcoholic? 5 Quiet Signs You’re Not Overreacting Jennifer Randall-Young introduces The Life With An Alcoholic, a show focused on supporting women who feel alone while someone they love is falling apart. In this episode, she explains why functional alcoholism can be hard to name and often invisible to everyone except the partner living closest to it. She shares five under...

Breaking Codependency in Alcoholic Family Dynamics: Boundaries, Nervous System Healing & Self-Reclamation Lauren Nicole Butler shares her experience as the child of two alcoholics: her mother has 21 years sober, while her father’s functioning alcoholism escalated during COVID, leading to severe illness, a stroke, and life in a care facility. She describes how her codependency and “fixing” resp...

Alcohol Detox, Toxic Relationships, and Finding Yourself Again | Kristen’s 15-Year Sobriety Story Kristen shares how dating a high-functioning alcoholic in her 20s led to a terrifying alcohol detox crisis: after she returned from a family trip, her boyfriend attempted to quit drinking alone, hallucinated, jumped from a moving car, and was hospitalized and placed in a medically induced coma for a w...

Stop the Research Spiral: You Can’t Cure His Drinking (Reclaim Yourself First) Jennifer Randall-Young introduces The Life With An Alcoholic, a show focused on supporting women who are holding everything together while someone they love is falling apart. She shares how she spent years in a “research spiral,” searching for medical explanations and fixes for her partner’s drinking, and explains that...

Stopping Him From Drinking Isn’t My Job: 5 Things I Quit Doing Host Jennifer Randall-Young introduces The Life with an Alcoholic, a show focused on the woman managing life alongside an alcoholic partner, and shares that after eight years trying to make her husband stop drinking she realized “stopping him from drinking is not actually my job.” She describes five things she stopped doing: buying alc...

Stop Trying to Fix Him: How to Stop Losing Yourself Married to an Alcoholic Jennifer Randall Young introduces The Life With An Alcoholic as a show for women holding everything together while a partner’s alcoholism escalates, focusing on the quiet ways the spouse changes: hypervigilance, constant scanning, backup plans, and losing her sense of self. She explains that the grief many feel is often fo...

Living With a Functional Alcoholic: You’re Not Crazy, You’re Carrying Too Much Jennifer Randall Young introduces The Life with an Alcoholic, a show focused on women holding life together while a loved one’s drinking escalates, and describes the isolating reality of living with a “functional” alcoholic whose public life looks fine. She recounts common experiences like counting bottles at night, sec...