Dr. S introduces a 3–4 episode series sparked by a conversation with Charlie Engle, focusing not on demonizing “the addict” but on what happens to those who love someone with addiction. She describes how a partner, parent, or friend can become a rescuer/fixer whose life reorganizes around monitoring, preventing crises, and managing the other person’s mood, creating a shared nervous-system dynamic marked by hypervigilance and chronic stress. She links this to health costs (sleep, immune, metabolic dysregulation), coping/bypassing behaviors, and the impact on children’s modeling of love and boundaries. Framing codependency as safety becoming tied to regulating another’s behavior, she argues rescuing can become an “invisible addiction” and emphasizes that recovery belongs to the individual. The episode sets up the next question: why people stay in these patterns so long.

00:00 Series Purpose
04:12 Three Big Questions
06:59 Loving Someone Addicted
10:06 Addiction Takes Many Forms
11:21 The Rescuer Role
16:02 Hidden Health Costs
19:48 Kids and Modeling
20:51 Codependency Reframed
23:03 Why We Get Pulled In
24:57 Why We Stay So Long
26:35 Wrap Up and Next Episode

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One of Tatler's "Top 21 private doctors in Britain" 2020
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