Dear Jaia:

Because you are familiar with emotional regulation, having attended programs based on CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), and because he has no access to mental health services due to the pandemic, you can teach him what you know. Before I attended my first CBT session, while not being in therapy, I read and worked the workbook part of “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies”. It was helpful to me and led me to look for a CBT therapist. Maybe this or another book & workbook, plus your input can help him, if he is willing to learn and apply what he learns.

Of course it would be better that a professional therapist will teach him and guide him, but in lack of one, he can still seek and get help, be creative about it, have .. peer support sessions with you. (You can look at Wikipedia’s entry on “Peer support” and adjust the concept to him and you, working together).

“He keeps telling me how much he loves me and wants to be with me, but that he’s just not in the right place to be in a relationship.. he just needs to be alone to get himself back in to recovery”- but he is in the right place to be in a.. peer-support-relationship with you, seems to me, and being alone, truly alone, is not a good idea for a person who is not well.

“He says that this is the best relationship he’s ever been in, and he’s being quite brutal on himself for falling off the wagon and ruining it”- brutal enough to.. get back on the wagon?

I know it’s not easy, far from it, at a certain point when a person has fallen off the wagon it feels too difficult to get back on, but people have gotten back on even though they felt earlier that it was impossible. One of the distorted thinking groups taught in CBT is “emotional reasoning”- a person believing something to be true just because it feels true. In his case, he may feel like it is impossible for him to get back on the wagon prior to therapy. But he may be surprised.

anita