Marriage & Addiction Counseling · Knoxville, TN
When addiction is hurting your marriage; this makes sense, and it works inside your actual life.
If your spouse is struggling with addiction, or you are, and your marriage is paying the price, you're not alone and you're not out of options. Real recovery for couples happens right where you are, with the right support, the right strategy, and enough time to do it properly. No inpatient programs. No disappearing from your life.
You’ve Been Here Before
If you Found This Page at 2am, You Already Know Something Isn’t Working.
Maybe it's your spouse's drinking or drug use. Maybe it's your own. Maybe you've tried talking, pleading, threatening, forgiving. You've had the same argument so many times you could script both parts. You've wondered whether the marriage can survive this, or whether it already hasn't.
You're not failing. You're trying to solve something deeply complicated with tools that weren't built for it.
What you're carrying might look like one of these:
The ultimatums that didn't hold — and what that cost you both
The exhaustion of hoping again after you promised yourself you wouldn't
The arguments that somehow become about winning the argument, not the real thing
Feeling alone inside something that's supposed to be a partnership
Watching someone you love disappear, and not knowing how to reach them
Living with a secret you've been carrying alone for too long
Whatever brought you here; your own struggle, someone you love, a marriage trying to survive this, you're in the right place.
Addiction doesn’t happen to one person in a marriage. It happens to both.
A Different Way to See It
Traditional Treatment Has One Patient. Your Marriage Has Two.
The addicted partner enters treatment. The other partner waits. Manages the household. Holds things together. Hopes this time is different. And when treatment ends, both people return to the same marriage, the same patterns, the same distance. That's not a personal failure. It's a framework that was never designed for two people.
The person struggling with addiction carries the suffering, the shame, the exhausting weight of a life that has narrowed around a substance. The people who love them carry something just as real, the hypervigilance, the grief, the loneliness of loving someone who keeps disappearing. Both people have lost something. Both people are trying to survive it.
What's possible here is something different. Not a treatment plan for one person that everyone else has to accommodate. A shared direction, built around where you actually are, aimed at something you actually want. The question isn't only how do we stop the addiction. It's what kind of life do we want to build, and how do we start moving toward it right now.
How We Work
Counseling Built for the Whole Partnership, Not Just the Addiction.
The framework here doesn't start with what you need to stop. It starts with what matters to you, who you want to be, what kind of life you're trying to build, what you've been moving away from that you'd rather move toward. That's not a softer version of addiction treatment. It's a more durable one.
Both Partners Matter
The non-addicted partner's pain, identity, and needs aren't a side issue. They are half the work. Whether you come in as an individual or as a couple, couples counseling has room for both stories.
A Shared Strategy, Not a Tug of War
Flexible, realistic, and designed to move you through relationship and addiction recovery together, not as two separate projects running in parallel.
In Practice
Your Life Doesn’t Stop. The Work Fits Inside It.
We start with a free thirty-minute conversation. No paperwork, no intake process, no commitment. Just an honest look at what's happening and whether this feels like the right fit.
Early sessions map the terrain, what's driving the pattern, what's been tried, what matters most to the people in the room. From there, we build something specific. Not a generic protocol, but a working model for your situation.
I use an ACTivity called the Matrix, developed by Kevin Polk, to help make the invisible visible. What are you moving away from? What are you moving toward? Who do you want to show up as? Once you can see that clearly, choices start to look different.
Session frequency finds its own Goldilocks zone, not so often that the work becomes its own form of dependency, not so infrequent that momentum disappears between visits. We figure that out together.
The goal through all of it is recovery in the midst of daily life. Your job doesn't stop. Your marriage doesn't pause. Your kids still need you. The work fits inside the life you're already living, because that's the only version of recovery that actually sticks.
If you’re working through addiction individually, the addiction counseling page describes that work.
If you found hidden alcohol specifically, this page speaks to that directly.
Through the seasons and storms that don't pause for anyone's recovery.
The Formal Part
Twenty-Five Years. Some of That Counts for Something.
PhD in Counseling. M.Ed. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Licensed Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor (LADAC II), State of Tennessee. Twenty-five years of clinical experience across mental health, addiction treatment, residential care, and private practice.
If you want to know more about the background, the consultation is a reasonable place to ask. What most people want to know first is simpler: whether you can actually talk to me. I think you can. But that's for you to decide.
If betrayal is part of what’s happened in your marriage, trauma counseling addresses that directly.
Where To Next
Let’s Talk.
The consultation is free, low stakes, and takes 30 minutes. You don't have to have it figured out. You don't need the right words yet. You just need to show up.
Knoxville · Farragut · Oak Ridge · Clinton, TN · Telehealth Available Across Tennessee