Following the success of her book "I Loved an Alcoholic," this expanded edition includes a new chapter in which Megan Whitfield distills the key lessons learned. For ten years, Megan lived with a man who could cut her open with a sentence at two in the morning and have no memory of it by breakfast. He drank. She covered for him, called his boss, cleaned up the mess. She learned to answer accusations that made no sense with arguments that changed nothing. What she didn't see for years: the patterns were in the words. In how they fought. In how they went silent. In how she explained and justified and helped until helping became its own trap. When she finally left, she expected him to fall apart. He got sober instead. Today they're close friends. This memoir traces the communication patterns that keep people stuck in destructive relationships, and how those patterns begin to break once you can name them. Drawing on research in addiction and relationship science, it shows what happens in conversations that escalate, why well-meaning support can deepen dependency, and what it sounds like when someone starts speaking differently.

Megan Whitfield lives in New York and Berlin, where she designs spaces that bring people together. For ten years, she was in a relationship with an alcoholic. What she learned about communication during that time-about words that destroy and words that heal-she wrote down in her first book. It's the book she needed back then. And couldn't find. Today, she and her former partner are close friends. He's been sober for years. She believes in change, in the power of the right words at the right time, and in the possibility that some stories end better than you ever dared hope.