Red flags everywhere... Is everybody really doing it? by Tom Tomaszewski

When I was at school I remember a tall, lanky guy with extraordinary candyfloss hair, a sort of crazy-looking David Gower, who missed out on a place at Oxford because he ended up serving time for smuggling cocaine. It wouldn’t do to repeat his real name here so let’s call him Flossy.                

     

 

 

I remember how, all those years ago, Flossy seemed to pop up in any conversation involving anything to do with having a good time.

‘Going to John’s party on Friday night?’

‘Yeah, Flossy’ll be there.’

‘Excellent’. 

Sometimes he even was although, from what I remember, because I knew Flossy rather well, he was more likely to be hanging around in Chelsea than Croydon. Very few people seemed to notice, though.  

‘Flossy,’ I remember asking him once, ‘how come you’re able to be in a dozen different places at the same time?’ 

He shrugged. We were waiting for a bus shortly before he was arrested and I think, by that time, he was quite able of believing he could be in more than one place at the same time.  Many of my classmates had memories of Flossy-fuelled parties but he was almost never there. 

 

As a therapist one of the most common things I hear said about addiction, about drink and drug use in particular, is that everybody’s doing it. It’s a simple enough defence: to try and normalise a behavior so the risks are less apparent. Freud had his ways of thinking about it. When some people feel an irresistible urge to do something and then discover it’s dangerous they find ways of not worrying and keeping on doing it rather than acknowledging reality and stopping. The outcomes of those ways, those coping mechanisms which some people reach out for to make life more tolerable, are what I work with every day at Charter Harley Street.  

 

The ‘everybody’s doing it’ attitude is very closely related to the vicarious badness my classmates enjoyed in relation to Flossy. If he was there, if Flossy was doing it, it was going to be one hell of a party.  But if ‘everybody’ had been at the party instead of just Flossy, what would that have meant? It might be a party that you had to go to – after all, everybody was going to be there. A party like that … surely it had to be safe? Both of these thoughts might occur to somebody who needs to go to a party: I have to be there and nothing bad will happen if I go. 

 

Is everybody doing it? 

In some communities I know that drug and alcohol use, and I mean use in the sense of using these things to try and make life feel more bearable, is extremely common.  I’m a father who’s seen his children grow up in a drinking and drugs culture which is very different from the one I passed through thirty years ago and seems to have closed up behind me like the one of those old, anonymous drawstring school PE bags.  I’m a therapist who’s worked in some of the poorest and most affluent parts of the country. There’s an easy line of defence waiting for those who feel they can’t do without a beer or some weed. Society doesn’t just feel more tolerant – it is. Absolutely it is and there are good things and bad things are attached to that.

‘Everybody’s doing it’ says nothing about how it might effect you. If I found myself thinking ‘everybody’s doing it’ I’d want to ask myself why I was saying it. Why would I need to say it? Maybe there’d be some uncomfortable feelings. What would happen if I listened to them? Perhaps there’d be some thoughts: I can’t get along without this. I have to do it. 

These might be thoughts worth listening to.

 About Tom

Tom Tomaszewski- Clinical Director at Charter Harley Street       

BA (Hons), PGCE, PGDip Psychotherapy (Kent), Grad Cert Group Analysis (IGA Birkbeck), MBACP, FDAP(accred), ISPS member . Tom has worked as a counsellor and psychotherapist at CHARTER for the last four years. He is an experienced group therapist and holds a Graduate Certificate in Group Analysis from the Institute of Group Analysis in addition to post graduate diplomas in Psychotherapy and Education.

"Why Do I Need To Understand Addiction?" by Mandy Saligari

Addiction is everywhere, its potential is in every one of us. 

Not as in a light-hearted jest of being addicted to everyday activities, but where there is damage as a result.  Lying hidden in human vulnerability, addiction creeps up on a person so that once they realise what going on...its often too late for anything, other than extreme measures.  

And recovery rates are not good when you are trying to return from the brink. 

Truth be told, treatment stats have barely changed in 50 years.                                      30:30:30 - Recover: Relapse: Die.                                                                                          Some services have better outcomes, but its not across the board and its certainly not through treatment that's available to everyone.

So it strikes me that as a society our best chance to improve our outcomes is to better understand this plague. To recognise it in its infancy.  I believe it is our obligation.             Where global warming is the outside priority, for without a world we have nothing, I believe addiction is the job we need to attend to on our insides. Without self respect we are savages. 

The stigma, the shame, the denial: these things blind the addict and those closest to them to delay treatment until its too late.

As they say in long term recovery groups, while you are in therapy, your addiction is outside the room doing press ups... and I believe this.  It is eating our nation alive and right under our noses.

The parents are the gladiators who will need to fight this battle and win; and to do that they need to be armed with information, confidence and self respect before they become parents.

That is why its so important to understand this illness; this raging disease that destroys us when we are at our most vulnerable; when we love and when we hate and despair so much we cannot love.

To see it in its infancy is to recognise it before it manifests in its deadly force; it is to recognise it in its human disguise, it is to know the Core Characteristics™ 

Lets begin at the beginning...

Mandy Saligari MSc FDAP NCAC (accred). Founder, Executive and Clinical Director / Senior Addiction Counsellor Mandy Saligari founded Charter Harley Street in 2008  and over the last five years, she has revolutionised the way  addiction is diagnosed and recovery is delivered. Mandy’s success lies in her ability to operate at the intersection of nature, nurture and emotion. 

 

                                                                                      
Charter Harley Street....                         

Recovery For Life

                                15 Harley Street, London W1G 9QQ                                
     +44 (0) 207 323 4970 

    info@charterharleystreet.com

“Where am I?” ....“In the Village” Part 2

Where to begin? 

I am surrounded by bits of paper. Bills, contracts, letters, reminders, bits of paper with LARGE RED TYPE. 

The washing-up is in the sink. 

The laundry is in the washing machine. 

The dog is barking (in both senses of the word). 

Chaos rules.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. 

Baby steps. Baby steps. 

Have a shower. 

Shave. 

Clean clothes. 

Deep breath.

Go to a meeting. 

Sit there with your eyes closed tight if you have to. Just go.

Deep breath. 

Job is not working. It doesn’t matter. Anything you put in front of your recovery, you will lose. There are other jobs and other universes. Where were we a year ago? Where will we be in a year’s time? Who knows? It’s just for today.

Very apposite cartoon quotations? We got ‘em. Kung Fu Panda: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That is why we call it the present.” (Best said in a kind of cod Chinese voice.)

 

But the better one is Dory in Finding Nemo: “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.”

Or, in my case... Walk the dog. Walk the dog. Walk the dog till your legs fall off…….

What does addiction mean to you? by Tom Tomaszewski

I could give you a technical definition of addiction, a theoretical one, one which might satisfy someone who writes dictionaries … or I could stay on the side of artists. Keats wrote about addiction, I could say, or Lou Reed, Sylvia Plath or Clarice Lispector. 

I could offer you some thinkers: Derrida? Avital Ronell? Or maybe you’d like to talk about how somebody could become addicted to TV, Facebook, buttons, stamps, clothes, pets?  We could talk about the Buddha or Simon Cowell.

What exactly is addiction? 

Somewhere between the sublime and the banal I’d think there was an answer. Perhaps that’s why we addicts have our highs and lows, doing the same thing twice and always expecting a different result. No. Addiction’s a grind, a killer, a slow drawing out of one last breath. Addiction is stepping off a cliff and imagining I might fly, only nothing as dramatic as that. It’s sitting in a room that never pleases me, the walls contracting, like being in a bad dream.

In addiction there are similar moves. If you know it you can watch the same game play out with different players. I watch a football match in London or in Tokyo and I know straight away it’s the same kind of thing. The differences, of course, are the reasons I might keep watching. I work with addicts because of the people involved. I work with addicts because of a disease that runs through us, between us.

Addiction is the relationship you’re stuck with. Needles, bottles, high heels, cards, lipstick. Is this starting to sound glamorous? It usually does, in the beginning. Fear, obsession, denial, deceit, expectations, projection, isolation, compulsion, control, self-centredness, shame and resentment. Are you living in that? It’s a repetition - and everything starts with repetition, from learning to tie my shoelaces to writing my name. But what if I can’t let go of the lace or stop signing my name, everywhere, on everything. Because I can’t.

So, what do you make of addiction?

 About Tom

Tom Tomaszewski- Clinical Director at Charter Harley Street       BA (Hons), PGCE, PGDip Psychotherapy (Kent), Grad Cert Group Analysis (IGA Birkbeck), MBACP, FDAP(accred), ISPS member . Tom has worked as a counsellor and psychotherapist at CHARTER for the last four years. He is an experienced group therapist and holds a Graduate Certificate in Group Analysis from the Institute of Group Analysis in addition to post graduate diplomas in Psychotherapy and Education.

                     Charter Harley Street ....Recovery For Life
                                   15 Harley Street, London W1G 9QQ
                       +44 (0) 207 323 4970  info@charterharleystreet.com