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.