A Letter to My Addiction
Dear Addiction, I need to tell you something, and for once, I need you to listen without interrupting. You have had the floor for long enough. When we first met, you were everything I needed. You made the noise quiet. You made the awkward comfortable. You made the unbearable bearable. I thought I had found […]
The Family Guide to Not Enabling
You love someone who is destroying themselves, and everything you do to help seems to make things worse. Or, more precisely, everything you do to help makes things feel better in the moment while making the underlying problem worse in the long run. Welcome to the exhausting, bewildering world of enabling. What Enabling Actually Looks […]
Why Smart People Struggle More in Recovery
Intelligence should be an advantage in recovery. After all, understanding the problem is the first step to solving it, and clever people are good at understanding things. So why do so many intelligent, successful, articulate people struggle to get and stay sober? The answer is uncomfortable: the same cognitive abilities that made you successful in […]
What to Expect in Your First 90 Days
Nobody tells you this upfront, so we will: the first 90 days of recovery are simultaneously the hardest and the most important period of your life. Not because they define everything that follows, but because they establish the foundation that everything else is built on. Here is what we wish someone had told us. Days […]
“I’m Not Like Them”: Breaking Through Terminal Uniqueness
Terminal uniqueness might be the most dangerous idea in addiction. It sounds like this: “I am not like those people. My situation is different. My reasons for using are more complicated. I am not really an addict — I just have a problem with one particular substance in one particular context.” It is the voice […]
Breaking the Stigma: Recovery in Professional Settings
You are a solicitor, or an accountant, or a teacher, or a doctor. You have qualifications, responsibilities, and a reputation to protect. And you are also in recovery. The question you face daily is: do you tell anyone? For many professionals, recovery remains a carefully guarded secret. The fear is real and not always unfounded: […]
When Your Child Will Not Accept Help
There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching someone you love destroy themselves. When that person is your child — regardless of their age — the helplessness is compounded by a primal drive to protect them that you cannot switch off. You have tried everything. Pleading, reasoning, threatening, bargaining, ignoring, researching, crying, […]
Ketamine: The Hidden Epidemic
Walk into most recovery meetings in Britain and mention ketamine, and you will likely be met with blank stares. The literature does not mention it. The old-timers may not understand it. And the person who has just arrived, desperate for help with their ketamine problem, concludes that they are in the wrong place. They are […]
The Science Behind the Six-Lens Framework
Most recovery programmes ask you to understand your addiction through a single lens: disease, or moral failing, or chemical dependency, or trauma response. Each of these perspectives holds truth. But each one, taken alone, leaves gaps that can become relapse triggers. The Six-Lens Framework is our approach to a more complete understanding. Rather than arguing […]
Why Recovery Literature Needs Updating
When Bill Wilson wrote the Big Book in 1939, cocaine was a local anaesthetic, ketamine did not exist, and the internet was decades away. The principles he outlined remain powerful and transformative. But the world has changed dramatically, and the literature has not kept pace. Today, someone struggling with addiction faces challenges the founders could […]