How I can help

You already know.

Area 10 · Addiction

You already know.

Most people arrive here long after the knowing started. This is somewhere the whole of it can be brought, without a verdict waiting.

Arrange an initial conversation or call 07799 563910
What it can look like

Addiction rarely looks the way it is pictured.

A clean-shaven man packs an open holdall on a kitchen table beside a plain wall clock whose minute hand bends around a fixed stop.

Addiction rarely looks the way it is pictured. Often the life is still standing. The work gets done, the people are looked after, and the thing itself, the drink, the substance, the habit, keeps a private life of its own, folded into the evenings and managed with rules. Not before six. Not on weeknights. Not again, after last time. The rules hold until they don't, and each time they don't there is a fresh round of promises, made quietly, to yourself.

Something you reached for began reaching for you.

A man sits alone on the edge of a bed at night, folding laundry by lamplight while the rest of the room stays dark.

Somewhere along the way, something you reached for began reaching for you. And you know. That is the hardest part to say out loud, because saying it changes nothing: you have seen it clearly for a long time, you may have stopped before, and the knowing and the stopping have not been enough. On top of the thing itself sits the commentary, the voice that reads it as weakness, that says other people manage. So it stays private, and the privacy has become its own weight.

Where it comes from

It helps to be honest about something the warnings never say: it works. Or it did.

A man eats alone at a dining table while a single empty chair stands apart from the others, lit against a bare wall.

It helps to be honest about something the warnings never say: it works. Or it did. The thing was never pointless. It quiets something, softens something, makes something bearable, gets you into the room or through the night. Whatever it manages was there before it was, and is usually still there underneath it. That is why willpower alone so rarely holds, and why the costs, however plainly you can list them, have not shifted it. Letting go means facing what it has been holding at bay, usually without knowing what will hold it instead.

Understood this way, the shame begins to loosen. Reaching for relief is what people do when something hurts and nothing else has answered. The difficulty is that this particular answer has been taking more than it gives, and the taking has grown.

Somewhere the whole of it can be looked at

The work does not begin with a demand to stop.

What it costs, and also what it does.

The work does not begin with a demand to stop, and it does not require you to accept a label before you are met. It begins with somewhere the whole arrangement can be looked at honestly: what it costs, and also what it does, because both are true and only one of them ever gets spoken.

This work draws on more than twenty years, much of it in residential mental health and addiction settings. The room is used to the whole of it, the rules, the relapses, the parts still working and the parts that stopped working long ago.

From that ground the work goes underneath, slowly, to what the thing has been managing, and toward building enough of your own ground that it is no longer the only answer. Change of this kind is rarely one clean stop, and it is not treated here as pass or fail. What the work offers is a changed relationship with the thing: the choices around it becoming yours again, and the weight of managing it alone set down.

Rainwater ripples across a pavement until it reaches the dry stone beneath a lone person holding a torn, patch-repaired umbrella with a broken rib.
If it has begun to run more of your life

It does not have to be looked at alone.

If something you reach for has quietly begun to run more of your life than you meant it to, it does not have to be looked at alone. And looking is not the same as being made to stop.

admin@martinaldertoncounsellor.com 07799 563910
I work with addiction from 117 Harley Street, in Norwich, and online.
A younger man carries an ordinary metal key beside a fair-haired woman as they approach an open, unheld gate.