Addiction Counselling in Milton Keynes

What It Was Doing for You

People suppress difficult feeling in whatever way is available, and the list is longer and more ordinary than the word addiction suggests. Alcohol and drugs, yes. Also gambling, pornography, shopping, food, work, and exercise, which is a good thing right up until the point it is not.

All of them do the same job in the short term. They interrupt something you did not want to feel, and they do it reliably, which is exactly why they are hard to give up.

Here is the trap in it, and it is mechanical rather than moral. The thing that gets you through the evening is usually also feeding the thing you are getting through. Drinking to sleep costs you sleep. Betting to escape the money worry makes the money worry. Then you feel worse, so you need it more. Round it goes, and each turn makes the next one easier to reach for.

Which is why willpower on its own tends to fail, and why failing at it is not evidence about your character.

Alcohol Specifically, Because It Is Usually Alcohol

I am not a party pooper. I like a glass of wine and there is nothing wrong with a drink.

The issue is consistency rather than any single night. Alcohol disrupts sleep, and it is a depressant, which is an awkward fact about the thing most people reach for when they are low. So the pattern that starts as taking the edge off ends up producing more of the edge, and you cannot tell from inside it which is causing which.

You can have a blip. December is nobody's finest month. What matters is coming back to a balance point afterwards. It is sustaining these things for too long that works through from psychological into physical, and the body does eventually tell you about it.

You Do Not Have to Have Stopped, or Decided To

The most common reason people put this off is a belief that they have to arrive already committed to giving up, and preferably having managed a fortnight to prove it.

You do not. Plenty of useful work happens with someone who is not sure they want to stop, or who wants to cut down rather than stop, or who genuinely does not know yet whether this is a problem. Working that out is a legitimate reason to come.

What I will not do is agree with you that it is fine when the evidence in front of me says otherwise. You will get an honest read, which is most of what you are paying for.

Where I Am Not the Right Person

Worth saying clearly rather than leaving you to find out.

I am not a detox service and not a rehab. If you need medically supervised withdrawal, that is your GP and a specialist service, and it should come first. If you want a fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous, SMART Recovery and Al-Anon exist, cost nothing, and a lot of people use them alongside counselling rather than instead of it.

Where counselling earns its place is the part those do not cover: what the thing was for, what happens to the feeling underneath once you take away the thing managing it, and what you put in the space. That is often where people come unstuck months after stopping, when everyone else has assumed it is dealt with.

If what surfaces then is low mood or anxiety that was there before any of this started, that is not a setback. It is usually the actual problem finally becoming visible.

What Working With Me Is Like

No reception, no team, nobody else in the building. You send a message, I am the person who replies, and I am the person you sit down with. Nothing goes on any record and nobody is told.

Early on I would want to look at all three levels rather than only mine. The biological, which is your GP's end and matters more here than on most pages. The sociological, meaning your circumstances, your work, the people around you and what is being asked of you. And the psychological, which is where I come in.

I have been in practice since 2013 and I am an integrative therapist, which means I trained across several approaches rather than one, and I do not put people through a fixed programme.

I will not tell you how many sessions this takes. Anyone giving you a number before meeting you is guessing.

In person in Wolverton, or online wherever you are.