Counselling Specialties
Addiction Therapy
Book a Free 20-Minute Consultation“What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.”
— Madeleine Albright
You decide you’re not drinking tonight and find yourself pouring one anyway. You tell yourself the last bet was the last one, but at the back of your mind, you start calculating how to win the money back. Or you are back watching porn even though, a few hours earlier, you were completely serious about stopping. You probably started looking for help when you realized you’re not in control anymore.
There is usually a reason you kept going back to it in the first place. If drinking gave you a few hours where you didn’t have to think about anything, your brain learned to connect drinking with that relief. After enough repetition, the decision to drink comes as soon as the urge. It’s like you’re watching it all unfold as a spectator. You can tell yourself you’re not going to use while you’re on your way to your dealer.
With most addictions, your body and brain adapt in ways that change you. You need more to get the same effect, and stopping brings withdrawal. In some cases, withdrawal is dangerous enough that you need medical supervision. The consequences often create a new reason to use. Lose money gambling, and now you want to get it back. Have a fight about drinking, and you’re left with more stress to drink away (how else do we change how we feel as easily, right?).
Through treatment, clients who work with Pathway to Self reach a point where they no longer need alcohol, drugs, gambling, or porn to get through life. They feel more capable of handling what life brings and more in control of their own decisions, and they no longer live with the same kind of suffering that once made escape feel necessary.
Ask anyone who’s been through addiction and they’ll tell you: it takes up a lot more time than the drinking, using, gambling, or porn itself. You’re thinking about when you can do it again, whether you have enough left, where the money is going to come from, or when you’ll finally be alone. You plan around it, wait for it, and keep track of it. Even when you’re not doing it, much of your day gets devoted to it.
While alcohol and drugs create physical dependence, your brain and nervous system (being physical too), become dependent on other forms of addiction: Gambling, porn, and other compulsive behaviours change the brain’s neurochemistry even without a substance entering the body. Those changes are part of why stopping can bring significant and painful withdrawal. Still, with alcohol, that withdrawal can become medically dangerous, with risks including seizures and, in severe cases, death.
Therapy was probably the most helpful part of addiction treatment for me. I was using to deal with stress and anxiety and stuff I didn’t really know how to deal with. My therapist helped me figure out what I was getting from the addiction, and I learned other ways to deal with those feelings instead of going straight back to using. Rehab helped me stop. Therapy helped me understand why I kept needing it. I got my will to live back.
Stopping also takes away your most successful coping skill to date. The problem it was solving for so many years, was already there before the addiction became a problem for you. The addiction didn’t get rid of that problem. It gave you a way to get away from it. By the time you stop, your brain has had years of practice activating the same skill: use. That’s why withdrawal is typically the easy part: the real work starts after that. Treatment changes both: the problem that made escape necessary and the brain that learned to depend on it.
You’ve probably tried to stop on your own, repeatedly, and found that you can’t. You keep telling yourself that you’ll never relapse again, but the simple fact that you can’t stop starts to create an experience of shame and self-judgement. After a while, you start to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
Relapse, when it happens, is treated as information, not another failure. With the Pathway to Self method, our first sessions will focus on changing the practical skills you use. Building stability means finding alternative ways to cope, first and foremost. If additional support is needed, you may be referred to withdrawal management or longer-term treatment facilities. The next step involves a deeper look at the original problem, the one that repeatedly needs to be resolved by using the addiction. Once that problem has been resolved, you’ll find it easier to never need to use, drink, gamble, or use porn.
Treatment will make difficult situations and emotions easier to get through, and the urge to drink, use, gamble, or watch porn will weaken over time. Over time, you start re-engaging with the people and activities that matter most. You’re more present in your life and relationships. You can have a terrible week, sit with it, and come through the other side without having to blow up everything around you just to change how you feel. The people close to you start seeing someone they recognize. So do you.