What does addiction mean to you? by Tom Tomaszewski

I could give you a technical definition of addiction, a theoretical one, one which might satisfy someone who writes dictionaries … or I could stay on the side of artists. Keats wrote about addiction, I could say, or Lou Reed, Sylvia Plath or Clarice Lispector. 

I could offer you some thinkers: Derrida? Avital Ronell? Or maybe you’d like to talk about how somebody could become addicted to TV, Facebook, buttons, stamps, clothes, pets?  We could talk about the Buddha or Simon Cowell.

What exactly is addiction? 

Somewhere between the sublime and the banal I’d think there was an answer. Perhaps that’s why we addicts have our highs and lows, doing the same thing twice and always expecting a different result. No. Addiction’s a grind, a killer, a slow drawing out of one last breath. Addiction is stepping off a cliff and imagining I might fly, only nothing as dramatic as that. It’s sitting in a room that never pleases me, the walls contracting, like being in a bad dream.

In addiction there are similar moves. If you know it you can watch the same game play out with different players. I watch a football match in London or in Tokyo and I know straight away it’s the same kind of thing. The differences, of course, are the reasons I might keep watching. I work with addicts because of the people involved. I work with addicts because of a disease that runs through us, between us.

Addiction is the relationship you’re stuck with. Needles, bottles, high heels, cards, lipstick. Is this starting to sound glamorous? It usually does, in the beginning. Fear, obsession, denial, deceit, expectations, projection, isolation, compulsion, control, self-centredness, shame and resentment. Are you living in that? It’s a repetition - and everything starts with repetition, from learning to tie my shoelaces to writing my name. But what if I can’t let go of the lace or stop signing my name, everywhere, on everything. Because I can’t.

So, what do you make of addiction?

 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.

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