I Was Never ‘Cured’: On Addiction, Exile, and Learning to Stay

Fair warning: this blog post opens with an exorcism. Stay with me, it gets gentler.

A note before you go: this post is a personal reflection on my own experience with mental illness and addictive processes and my own professional training. It is not a treatment recommendation for addiction, anxiety, or trauma. If any of the content resonates and you're currently struggling or in crisis, please know there is real, specialist support available. Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs and SMART Recovery UK are both excellent places to start, alongside your GP and the Samaritans.

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As a twenty-something-year-old, as I repeatedly had holy water flicked onto my face by a wet Jesus on a cross, I remember repeating to myself over and over again "you're ok, you're ok, this will be over soon." I remember being in a complete state of panic, probably owl-eyed, and profusely sweating on this very hot summer day in Lisbon. The room was dark and the lady made scary stomping noises with her left foot. I remember tuning in to the comforting cackle of familiar voices in the room next door – that gave me the comfort and solace to endure the "exorcism" that would finally rid me of the very acute panic attacks and depersonalisation/derealisation episodes I'd been having.

I was told a diversity of evil energies had entered my body, and after trying everything I could think of to rid myself of these hellish feelings (including being assessed by one of the top psychiatrists in England), I figured the next logical, last-resort stop-shop should be the local tradesperson with direct connections with Hell itself.

I probably don't need to tell you none of it worked, though I remember stating (after seven gruelling days of "treatment") that I was indeed "so much better!" What did work, however, was going home after the "exorcism" to listen to Enya and light up Nag Champa. Well, it did the trick. When I look back at the time, I see that the ability to connect to the Felt Sense (read on to find out more about what this is) was there all along, except I got lost in the long list of what I was being told was good for me, would work, should work.

But then again, who can blame them? Who can blame us for believing in the fantasy that, with the right treatment, everything will fall right into place and your annoyingly uncomfortable and hellish feelings will be gone?

There's a fantasy I used to have, and if I'm honest, some quiet part of me still checks for it every so often, that one day everything would simply fall into place. A before and an after. The anxious/addicted part of me would be gone, exiled, dealt with, and I'd finally be the version of myself that didn't need to think about it anymore.

I know that fantasy is not unique to me. I think most of us who've struggled with something, whether that's a substance, a behaviour, chronic pain, a panic attack that arrives uninvited at 3am, want the same thing really: for it to just be gone. Not managed. Not understood. Gone. And who could blame us? Nobody wakes up wanting to keep hold of any of this stuff.

But here's the thing I've come to sit with, slowly, and with more than a little resistance along the way: wanting relief and wanting exile are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical in the moment. "I want this to stop hurting" is one sentence. "This part of me is bad and needs to be gone" is a different sentence entirely, wearing the first one's clothes.

Nobody forced me to sit in the exorcist's chair, of course. I wanted that part of me banished back to hell just as much as those who took me there did (and I don’t even believe in hell!). I didn't like that part, and neither did they. Feelings of helplessness, inadequacy and despair were all being thrown into the cauldron, spiced with the anger that nobody could just get to enjoy summer while I was an anxious wreck.

It would take me a long time, and a lot more than seven days (try seven years?), to understand that none of what I was doing back then was actually about wanting to feel better. It was about wanting that part of me gone. Dragged off, exorcised, denied a ticket back into my life. And the strange thing is, nobody had ever taught me there was a difference.

As I returned to the UK, considerably out of pocked and resigned to the fact that neither Enya nor the exorcist had cleared all my symptoms, I went back to my life, still dealing with the same symptoms, some days worse than others, some days rendering me disabled. I still coped in the ways that I knew how to – a lot of it through addictive processes which served a real purpose in service of survival (and still do when all else fails!). I started noticing the little voice inside my head, perhaps the same one that told me I was going to be ok whilst my face was getting wetter back in that darkened room, which started looking after my anxious self and looking out for experiences of safeness.

At the time, I started decorating my entire flat like a Mediterranean home. I'm a Portuguese man away from home in a cold country, so looking back, I am proud of that wise parent part within me that started nesting in an attempt to soothe. What joy! Of course I wasn't cured by white linen and TK Maxx sea-themed tat, though I promise you that it helped. It really, really did.

It would be years before I'd read Eugene Gendlin and find out he'd already written the thing I'd stumbled into decorating a flat with white linen and dodgy fairy lights:

"What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes... If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That's the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs."

I hadn't let anything breathe, not on purpose anyway. But something in me had started, quietly, to stop treating my own anxious, addicted self like an intruder to be exorcised, and started treating it a little more like a frightened animal that just needed somewhere warm to sit.

Someone asked me the other day why I do what I do. Well, this is it. A sanctuary stop along someone's journey - I hope. Not just a place where you can reconnect with safeness, but also a place where we can welcome all of the parts into the room and, with gentleness and care, start to listen to them. The beautiful work of integration, not separation and exile, is what I truly love doing.

Looking back, I don't think decorating that flat was a distraction. Distraction, in my experience, has a particular flavour to it, a kind of frantic, can't-sit-still, anything-but-this quality. This wasn't that. This was slower. Quieter. I'd stand in my Mediterranean-blue living room in the middle of an English winter and just... breathe a bit easier. My shoulders would drop half an inch and I'd momentarily sense that, in fact, the world wasn't ending.

That, it turns out, is not a small thing. It's a huge big thing. Because before your nervous system can do any of the harder work, the working through, the feeling of the actual feelings, the integrating of parts, it needs some evidence, some proof in the body, that safety is actually possible. Not safety as an idea. Safety as a felt experience. A shoulder that drops. A jaw that unclenches. A room that smells, faintly, of home.

I didn't know any of this at the time, obviously. I just knew that white linen felt better than the alternative. But what I was doing, without knowing the words for it, was giving my body a taste of something other than fight, flight, or freeze. A little rehearsal of ease. And you cannot skip that step. You cannot go from "everything is a threat" to "let me gently welcome and integrate my most difficult parts" without first, somewhere along the way, letting your body remember that not everything has to be a threat all of the time.

This is what I mean when I talk about respite in my work now. Not escape. Not distraction. Rehearsal. A small, repeated, embodied reminder: this is what calm feels like. This is available to you too.

It would be years before I had a name for any of this. Years before "Jan Winhall" or "Felt Sense Polyvagal Model" meant anything to me at all. I was just a man with a lot of throw cushions and an increasingly confused husband who drew the line when I said I wanted a mural print of the Mediterranean coast in the living room.

But here's what I find almost funny now, in the way that only hindsight allows: there is an entire, rigorous, decades-old practice built around exactly what I was fumbling towards alone in that flat. Eugene Gendlin called it Focusing. Jan Winhall took his work and wove it together with Polyvagal Theory to build something specifically for people like me, people whose relationship with a substance, a behaviour, an addictive process, was never really about the substance at all. It was about what the substance was doing for an unbearable feeling that had nowhere else to go.

And here is the bit I most want you to hear, if you take nothing else from this: you can learn this. Connecting to your own felt sense isn't a gift some people are born with and others aren't. It isn't intuition, or spirituality, or being "in touch with your emotions" in the way that phrase gets thrown around. It's a skill, in the most ordinary sense of the word, like learning a language, or learning to ride a bike badly before you learn to ride it well. You practise noticing. You practise staying with something murky and wordless. You get better at it.

I wish someone had told me that in that darkened room in Lisbon. Not "here is a diagnosis," not "here is an exorcism," but: there is a whole language living in your body already, and it can be learned. I do want to stop here and acknowledge that medication did, once upon a time, enable me to catch my breath and create capacity to feel safeness again. It allowed for the possibility to feel something other than panic, even if it couldn't ever possibly do any of the integration work I am talking about. (I stop here just in case you got the idea that I'm advocating for you to purchase linens and throws instead of taking your meds!)

So, no. There was no definite penny dropping moment that fixed it all. No single day where the addicted/anxious part of me packed its bags and left for good, denied re-entry, ticket confiscated at the door. I still have days, sometimes weeks, where that part of me stirs, wants something, needs listening to, shows up and kicks up a fuss. I imagine I always will. Which isn't to say I'm super pleased when this "guest" knocks on my door, looking like it's been dragged through a bush backwards. I've come to learn that I need to invite him in, ask him to take a seat, and say, "Oh, hello my old friend, what's up?" I don't always manage to do this either, but, eventually, I got to ask and then listen to someone who keeps showing up.

But here's the thing I actually believe now, all these years and a proper training in Focusing with the Felt Sense later: that's not failure. That's not evidence the work didn't take. A body doesn't heal by having parts of it deported. It heals by learning, slowly, patiently, sometimes with the help of white linen and a bewildered husband, that every part of you, even the loud one, even the one still reaching for relief in ways that used to frighten you, is allowed a seat at the table.

I still don't always get it right. Some days I catch myself wanting the old exile back, wanting something simply gone rather than known or outright feeling like I'm back to square one because im back in the throes of addictive processes. That's alright too. Integration was never a finish line. It's a practice, the same way Focusing and connecting with the Felt Sense is a practice, the same way this work, the work I do with you when you come and lie on my massage couch, is a practice: showing up, again and again, gently, to a part of yourself you once tried to send to hell, and saying: stay. Let's get to know each other properly this time.

Further reading:

Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (Bantam Books, 1978)

Jan Winhall, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (Routledge, 2021)