Chapter 8. A Story That Remains Open.
There is a particular kind of silence that comes after a person has spent a long time trying to escape from himself. It is not the silence of peace, at least not at first. It is closer to the silence of a room after an argument, when the voices have stopped but something in the […]
Chapter 7. What Remains After the Drug When the Old Way of Living Is Already Destroyed and the New One Has Not Yet Appeared.
There is a moment in recovery when a person begins to realise that stopping the drug has not brought them back to the life they expected to find. They may have imagined this period for months, perhaps for years. In their imagination, there was a clear division between the time when they were using and […]
Chapter 6. What the Psychologist Notices in Addiction Before the Person Is Ready to Admit It.
A man comes to see a psychologist because his wife has threatened to leave him. He says this almost immediately, before he has properly settled into the chair. He explains that they have been arguing for months, that she has become suspicious of everything he does, and that lately she seems to be looking for […]
Chapter 5. What Happens to a Person When They Try to Give Up the Thing That Once Helped Them Not Feel.
There is a particular kind of uncertainty that can appear when a person decides to stop using a substance that has been part of their life for a long time. They may have spent months thinking about this decision, or perhaps it came after an argument, a frightening experience, a financial problem, or one of […]
Chapter 4. Why the Drug Gradually Becomes Not Pleasure, but a Way of Getting Through an Ordinary Day.
There is a point in some forms of addiction that is difficult to recognise because, by the time it arrives, the original pleasure may already be almost irrelevant. The person may still remember what the drug once felt like. They may remember the first evenings when everything became lighter, quieter, more interesting, more distant, or […]
Chapter 3. At What Point Does a Way of Coping With Oneself Begin to Live Instead of the Person?
There is probably no exact moment when a habit stops being something a person does and starts becoming something that seems to happen to them. People often want to find such a moment afterward. They look back at the first use, the first period of regular use, the first time they hid it, the first […]
Chapter 2. Why the Same Experience Remains a Difficult Period for One Person and Becomes the Beginning of Addiction for Another.
There is something difficult about comparing two people who have gone through almost the same thing. From the outside, the circumstances may look close enough to make the comparison seem obvious. Two people lose their jobs. Two people go through a divorce. Two people spend months caring for a sick relative. Two people experience loneliness […]
Sometimes a Person Does Not Want the Drug.
Sometimes a person does not want the drug. They want to stop feeling what is happening inside them. The distinction sounds almost too simple when it is written down. It can even sound suspiciously convenient, as if one sentence could explain something that may have taken years to develop. Addiction does not usually arrive with […]
The High-Functioner’s Trap: When “Success” is Just Anxiety in Disguise.
A few months ago, a client sat in my office—let’s call him Alex. Alex is the kind of guy who wakes up at 4:30 AM, runs five miles, manages a tech team of fifty people, and listens to behavioral neuroscience podcasts at double speed during his commute. He came to me not because he thought […]
Where Does Stress Live?
There is a particular kind of discomfort that is difficult to explain to another person. The neck feels hard by the end of the day, the shoulders seem to have climbed almost to the ears, there is pressure somewhere in the throat, or the lower back begins to ache after a difficult conversation even though […]
When Love Becomes a Daily Act of Endurance: Living with Autism in the Family.
Now imagine families where a child has autism.Or several children.Not a metaphor, not a diagnosis on paper, but a real presence in the house. Every day. How do they cope.What do they feel. They love their children, of course. That part is unquestionable, almost boring in its certainty. But love here is not clean or […]
Burnout Doesn’t Arrive All at Once. It Quietly Rewrites the Way You Live.
At some point you start noticing something strange.The work hasn’t necessarily become harder. It simply stopped ending. Even when everything is formally switched off — the day closed, the door shut, the screen dark — nothing inside really disconnects. The tension stays. Not sharp. Background noise. You get used to it the same way you […]
When You Can’t Let Go: The Psychology of Emotional Stuckness After a Relationship Ends.
The strange thing about this kind of being stuck is that it doesn’t always look like loss.Sometimes it looks like calm. Almost normality. Even functionality. You work. You talk. You joke.On the outside, everything seems assembled. And that’s exactly what’s unsettling.Because if everything is so “fine,” where does this background heaviness come from — the […]
Waiting for Life to Begin: The Psychology of Living in “Later” Mode.
Living in waiting mode almost always looks reasonable. Even convincing. Now is not the right time. First this needs to be finished, that needs to be endured, something else needs to heal or stabilize. Later. A bit later. And inside that “later” there is a strange comfort, as if life already exists somewhere ahead, carefully […]
When Life Moves at a Different Pace: The Invisible Psychology of Living with Disability.
Disability rarely arrives as a single, clearly defined moment. More often, it resembles a shift in coordinates — barely noticeable at first, when it is still possible to pretend that nothing significant has changed. But gradually, the world begins to respond differently. Stairs become longer than they were yesterday. People speed up, as if someone […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.