Reflection
The Addictive Personality, and Why Disciplined Men Are the Hardest to Treat
He runs something. A firm, a fund, a team, a practice. He is up before six, he does not miss deadlines, and people describe him as relentless in a tone that is meant admiringly. He has never used the word addiction about himself and would find it faintly absurd if someone else did.
He is also drinking every night in a way he has stopped counting, or he is counting everything else with a precision nobody sees.
These two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact.
What people mean by an addictive personality
The phrase is usually meant as a diagnosis of character. Some people, the thinking goes, are built weaker: less able to resist, more prone to excess, constitutionally unreliable around anything pleasurable. It is a comforting idea for everyone except the person it describes, because it draws a line and puts most of us safely on the other side of it.
Clinically it does not survive contact with the room. What is actually observable is not a defective type of person. It is a capacity, and the capacity is neutral.
The capacity is this: the ability to become wholly preoccupied with something, and to keep going at it past the point where a reasonable person would stop. Obsession supplies the preoccupation. Compulsion supplies the continuing.
The same mechanism, two reputations
This is the part of my doctoral research that has changed how I work.
High flyers, senior professionals, lawyers, bankers, surgeons, top-level sportspeople: they need to be obsessive about achieving and compulsive about the doing of it. That is not a metaphor. It is the same obsession and the same compulsion that present in eating disorders and in addiction.
The difference is not the mechanism. It is what it happens to be pointed at, and therefore how the world responds.
Pointed at a company, it produces growth, and the response is promotion, money and respect. Pointed at a bottle, a body or a ledger of calories, it produces the identical internal experience and the response is shame, self-loathing, isolation and disrespect.
One man is called driven. The other is called an addict. The internal weather is indistinguishable.
This has a consequence that matters more than it first appears. If the capacity is the same, then the man’s greatest professional asset and the thing destroying him privately are one object, not two. He has not failed to apply his discipline to the problem. His discipline is the problem, wearing different clothes in the evening.
Why willpower cannot work here
Here is why the advice everyone gives him is useless, and why he already knows it is.
Told that he needs more self-control, he is being asked to apply the exact faculty that has been captured. Told to impose structure, he will impose it, brilliantly, and the structure will become another thing to be obsessive about. Told to try harder, he will try harder than the person advising him has ever tried at anything, and it will not work, and he will draw the obvious conclusion about himself.
It is the machine attempting to switch itself off.
Every failed attempt then does additional damage, because a man whose entire self-concept rests on being someone who does difficult things reliably has now assembled a private file of evidence that he cannot do this one. That file is usually the thing he is most frightened of, and it is almost never the thing he mentions first.
I have written elsewhere about the functioning alcoholic, and about what this looks like when it lands in the body rather than the glass, in The Jail of Discipline.
Why nobody sees it
The social camouflage is close to total.
The behaviour that would raise alarm in someone else reads, in him, as commitment. The early starts, the missed meals, the punishing training, the not stopping: every one of those has an approving interpretation available, and it is the interpretation his colleagues, his family and frequently his doctor will reach for first.
He is also good at this. Performance holds long after the private situation has deteriorated, because holding performance is precisely what the capacity does. By the time anything is visibly wrong at work, it has usually been wrong everywhere else for years.
And discretion compounds it. A man known in his field, his firm or his town has excellent reasons not to be seen walking into anywhere that might be discussed. That is not vanity. It is a realistic assessment of his circumstances, and it is why so much of this work happens privately, or online, rather than not at all.
What the compulsion is actually doing
None of the above explains why it started, and this is where the useful work is.
A capacity for obsession does not decide on its own to attach itself to alcohol at eleven at night. It attaches because something is being managed. Underneath, with great consistency, sits trauma that was never addressed, depression that has never been named as such, exhaustion carried so long it stopped registering, or shame that predates the career by decades.
The behaviour is doing a job. It is anaesthetic. And it works, which is precisely the problem, because anything that reliably makes an unbearable feeling stop for an hour will be returned to, by anyone, regardless of intelligence or character.
This is why I take so little interest in willpower and so much in what the drinking or the counting is holding down. Remove an effective anaesthetic while leaving the pain untouched and you have not treated anything. You have made the person’s life harder and given them one more failure to file.
The thing this is not
It would be easy to read all this as good news. If the compulsion is the same capacity that built the career, then surely the answer is simply to point it somewhere better.
That is the most common misreading of my findings, and it does not hold.
Redirecting the behaviour without addressing what it is managing moves the symptom rather than resolving it. Take the drinking away from a man who has not looked at what the drinking was for, and something else arrives to do the same job, often within months, and frequently something more socially acceptable and therefore harder to see. The training intensifies. The work expands. The affair starts. The job still needs doing, so something is hired to do it.
That is the whole reason this practice works the way it does. Not to suppress the symptom and call that recovery, but to understand what it has been carrying, because a symptom that is merely removed will be replaced.
When it is worth taking seriously
Not everyone with this capacity needs treatment. Most people who have it are simply effective, and it costs them nothing.
The rough test is not how much you drink, train or count. It is whether it is still chosen.
If stopping for a fortnight would be genuinely difficult, and you have quietly avoided finding out. If the intensity has been climbing for years rather than holding steady. If there is a version of your evenings, your eating or your training that you would not want described accurately to someone who respects you. If you have made the same private resolution more than three times. If performance is intact and everything behind it is not.
None of that requires a crisis, a diagnosis or a label to be worth addressing. Most of the people I see arrive functioning, often conspicuously well, and would fail every stereotype anyone holds about who this happens to.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.
This article draws on my Doctorate in Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex, The devouring Kronos: the impact of father-son relationships on the son’s relationship with food and the body in the Jungian consulting room (DOI 10.5526/ERR-00042825). The related clinical work is described under addictive personality and executive addiction treatment.
If any of this is familiar and you would like to discuss it, you can get in touch here.
