A great many of the people who contact me from Cyprus describe the same trajectory, and almost none of them expected it.
The drinking was ordinary at home. Then came a move, or a retirement, or a posting, and the structures that had quietly been limiting it disappeared. No commute. No colleagues who would notice. A social life organised around long lunches and terraces, in a culture where drinking in the afternoon is unremarkable and where nobody has known you long enough to recognise a change.
It is rarely a dramatic collapse. It is a gradual re-baselining, over two or three years, until the amount that now feels normal would have alarmed you before you arrived.
Why it is difficult to address locally
Specialist addiction provision in Cyprus is limited, particularly in English and particularly for adults who are still functioning.
There is also the problem of community. The British and international populations in Limassol, Paphos and Nicosia are close enough that seeking help locally means being seen to seek it. For somebody whose difficulty is invisible to everyone around them, that exposure is often the reason nothing happens for years.
Working with a clinician in London removes it. No local record, no waiting room, and nobody who will mention it.
What I bring to it
I trained as an addiction specialist at the Hazelden Foundation. I spent nine years working within private residential treatment and five years supervising clinical teams in it. I am a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of practice, and both registers are public and independently checkable.
I also treat the eating disorder that so often sits underneath a drinking problem, which matters more than it sounds. A great deal of relapse is driven by an untreated relationship with food, because alcohol is, in effect, liquid sugar. Treat the drink alone and you have treated half of it.
The right level of help
Cyprus is two hours ahead of London, which makes the working day straightforward from both ends. Sessions are once, twice or three times a week depending on what is needed, and reduce as things steady.
If what you need is residential care, I will say so. If what you need is serious one-to-one work you can do without leaving your life, that is what this is. More on how I think about that choice.
Common questions
Is online addiction counselling effective?
For the psychological work, yes, and often more practical. What matters is frequency and continuity. Where there is physical dependency requiring supervised detox, that needs medical care locally first, and I will say so plainly rather than work around it.
I am drinking more since moving to Cyprus. Is that unusual?
It is extremely common and it is one of the most frequent reasons people from the expatriate community make contact. A change of country removes the structures that were quietly limiting the drinking: the working week, the people who would have noticed, the reasons not to start at lunchtime.
Would residential treatment be better?
Sometimes, and I will tell you honestly. I spent nine years working inside private residential treatment and five supervising clinical teams there, so the answer will be clinical rather than commercial.