Addiction therapy is not primarily about stopping. Most people with a serious addiction have stopped many times. The question is not how to stop — it is how to build a life in which the addiction is no longer necessary.
What therapy addresses
Effective addiction treatment works at several levels simultaneously. The immediate compulsion. The psychological function the addiction has been serving. The patterns of thinking and relating that sustain it. The damage it has caused — to relationships, to self-esteem, to physical health. And the question of what recovery actually looks like for this particular person.
Alexithymia — from the Greek for “without words for feelings” — is the difficulty identifying what one is feeling, distinguishing between emotions and bodily sensations, and putting emotional experience into words. It is not the absence of feeling. It is the absence of access to feeling.
Relapse is a return to substance use or addictive behaviour after a period of abstinence. It is one of the most misunderstood events in recovery — typically interpreted as failure, as weakness, as evidence that the person did not want recovery badly enough. None of these interpretations is accurate.
Addiction is a chronic condition characterised by compulsive engagement with a substance or behaviour despite significant harmful consequences. It is not a failure of character. It is not something that willpower alone can resolve. And it is not a choice in the way that ordinary choices are choices.
People with addiction are often the first to invoke freedom. It is my right. I am only hurting myself. What I do in my own home is my business.
Philippe Jacquet does not argue with the principle. He asks a question instead.
Codependency is a relational structure in which one person progressively loses the boundaries of self in relation to another — organising their identity, emotions, and choices around the needs, moods, or behaviours of someone else.
Origins of the term
The word codependency emerged from the addiction field. Melody Beattie described it as a secondary disease: the alcoholic is addicted to alcohol; the family member becomes addicted to the alcoholic. Their attention, energy, and sense of self become organised entirely around managing, rescuing, or surviving the person with the addiction.
Sex addiction and pornography addiction are not primarily about sex. They are about the management of anxiety, emotion, and intimacy — using sexual behaviour or content to seek connection, intensity, or relief without the vulnerability that real contact requires.
The link to cocaine
Sex addiction rarely arrives alone. The person presenting with compulsive sexual behaviour is frequently also using cocaine. This is not coincidence — it is neurochemistry.
The twelve step programme is a peer support and self-improvement framework that has helped millions of people worldwide achieve and maintain recovery from addiction. Philippe Jacquet consistently recommends it alongside individual therapy — not as a perfect solution, but as an irreplaceable community structure that individual work alone cannot replace.
Passion, in the clinical context used by Philippe Jacquet, refers to genuine engagement with life — a sense of meaning, purpose, or calling that gives the person something to move toward rather than only something to run from.
Addiction does not arrive in a full life. It arrives in a life that is missing something. The substance fills that vacancy — it provides intensity, anticipation, relief — a counterfeit version of being fully alive.
A symptom — whether an eating disorder, an addiction, or a compulsive behaviour — often functions as an anaesthetic: it reduces the felt discomfort of an underlying situation to a level that makes it liveable. Therapy, by removing the anaesthetic, temporarily increases the pain. This is not a failure of the therapy. It is how change becomes possible.
Addiction is a compulsive cycle of using a substance or behaviour to avoid pain or feel better, followed by shame, guilt and the resolve never to repeat it. The name of the game is avoiding to feel.
The myth of Sisyphus
“Addiction is a bit like the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus pushes the boulder to the top of the hill, and in the morning he starts again. Addiction is the same — every morning pushing, pushing, trying to avoid the pain. In the morning, he is again at the bottom.” — Philippe Jacquet
Euphoric recall is a cognitive phenomenon in which a person with addiction selectively remembers the pleasurable aspects of substance use while minimising or forgetting the negative consequences. The memory is not fabricated — it is incomplete.
How the memory lies
Human memory is not a recording — it is a reconstruction. For a person in recovery, the brain’s reward system replays the relief, the warmth, the ease. What gets quietly edited out is the next morning, the relationships damaged, the promises broken.
Recovery from addiction or an eating disorder is not the elimination of desire or the pull toward the behaviour. It is the development of the capacity to live freely in the presence of that pull.
“Generally people who think about recovery believe that suddenly the behaviour, the obsession, the desire will disappear. No. Recovery is about managing symptoms — being able to live free of those symptoms and experiencing your emotions.” — Philippe Jacquet