Holiday times are good times. Aren’t they? Nowadays, with air travel, the holiday season can be at any time of year. The good times don’t need to fade away into distant memory. We can have them again whenever we want. A holiday gathering can be a family gathering with any number of family members. Or it can be a fun time meeting new people and making new friends in holiday parties day after day. The sweet life, la dolce vita, is ours for the taking.

Or is it?

My experience, from running my own treatment centre for 23 years, is that holidays can be grim times for addictive families. Addicts let their hair down at other people’s expense. What they call ‘fun’ can be a wretched time for people close to them.

Getting ‘smashed’, ‘wasted’ and ‘out of it’ can be literally true. I did exactly that, in one way or another, many times.

And then I wised up to what I was doing to my mind, my relationships and my life. I was destroying them. My mind was besotted by chemicals. My close relationships were with addictive substances and processes rather than with people. My life was a mess.

Eventually I lost my genuine friendships and found fair-weather friends instead. They weren’t going to criticise me or, worst of all, tell me how much they carefor me. They would leave me alone to get on with my life in my own way.

Until the only person left in my life was me.

I wasn’t aware of what I was doing to my mental health. I knew I didn’t have mental illness, as defined in psychiatric text books. Therefore it never occurred to me that I might not have mental health.

As an active addict, my primary quest in life was to find the next ‘magic fix’, something or somebody to lift the sense of inexplicable inner emptiness that accompanied me wherever I went and whoever I was with.

I thought the terms ‘alcoholism’ and ‘drug addiction’ applied to other people, not to me. I genuinely could not see what I was doing to myself. In my psychological state of ‘denial’, I thought I was in great shape. In this respect I told my truth. But I could not see that my truth was wrong.

I didn’t see that my ‘drug dependence’ was no different in principle from that of any addict, even though I was not using the particular drugs that some other addicts used. I looked always for the differences between us rather than the similarities.

I was just as much a drug addict as any other. My substance abuse matched the addictive process of any other person hooked in a dependency.

Certainly, regardless of the precise nature of my various addictions, I got many of the addictive characteristics that caused havoc in the lives of other addicts. I damaged every aspect of my life and I didn’t see that I was doing so.

Because I was having a great time, a wonderful time, a fabulous time. Wasn’t I?

Eventually, when everything fell apart as it inevitably does with alcoholics and addicts of any kind, I asked for help. For my wife! I wanted her back. I couldn’t understand why she would walk out on me. I was fun to be with. Wasn’t I?

I simply did not see that I was an addict of any kind or that I needed addiction treatment of any kind. A treatment programme, treatment centre or rehab was for other people. Not for a sane and sensible person like me, still in full-time work, earning my living and paying my way.

And then the most extraordinary thing happened. I met people who were just like me in the Rake’s progress they described. But they were having really happy lives, not the pretence that I put on for show. And they weren’t using any addictive substance or process.

I hadn’t believed it was possible to be happy without using something to ‘make’ me happy.

They describe themselves as ‘recovering addicts’. They still acknowledged they have addictive natures but they don’t give in to them. I was amazed. I’m pretty tough. I’ve been to British private school, done time in the army, and been a junior hospital doctor. But I had never been tough enough to beat my addictions. To be sure, they must have superhuman powers!

But they seemed to just like me, coming from the same emotional ‘pod’ even though our social backgrounds differed considerably.

And they appeared to be having a lot of fun, not in a forced way but genuinely.

They taught me how to value my weaknesses rather than my strengths. They showed me how to avoid ‘trigger’ substances, processes and relationships that might lead me back to a life of superficial bonhomie hiding an inner loneliness. I didn’t want to trigger relapse. I’d done that too often, when my determination and willpower were insufficient.

Well, it seemed to me that relapse prevention seemed to be a lot more sensible than continuing to pick myself up after one relapse after another.

So I asked them how they did it. They told me. And I followed their example. And now I call myself a ‘recovering addict’, I do what they do and I help many addicts of one kind or another. Along with other people ‘in recovery’, I help people to put their days of active addiction behind them, often by using support groups to counter the inner sense of emptiness that had dogged us for so long.

And then – guess what? – we have the life of our dreams. Holidays were never as good as this!

Some addicts are highly intelligent. They use this natural gift to ‘prove’ to themselves and others that they are not addicts. As with mediaeval monks discussing how many angels dance on the head of a pin, they argue over the precise nature of addiction until the cows come home. Intelligence doesn’t protect them from mental and behavioural stupidity. And mental health is not merely the absence of mental illness. Intelligent people are just as prone to mental illness and addiction as anyone else.

Other people are as thick as the proverbial two short planks. This does not lead to them being either accepted or rejected by other addicts in their surroundings. For many individuals their intellectual struggle and their addiction are just the way they are – without any direct connection between these two aspects of their lives.

A lack of emotional intelligence, an inability to learn from practical experience and take sensible action, is not directly connected with intellectual ability or its absence. But emotional instability is a common feature in all addicts. Unpredictable feelings can come out of nowhere and go all over the place.

When A (an action) directly and always leads to B (a specific end result) a simple cause is established. More complex, conditional, causes occur when C or D need to be present for A to lead to B. Background influences, X, Y and Z, may result in A leading to B more commonly than in other circumstances. Understanding concepts of causation and mathematical probability are functions of the intellect. If that skill were sufficient to prevent addiction, no intellectually clever people would ever become addicts. IQ tests should then demonstrate their invulnerability. But that is manifestly not the case.

But now let’s look at this the other way round. Hard core addicts of any kind – alcoholics, drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, sufferers from eating disorders, any of them and many more – eventually become utterly self-destructive. That isn’t very clever. Their alcoholism, drug abuse, drug addiction or compulsive behaviour of any kind steals their greatest assets – their capacity to reason and ponder – and turns them into tools for intellectual and social self-delusion.

‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ was the exhortation of a highly intelligent man – Timothy Leary – but he took many members of the flower power generation down with him into intellectual oblivion when they turned to drugs. Substance abusers may believe they are exercising free will when they turn to drugs. The truth is the opposite. Addiction destroys free will. The fanciful musings of abusers and addicts are mentally bizarre. Their creativity is corrupted. Their youthful enthusiasm is diverted by drug use into cul-de-sacs of banality. Drug and alcohol use tended to make them indistinguishable from each other so that if you’ve seen one addict you’ve seen them all. The only feelings long term addicts are left with are blame and self-pity. They have no residual individual personality. Many of them need addiction treatment if they are to recapture any sense of hope, trust, honour, appreciation, innocence and beauty.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the sharpest minds who ever lived, discovered the secret of the universe after inhaling ether: he said ‘A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout’.

Aldous Huxley, another fine intellect, experimented with mescaline (first cousin to LSD) in order to open the doors of perception. He wrote that taking the drug led to ‘a gratuitous grace’ and that the person having this experience ‘will be transformed for the better’.

In 23 years running my inpatient treatment centre I worked with over 5,000 addicts of one kind or another. I do not recall any of their lives being transformed for the better by any addictive substance or process – other than temporarily in their own mental confusion.

One important study showing what addicts of any kind have in common demonstrated to us that having other addicts in their families was the most predictive factor in addiction. High intelligence, or the lack of it, was not a factor. Whatever the level of intelligence, the risks of addiction are the same.

But addicts like me are often too clever for our own good. We may have high levels of intellectual attainments but our intelligence can become an enemy rather than a friend. As suggested by Dr Bob, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, we need to ‘keep things simple’.

Many people die before they hit rock bottom addiction.

They think they can manage their ‘habit’, use sensibly, and have a bit of fun. Then one morning they wake up dead.

Addiction isn’t a habit. For one in six of the population, it’s a compulsion, probably driven by faulty neurotransmission systems in the mood centres of the brain. Constantly they feel a desperate sense of inner emptiness for no obvious social reason. They feel down even when everything in their lives seems up, in the judgement of other people.

When they discover substances, processes and relationships that lift the mood, they feel an immense sense of relief. For that reason they continue to use them. These ‘magic fixes’ work.

But there are damaging side effects. People with addictive natures accumulate problems in every aspect of their lives. They lose jobs, marriages and friendships. Their health suffers. Their social, professional and economic life deteriorates.

For therapists to say that they need to ‘hit rock bottom’ before they will get well is false. In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous it says that it is a matter of rejoicing that some who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics had joined their number. It would appear that these therapists are unfamiliar with the basic texts of recovery.

The art of intervention is to help addicts and people with drug and alcohol issues, or other forms of substance abuse or chemical dependency or compulsive behaviours of any kind, to get off the downward spiral a long time before they hit rock bottom. The experience of hitting bottom is a choice, not a necessity. The rock bottom myth should be put to the sword. Why wait until they have lost absolutely everything before getting off that calamitous ride?

Intervention can be very successful when people with alcoholic addiction are still in full time work, are married and still have their driving licences. All they have to see is the ray of hope that life can be better than it is at present. They have to be attracted towards recovery – possibly in an alcohol rehab either in an inpatient or outpatient treatment programme, rather than frightened away from disaster.

For drug addicts to wait until they have hepatitis of one kind or another, or take repeated overdoses, or have liver failure, or complications with their mental health, is crazy. Addicts, or people suffering from drug abuse in any form, can get completely well and never suffer any of those fearful consequences if they are helped to turn themselves round as soon as it is clear that their daily lives are getting progressively more troubled.

For people with eating disorders, despairing that there is no escape from the cycle of bingeing, purging and starving, the new dawn breaks when they meet those of us who have been in that lonely state but found the way out. They can learn from us how to avoid the rock bottom of hospital wards and the shame of looking in the mirror or knowing that truth and lies don’t mix.

Compulsive gamblers tend to lose all their possessions and have mountains of debts before they ask for help. That can change.

Breaking through the denial, in which the addictive disease ‘tells’ addicts that they don’t have it, takes belief – and experience – that it can be done. A rock bottom moment doesn’t need to happen for anyone struggling with addiction. All that is necessary for a turning point is for the addict to see that, in a progressive and destructive disease, the future will be worse than the present. And recognise that determination and willpower will work no better in the future than they have in the past. The experience of personal rock bottom, in human spiritual terms in any addicted person, will vary from one addict to another. Our lives are individual but we share the same general addictive characteristics that imperil us.

The motive for change is pain. Taking away the pain – by paying off debts, telling lies to employers, soothing down partners and landladies and generally being kind and considerate to addicts – makes them worse rather than better. Compulsive helping, doing things for others that they could and should do for themselves, is a vice, not a virtue. Family members – and people in the helping professions who happen to be compulsive helpers – need help for themselves before they damage anyone else. We do not have to cause addicts pain but we do need to leave them in the pain they cause themselves. Without the pain there will be no gain. Recovery changes your life and theirs. All of it.