Seven women and five men, mostly mid-life professionals in casual tracksuits – some wearing slippers, some clutching bottles of water – are sitting in a peaceful room, surrounded by rolling Cheshire countryside, discussing the compulsions that rule their lives.
Most have paid £18,000 for a 28-day stay at Delamere – Britain’s first purpose-built, private addiction rehab centre, which offers yoga, reiki and art classes alongside therapy – because they’re dependent on alcohol. But booze isn’t the focal point of the group session.
Intriguingly, it’s how one addiction can be accompanied, or replaced, by another.
‘I put on seven stone when I stopped drinking,’ says one of the female participants, while a male guest admits to an obsession with work that accompanied a cocaine habit. He only belatedly realised that while drug abuse is very obviously bad for your wellbeing, ‘seventy hours a week isn’t healthy’ either.
Then there’s shopping. Who cannot relate to the excitement that comes with online notifications that your delivery is ‘eight stops away, seven stops away, etc’?
For another of Delamere’s female guests, that was enough to lure her into repeatedly shopping for things she neither wants nor needs.
‘The high I get from that is quite strong. And then that emptiness – I get five minutes of ‘Oh that’s amazing’, and then it’s gone,’ she says.
Another Amazon addict describes ‘a pile of vegetable choppers and water sprayers, organic salts and all sorts of kitchen equipment’ in her cupboards that she bought on the site when drunk. ‘And they’re not even out of their boxes.’
Antonia Hoyle says she knows only too well how quickly drink can lead to a never-ending cycle of toxic obsession
Instagram adverts are another woman’s nemesis. ‘I find myself buying each thing in a different colour and can spend £10,000 in five minutes,’ she says, shockingly.
Extreme, perhaps, but if you’re wincing in recognition you’re not alone. For Delamere not only deals with addiction to substances, but behavioural addictions too – to posting on social media, scrolling on smartphones and to tech in general.
And in a digital age where tech firms employ behavioural scientists specifically to keep us hooked on their products, it’s hardly surprising these damaging obsessions are on the rise.
The theory at Delamere is that behavioural addictions go hand-in-hand with physical dependency – and often replace it as addicts dry out.
‘The addictive nature needs to be tamed,’ says Martin Preston, 41, the centre’s founder and a former addict, or ‘it will try to latch on to anything that can change the way we feel’.
Certainly, this resonates with me. When I realised my drinking was making me anxious, I quit three years ago.
I’ve never called myself an addict, but I was drinking three or four times a week, sometimes at the weekend to the point of embarrassing drunkenness.
As a mother of two, booze was both a way to relax and a source of shame. The longer I gave it up for, the more I realised I was attempting to distract and numb myself with social media instead – picking up my phone constantly when confronted with a difficult emotion, seeking the comfort I would once have found in sauvignon blanc with likes and approval online.
Antonia at the centre with Charlotte – a successful musician hooked on alcohol, ketamine and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for much of her 20s and 30s
I started drinking again, albeit more moderately, last January, after two years’ abstinence, and since then I have noticed a direct correlation between the amount I drink and the amount I scroll.
At weekends when I open a bottle, I am less bothered by my Instagram feed. When I decide to abstain, I cannot stop checking it.
Studies have found women are more likely to be addicted to social media (men get hooked on gaming and online porn) and perhaps it’s significant that guests at Delamere are 70 per cent female.
They are ‘lawyers, doctors, teachers, police – on occasion people in the public eye,’ says Preston, who believes that most rehab centres, in converted old buildings with what he describes as ‘care home corridors’, are counterproductive to the healing process.
The atmosphere at Delamere, in the village of Cuddington near Northwich, voted Best Amazing Space in the Northern Design Awards, is certainly more plush hotel than lockdown facility.
It has spacious communal areas for playing cards and table tennis and no formal reception area to intimidate guests checking in.
As well as group and individual therapy, mindfulness and breathwork sessions are provided, along with equine therapy with placid horses to teach guests to regulate moods healthily.
‘Our approach is compassionate, not judgmental,’ says Martin, who in his early 20s was ‘using about three grams of cocaine and drinking up to a litre of spirits on a daily basis,’ until a three-month stint in an ‘intimidating’ rehab centre helped him to get sober.
Swapping one form of addiction for another, however, he spent the next two years getting ‘wired’ on energy drinks, chain-smoking, binge eating and participating in adrenaline-fuelled sport to try to replicate drug-induced highs.
Only therapy quietened his demons and brought him peace.
After our group session, I speak to Charlotte, a successful musician hooked on alcohol, ketamine and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for much of her 20s and 30s.
In the industry, drugs are ‘celebrated,’ says Charlotte, now in her 40s. Her addiction was also facilitated because she could buy them via the dark web – ‘and it all comes the next day in the post’.
Martin Preston, 41, the Delamere centre’s founder and a former addict
Yet the more she used, the more her depression spiralled ‘to the point of suicidal thoughts, not getting out of bed for five days at a time, not washing’.
Now in her third week at Delamere, she hasn’t used laughing gas for eight weeks, drunk alcohol for six, or taken ketamine for three.
But it wasn’t the ketamine that drew her here: ‘I’m addicted to work. I’m addicted to social media. I’m addicted to my phone. I can spend days in bed watching Netflix. I’m addicted to anything, basically.’
The desire to post a picture of her dinner for ‘likes’ from her 250,000 Instagram followers is a case in point. So too is her 30-vitamin supplement a day habit – ‘seaweed, lion’s mane, things I can’t even pronounce, but I take because I want a quick fix – to take a pill and think everything’s going to be OK’.
On arrival at Delamere, her supplements were taken away, so was her smartphone, in case she found herself scrolling Instagram pictures of ‘babies laughing or silly dogs’ until 7am like she does at home.
‘My husband would joke ‘you’ve pulled an all-nighter’. I just can’t stop. I can’t read a book – I haven’t the concentration, then four hours have passed, I’ll have to get up and record a radio show.’
It is Charlotte who admitted, in our group session, to spending £10,000 on clothes in just five minutes online.
When she comes home from a work tour, she says a quarter of a room the size of the one she and I are sitting in will be filled with parcels, ‘and I have no clue what’s in them’.
‘It’s crazy saying that out loud. I don’t know what I’m ordering. Constantly on my phone, I’m not present. I’m not paying attention to my husband or daughters.’
I feel an uncomfortable familiarity as she says this. Certainly, I find social media strips my life of colour. When my eyes are glued to my smartphone I am as oblivious to my children’s needs as I am when drinking.
Immaculately groomed when we meet, Charlotte now realises her compulsions stem from childhood poverty, the hand-me-downs and foodbanks ingrained in her memory. ‘I have an obsession, an addiction, with not having enough.’
She’s learned too, through specialised therapy sessions on grief and loss, that the recent death of her mother has exacerbated her behaviour, and that designer labels don’t equate to success.
‘I’ve learned so much about myself. I’ve really torn myself down for the last three weeks, but I feel I’m building myself back up now.’
Most guests at Delamere are broadly middle-aged, though Martin recalls a young university student with a cocaine addiction sent by her parents and a retired university professor addicted to cannabis.
The oldest he remembers is an 87-year-old woman who was dependent on alcohol, the most common substance addiction.
Delamere – Britain’s first purpose-built, private addiction rehab centre, which offers yoga, reiki and art classes alongside therapy
Antonia with Martin at the centre. The theory at Delamere is that behavioural addictions go hand in hand with physical dependency – and often replace it as addicts dry out
‘We see more ketamine than we did. Prescription drug addiction is absolutely on the rise, too.’
Guests physically withdraw from alcohol with the help of an onsite nurse who administers medication such as Librium – a sedative.
Christine, in her 60s, who arrived here 18 days ago, explains. ‘I was like the walking dead. When you come off alcohol you have sweats. My pyjamas were wet through. You’re walking like a zombie. Then you have the shakes. Librium helped with all of that.’
A softly-spoken department manager with two adult children, her drinking escalated after divorce. She would drink two bottles of wine on a work night, and at weekends it was more like three. ‘I was drinking alone, so people didn’t know how much.’
Her GP warned she might be at risk of liver damage and after a ‘family conference’ she Googled Delamere and her daughter drove her here.
Her boss helped finance her stay, which staff here tell me is not uncommon. ‘They lent me half the money – it will come out of my salary – plus they’ve given me extra holiday. It was one of my better decisions.’
Christine is the woman with the unopened kitchen gadgets, and tells me most of her online purchases were delivered to her office. ‘I’m well known at work for receiving Amazon parcels. It was a kind of joke.’
Yet compounding the comedown from a shopping splurge is often a deep sense of shame.
Psychologist Chris Lomas, who leads the group session, says behavioural addiction is shockingly common: ‘Anything involving the online process is immediate, which means the gratification is instant.
‘It’s scary how that’s had an impact on people.’
Just like getting blind drunk, problem behaviours online stem from an urge to escape difficult feelings. In fact, the biochemical mechanisms are the same.
Smartphone scrolling, for example, fuels the same rapid rise in the ‘reward’ neurotransmitter dopamine as alcohol, prompting a spike in feelings of wellbeing, followed by a drop – withdrawal – and the urge to replicate the behaviour.
‘You can be as addicted to your internal chemicals as you are to any external chemicals,’ says Lomas. And while behavioural addiction might not kill us, it can cause financial ruin, social isolation, and crippling shame and is often ‘no less damaging’, he adds.
In fact, I find it now gives me more of a buzz than wine. If I don’t delete the app from my phone and activate an internet software blocker to stop me accessing it on my desktop, I can spend more than five hours a day on Instagram alone.
Where abstinence isn’t possible – we all need to eat and use the internet, after all – Chris suggests ‘cognitive restructuring, a fancy name for a simple process’, which involves asking ourselves whether we need to shop, scroll, or stuff ourselves. ‘Will you feel better afterwards? Can you do something to distract yourself?’
With a wistful smile, Christine reveals she used to crochet, read and garden, before her drinking took over and ‘I lost all that’.
Psychologist Chris tells me these are excellent examples.
I think back to my first year of sobriety, when I challenged myself to read a book a week, which gave me a sense of achievement and self-respect, and how when the year ended, I felt directionless and distracted again.
Had I found another challenge, might I have stopped drinking for longer?
In addition to finding healthier replacement activities, Delamere guests learn mindfulness – the act of acknowledging thoughts and feelings without reacting or judging, which is proven to be helpful in curbing addictive behaviour.
‘It’s been a game changer for me,’ says Sally Hopkins, 25, from Altrincham, Cheshire, now a Delamere ‘recovery mentor’ who helps guests build the confidence to return to the outside world.
Like most mentors here, she is also in recovery, having started binge drinking aged 14, her tolerance increasing until ‘it wasn’t unusual’ to down over a litre of spirits on a night out.
She recalls finding herself alone in Manchester after arguing with friends, ‘crossing tramlines, not for suicidal reasons, just because I took crazy risks for no reason’.
Once a bright student excited about life, she drank to the point of suffering daily panic attacks while working as a technical support engineer. ‘I was extremely anxious, really quite depressed.’
At age 19, she woke one morning, full of ‘dread, guilt and regret’.
Finally admitting alcohol was to blame, she told her father – a retired chief executive of a drug and alcohol charity and himself in recovery since before Sally was born – that she needed to go to an AA meeting.
‘He looked at me and just said ‘yeah’.’
With ‘wrap-around’ support from her dad, she stopped drinking, and has learned to be curious about her emotions, rather than attempting to crush them.
With boredom, for example, which leads so many of us to drink or scroll, she explains it’s about ‘seeking out the why’.
‘I challenge it and investigate. If there’s something to be done, I take action.’
If not, she accepts that, ‘it’s not going to kill me. It’s OK to be uncomfortable today. It will pass.’
We all need a sense of purpose, she adds – without it, our self-esteem plummets and irritability and discontent sets in.
‘A lot of what I do in my mentor sessions is focusing on who we are and what we are meant to be doing,’ she says.
And I realise with a jolt that, for all the mindfulness I have practised and breathing exercises I have done, it is a question that remains unanswered for me.
The addictions these women are battling may be extreme, but many of us have within us the seed of similar obsessions.
My visit to Delamere has convinced me of my own.
Some names have been changed.
