[Leaving addiction] Performance and stimulants: Clément's story

Clément runs a prestige group as its chief executive. A job carrying very heavy responsibility.

He tells me straight away that he is very self-sufficient, and that calling on someone from outside to get out of a dead end is really not his habit. But here he has to face the fact that he cannot find the way out.

I point out that being partly dependent on each other is rather lucky, since none of us can be an expert in everything — mechanics, plumbing, electricity, computing, electronics, psychology — otherwise we would have no time or energy left for the field we actually care about.

Over our sessions I am quickly struck by how fast he reasons, how easily he takes things in and puts them to work, and by the discipline with which he lives out his values. That last one earns my respect.

Clément is deeply involved in a job that takes up most of his time. His evenings and part of his weekends often go to it too.

So we identify the function of his use very quickly: cocaine is what lets him keep the pace.

• either as a lift, to answer a tender in the middle of the night
• or to hold out on a weekend evening and allow himself a night with friends or with his partner

When I then ask whether that intense pace suits him, the answer is no — not much of a surprise. Clément is clearly an active, hard-working sort, but he admits he would like to find a healthy balance again, and in particular the time and space for real moments with the people close to him and with his family, whose invitations he turns down far too often.

"I am well aware that all the time and energy I am putting in today will earn me no gratitude from the shareholders on the way out. Sure, they are delighted with my performance right now, but that is all. These sacrifices serve no purpose except generating more money for the group and raising their expectations every time. More success just means bigger targets next."

So we pause to look at what is pushing Clément to over-perform. Since it is not the promise of future freedom or recognition, why does he keep up this pace at the expense of his health, his wellbeing and his relationships with the people he loves?

Exploring it together brings us to the driver behind that precarious balance: the need to be seen as the best, and to keep up the image of an infallible man in front of his teams. Digging further, we find that the need was born in childhood, and more precisely at school. Clément was never an academic child. Like many high-potential profiles, he found it very hard to take in information without understanding its point, or the reason for learning it. That sits badly with rote learning as it was applied in the classrooms of the time, and he was written off as a dunce.

Some of his teachers allowed themselves to predict a future with no future in it. "You will end up on the street" is one of the things he heard along the way.

Faced with a school system that did not understand him, Clément gradually resigned himself to joining the other outcasts and cynics and took refuge in rebellious escapes: cigarettes, cannabis, alcohol. Then, at eighteen, he left the country and found a job in tourism. That is where he discovered his appetite for learning by doing. In a matter of months Clément had the local language, having scored disastrously in that same subject at school.

He climbed the ladder fast, and every promotion was a form of revenge on the education that had condemned him to failure. Clément fights every moment not to prove the institution right. You might say: "Well, that failure at school turned out useful — he made a strength of it." And you would be partly right.

But it is that same failure at school that unconsciously pushes Clément to over-perform, systematically, so as never to live through such humiliation again. There can be no room for the slightest doubt about his ability to succeed, even at the cost of his own balance. Once that came into view, we used interactive hypnosis to help him reconnect with the emotional needs underneath: energy, recognition, clarity, mastery — the needs he had been trying to meet through relentless work and through the drug.

Given how quickly he takes things in (once the point of the exercise is clear to him), Clément made these inner visualisation tools his own very fast, and used them to feed those positive states from the inside.

In two months the use disappeared and his way of living changed. He started training twice a week to feed the sense of energy, wellbeing and mastery, and we built a working framework matched to his need for both efficiency and balance, so he would not slide back into sacrificing himself. Clément is even considering picking up one of his great passions again: floral art. Through coaching questions we explored together how to make room for it and how to unblock the practical obstacles. The change happened gently, and the urge to use faded without force, because every underlying need was being answered. Finally we went through every situation that could put him at risk and built simple strategies, matched to his needs and his constraints, to head off any relapse. Clément's story is a good illustration of what I see in this work every time: behind every behaviour that gets away from us, there are legitimate needs asking to be heard. The substance is never the problem in itself. It was the strategy he had found — temporary, costly, but effective in its own way — for want of anything better. By going back to the source and understanding what was driving him, we were able to replace that mechanism with something that fits who he actually is. Not by imposing a framework on him, but by giving him access to his own resources again. This approach never fights the symptom: it simply answers the underlying needs that produced it another way.