Addiction Counselling for Brussels

Brussels runs on the long lunch, the reception and the delegation dinner, and for a great many people in the institutions, the law firms and the lobbying world, alcohol is simply part of the working week.

That makes a developing dependency almost impossible to distinguish from ordinary professional life, including to the person who has it. Nobody is drinking alone. Everybody is drinking.

The second difficulty is that Brussels is a small international city where colleagues, neighbours and children’s classmates come from the same few thousand households. Seeking help locally means being seen to seek it. Working with a clinician in London removes that entirely, in English or in French.

Addiction counselling in Brussels

The environment in which addiction develops is rarely incidental to its content. Brussels, for many of the people who work there, is an environment of high pressure, long hours, a culture of drinks at the end of a session or the end of the working day, and a level of professional visibility that makes it extremely difficult to acknowledge that something has gone past the point of ordinary use. The line between a culture that normalises drinking and an individual whose relationship with alcohol has changed in ways that are concerning is easy to miss, until it is not.

This practice offers English-language addiction counselling to people in Brussels. The work is individual, depth-oriented, and conducted in complete confidence.

The approach

Dr Jacquet has specialised in addiction for over 25 years. The clinical approach here is integrative and Jungian, work that treats addiction not as a failure of discipline but as a response to something that has not been adequately addressed. What the substance or behaviour provides (what state it relieves, what it is substituting for, what it would mean to give it up) is the starting point for understanding what needs to change.

Where unprocessed trauma underlies the dependency, EMDR may be incorporated. Philippe is an EMDR practitioner with over 20 years of experience, and trauma is more commonly a factor in addiction than most clinical settings acknowledge.

What is treated

The practice works with alcohol and drug addiction, cocaine and stimulant dependency, gambling, sex and pornography addiction, and other behavioural compulsions. Where addiction co-occurs with depression, anxiety, eating disorders or trauma, those presentations are addressed together rather than separately.

A private, highly specialised service

In Belgium a great deal of mental-health support is arranged through the public system, and for many people that is the right route. This is deliberately something different. It is a private, highly specialised addiction practice - senior specialist expertise, usually no waiting list, free choice of clinician, and strict confidentiality. People come here when they want depth and discretion, and a specialist who has spent 25 years with precisely this work, rather than a general service.

Impulsivity and the urge to act

Underneath a great deal of addiction is a difficulty with impulse: the pull to act on an urge before thought has caught up with it. It is clearest in the behavioural addictions - gambling, online trading, sex and pornography, compulsive spending - which are disorders of impulse as much as of any substance, but it runs through alcohol and stimulant use too. Much of the work is about restoring the pause between urge and action: understanding what the impulse is discharging, what feeling it is trying to escape, and building the internal space in which a different choice becomes possible.

Confidentiality

All sessions are conducted under strict confidentiality. In the specific professional context of Brussels (where institutional, diplomatic and corporate careers depend on reputation) this is not a procedural formality. Nothing is shared with any employer, institution or third party without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits explained at the outset.

Addiction in the Brussels bubble

The professional culture around the institutions, the receptions, the travel, the long negotiating cycles, normalises patterns of drinking and stimulant use that can quietly cross the line while careers continue to flourish. The practice has long experience with exactly this presentation: high-functioning professionals whose dependency is invisible at work. Sessions are available in English and French, with complete discretion, by secure video, which many institutional clients prefer.

On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work, and when each is the right step: addiction counselling and therapy in London.

Hazelden-trained addiction specialist, UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist. Nine years working inside private residential treatment, five years supervising clinical teams in it, twenty-five years of practice. Both registers are public and can be checked independently.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.

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