I work with clients in Dublin and across Ireland online, by secure video.
Ireland has very good addiction counsellors. There are people doing good work with eating disorders, and there are people trained in EMDR. What is harder to find is a single clinician who can hold all of it at once, and that is the reason most people from Ireland get in touch with me.
One profile, not three problems
Addiction, eating disorders and trauma are usually one psychological profile presenting in three directions rather than three separate conditions that happen to coincide.
Someone comes about their drinking. Underneath it is a relationship with food that nobody has asked about. Underneath that is something that happened long before either of them started. And around all of it sits the anxiety, or the depression, that everyone has been treating as the problem itself.
You can find clinicians in Ireland who work with each of those things. If you arrive with the whole of it, you will struggle to find one person who can follow you through it.
That is what I do: the complex case, complex PTSD, where addiction and often an eating disorder sit in the same person. Eating disorders are where most of my clinical life has been spent.
Anonymity, on a small island
Ireland is a small island and everybody knows everybody. If you see a therapist in Dublin, there is a reasonable chance they know somebody you know, or drink where your brother drinks, or taught your cousin. That is nobody’s fault and no reflection on Irish clinicians, who are often excellent. It is arithmetic, and on an island with large families and long memories the arithmetic is unforgiving.
For a great many people that is precisely why they look outside the country. I have written about that at more length, including what taught me the lesson, on the EMDR page.
The warmth that does not travel
I live in Ireland, so what follows is observed rather than read.
There is a quality to Irish sociability that people who arrive from elsewhere find remarkable. Within a few weeks you have what feels unmistakably like deep friendship — real warmth, real conversation, an ease that would take years to establish in most of Europe.
Then you leave. And the phone does not ring. Not out of any coldness, and not because it was insincere; it was entirely sincere at the time. It is simply that the warmth is bound to presence and to place. You were inside the circle while you stood in it, and when you stepped out the circle closed, without malice and without anyone deciding anything.
That is disorientating for an emigrant, and it explains a great deal about the ones who stay.
Because the corollary of a culture with that much sociability is not what people assume. It is perfectly possible here to be surrounded by people and entirely alone. A man can have forty acquaintances who would buy him a drink, a family who would do anything for him, a village that would turn out for his funeral — and not one person to whom he could say the thing. Company is abundant. Disclosure is not, and the two are frequently confused, including by the man himself, who cannot understand why he feels so isolated in a life that is visibly full of people.
Drink as the licence to speak
This is where the drinking sits, and it is more interesting than the cliché.
The cliché is now also inaccurate, which is worth saying because an Irish reader will know it. Alcohol consumption here has fallen by more than a third since it peaked in 2001, and Ireland now sits within the European average, with ten EU countries drinking more.
That national figure is the wrong number to look at.
The average has fallen substantially because a large minority of the population drinks nothing at all. Among people who actually drink, consumption is around thirteen litres of pure alcohol a year and it has been rising, not falling. Roughly a quarter of drinkers exceed six standard units on a typical occasion. So the pattern is episodic and heavy rather than steady, and the man who is genuinely in trouble now looks more ordinary against the national statistics than he would have twenty years ago, not less. The average improved. He did not.
What alcohol does here, though, is something more specific than volume.
In a culture where enormous warmth is available but direct emotional disclosure is not, drink becomes the licence. It is the one condition under which a man can say what he actually feels, to another man, and not be thought strange for it. It is said at one in the morning, it is received properly, and there is a tacit agreement that nobody will refer to it again.
That arrangement works. It is why it has lasted. But it means the only route to being heard runs through the substance, and the moment the drinking becomes a problem in its own right, the man loses his single channel of expression at exactly the point he most needs it. He does not merely have to stop drinking. He has to learn to speak sober, which he has never had to do, and which nobody taught him.
That is a large part of what the work actually is.
The provider, and the second residence
Most of what I have written so far could describe a man in an office. A good deal of it does not.
Ireland is strongly family-oriented and it works hard, and a large number of men are in physically demanding trades — building, construction, plant, haulage, farming, fishing. Work that is genuinely difficult, frequently dangerous, tied to weather and to an economic cycle nobody controls, and done by men who are proud of doing it.
That orientation towards family is a real strength and it is worth saying so before saying anything else. It is also, clinically, a closed door.
If your identity is the man who provides, then needing something is not available to you. Not forbidden — unavailable. The role has no slot for it. He cannot be struggling, because his entire function in the family is to be the one who does not struggle, and admitting otherwise does not feel like honesty to him. It feels like failing at the job.
The figures on what that costs are not ambiguous. A 2024 study of male construction workers in Ireland found a lifetime prevalence of suicidal ideation of twenty-two per cent, with six per cent reporting a suicide attempt. In the UK, suicide among construction occupations runs at roughly three times the rate of non-construction occupations. These are not men who lack resilience. They are men in an occupation that provides no permitted route for anything to be said.
Why the pub is not simply where the drinking happens
And then the pub, which he half-jokingly calls the second house.
The reason advice about drinking so often fails with this man is that the advice misunderstands what the pub is. It is not merely the place the alcohol is. It is the club. It is where the news is, where the slagging is, where work is heard about before it is advertised, where a man is known by name, and — this is the important part — the only setting in the culture where men may sit together for hours with no task and no explanation required for being there.
Take the drink away and you have not removed a beverage. You have asked him to resign from his entire social infrastructure, at the precise moment he is least equipped to build another one, and to do it in front of everybody who will notice immediately.
Framed like that, the reluctance is not denial. It is an accurate assessment of the cost. Any treatment plan that does not take it seriously deserves to fail, and generally does.
There is usually a body in this too. Twenty-five years on sites leaves chronic pain, and pain that is managed with drink, or with codeine, or with both, is one of the most common quiet dependencies I see and one of the least often named as one.
And there is 2008. A generation of tradesmen watched the sites stop, lost businesses, houses and standing, and a great many emigrated to keep families afloat. That was a national economic event, but it was almost universally experienced as a personal failure, and men who carried it that way have generally never described it to anyone as anything other than bad luck.
None of this is treated by being told to drink less. It is treated by there being somewhere the disclosure carries no social cost — which, for a man whose entire world is within ten miles and knows his father, is the whole difficulty, and the reason a good number of them look outside the country.
The ones who went, and the ones who stayed
Emigration is woven through Irish life in a way it is not elsewhere in Europe. Going away is not a rupture here; it is a recognised path, and everybody knows somebody who took it.
And there is a figure who returns from it. The man who went to London, Boston, Sydney or the Gulf, did well, and comes home with the car and the house and the standing — I made it. He is celebrated, and rightly, and his return is a genuine pleasure to everyone.
He is also, without anyone intending it, a measuring instrument.
Because the man who stayed is standing next to him. He had reasons: a sick parent, a farm, a girlfriend, a job that seemed fine at the time, or simply no particular moment at which leaving became the obvious thing. Those reasons were good. They are also, twenty years on, not sayable, because they sound like excuses when placed beside somebody else’s success.
What I see in that man is not envy. It is a specific and unspoken sense of a life that was decided by default, and the near-total absence of any permitted way to say so. He cannot tell his family, who need him. He cannot tell his friends, who stayed too. He cannot tell the man who left, who would be kind about it, which would be worse.
So it goes somewhere. Usually into drink, frequently into gambling, increasingly into cocaine — and gambling in particular suits it, because it restores, briefly and convincingly, the sense that the story is not finished and one decision could still change everything.
The trauma nobody was allowed to speak about
Then there is the older material, and Ireland has an unusual amount of it.
The Ryan Report in 2009 examined the industrial schools and reformatories, through which roughly forty-two thousand children passed between the 1930s and the 1970s. The McAleese report addressed the Magdalene laundries. The Commission of Investigation examined the mother and baby homes. The Ferns, Murphy and Cloyne reports dealt with clerical sexual abuse and, as importantly, with how systematically it was concealed.
These are not historical curiosities. The people involved are alive, many are in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and a considerable number have never spoken about it to anybody at all.
Two things make this material particularly difficult to reach in men.
The first is that the abuse was frequently committed by the very institution that held the moral authority to define what could be spoken about. When the body that defines sin is also the source of the injury, there is no available language for the injury. The child is left with the event and no framework except the one that makes him responsible for it.
The second is that the collapse of the Church’s authority, when it came, was very fast — and while that was necessary, it left a generation without the container they had been raised inside, and without anything to replace it. Some of them are relieved. Some are quietly bereaved and would not dream of admitting it. Both states are common, and neither is much discussed.
The split
The religious division is the other inheritance, and it does not stop at the border.
The Troubles produced a great deal of trauma that was never treated as trauma, on all sides, in a period when there was no vocabulary for it and no service to provide it. Men who were children then are in their fifties now. Some witnessed things directly. Many more absorbed an atmosphere of threat, vigilance and silence that shaped a nervous system without ever producing an identifiable event to point at.
That is the presentation I see most often from the North: not a memory to be reprocessed, but a baseline of watchfulness that has been there so long the person regards it as their personality. It responds to treatment, and it very often has never been named.
Where there is a specific event, EMDR is generally the fastest route through it. Where there is no single event — where it is an atmosphere absorbed over a childhood — the work is longer and it is not primarily about memory.
The confessional, and what replaced it
Whatever one makes of the theology, confession did psychological work, and it is worth describing that work plainly.
It was regular. It was available in every parish, without charge, without an appointment and without means. It was absolutely confidential, under a seal taken more seriously than most professional codes. It had a defined beginning and a defined end. And it finished with a formal release — the thing was said, it was heard, and it was declared to be over.
That is not a small piece of psychological architecture. It is most of one.
Psychotherapy has never pretended otherwise about the lineage. Freud and Breuer called their early technique the cathartic method, and their patient Bertha Pappenheim called it the talking cure — a secular technology for something the confessional had been doing for centuries. Jung was more explicit still. In Psychotherapists or the Clergy he observed that “patients force the psychotherapist into the role of a priest”, and expect to be relieved of their distress accordingly. He did not regard that as a distortion of the work. He regarded it as an accurate account of what the analyst had inherited.
It should be said in the same breath that the confessional was not benign for everybody. For a great many people it was coercive, it manufactured shame at least as efficiently as it relieved it, and it belonged to a system of social control that a lot of Irish people were extremely glad to see weaken. Both of these are true at once, and any account that only manages one of them is not describing the country.
But here is Ireland’s specific difficulty.
The channel did not quietly fade the way it did across most of secular Europe. It was discredited from the inside — by the revelation that the institution holding the seal of confession had been systematically concealing the abuse of children. It was not outgrown. It was disqualified, and quickly, and by its own custodians.
And nothing has replaced it at anything like the same scale. Therapy costs money, requires an appointment, still carries stigma in a good deal of the country, and on a small island carries the anonymity problem already described.
What remains — free, in every town, no appointment, no means test, socially sanctioned, and open at half past ten at night — is the pub.
Look at the form of it. Disclosure to a listener, late, in confidence, followed by a tacit absolution: nobody will refer to it again. That is the structure of confession almost exactly. What it does not have is the containment.
Confession had a boundary, a ritual close and a release. Drink has no ritual end, no absolution, and — this is the part that matters clinically — the disclosure is frequently not retained by either party. The material is discharged and never integrated.
Which produces the sensation of unburdening without its effect. And anything that produces the sensation without the effect has to be repeated, indefinitely, which is a reasonable description of a great many drinking lives.
This is not a moral point. It is the same reason catharsis on its own does not treat trauma. Reliving a feeling at full intensity is not in itself therapeutic and can leave a person worse; what determines the outcome is what the material is integrated into afterwards. That is precisely why EMDR is a structured processing protocol rather than an invitation to relive, and it is why a man can tell the same story at the same end of the same bar for fifteen years and be no further on than the first night he told it.
What gets said in the pub, and to whom
Something is put to me often enough by Irish men that I have stopped being surprised by it, and it illustrates all of this more completely than anything I could construct.
A man describes finding out — usually around a funeral, sometimes years afterwards — that somebody who drank with his father knew things about how his father felt that he, the son, never knew and was never going to know. Not facts about his life. How he felt. What frightened him. What he regretted, and what he would have done differently.
The son is rarely angry when he says it. That is the part that stays with me. He reports it the way you would report the weather: of course that is where it went, where else was it going to go.
And then the thing that almost nobody notices they are describing. He has learned the rule. It is not said at home. He is, by the time he is sitting in front of me, a man whose own children will one day have to find out from somebody else.
That is what the loss of a contained place to speak actually costs, and it is not paid by one generation.
The work is not to find him a new confessor. It is a setting where what he says is remembered, held, and followed by something — and, if it is done in time, a man whose children will not have to hear it from a stranger in a bar.
Spiritus contra spiritum
There is one more thing about Ireland, and it is the part that makes the drinking legible rather than merely regrettable.
This is a land that invites the spiritual. Not as a figure of speech — the landscape does it, the light does it, the west in particular does it, and there is a pre-Christian layer sitting under the Christian one that has never entirely gone away. Holy wells, pilgrimage, places treated as thin. Whatever one makes of any of it, the appetite for the numinous here is not borrowed from anywhere. It is in the ground.
And over that sits a religious history which, for a great many people, has made the institutional expression of that appetite unusable. Through the conflict, and through what was done to children by the institution that claimed the authority to speak about the soul.
That leaves an unusual combination: a strong instinct for the transcendent, and a discredited container for it.
The instinct does not disappear when the container fails. It goes somewhere.
Jung wrote to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, on 30 January 1961, about a patient he had treated three decades earlier. His observation was that alcohol in Latin is spiritus — the same word used for the highest religious experience and for the most degrading poison — and that the craving for drink was, at a low level, a thirst for wholeness. The formula he offered was spiritus contra spiritum: spirit against spirit.
That letter is one of the founding documents of the twelve-step tradition, and it is also straightforwardly Jungian psychology. It is not a metaphor. It is a clinical claim about what the craving is for.
If it is even partly right, it has a practical consequence that matters here more than almost anywhere. Treating Irish drinking as behaviour alone will underperform, because when the alcohol is removed the appetite is still there and now has nothing to point at. That is one of the most common shapes relapse takes, and it is routinely misread as weak motivation.
None of which requires religious belief, and none of it is a recommendation to go back to the Church. The word Jung used was individuation — becoming a whole person rather than a functioning one — and it has no creed attached to it.
It is also the reason this particular combination of training is useful in Ireland. I trained in addiction at the Hazelden Foundation, inside the twelve-step tradition where that letter is foundational, and I am a Jungian analyst. Both traditions descend from the same insight, and they are rarely held by the same clinician.
What I offer
EMDR therapy for trauma, delivered online. More than twenty years of practice and well over a hundred sessions online.
Addiction counselling, including alcohol, cocaine and behavioural addiction, worked with alongside whatever else is present rather than in isolation.
Eating disorder treatment, including in men, which was the subject of my doctoral research at the University of Essex.
Practicalities
Sessions are online by secure video. I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. Registration can be verified on the UKCP register.
If what you need is somebody in the room, or residential treatment, I will tell you that at the assessment rather than six sessions in.
Figures: alcohol consumption and drinker-level consumption, Drinks Ireland and Alcohol Action Ireland; institutional abuse, the Ryan Report (2009), the McAleese report (2013) and the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. This page is for information and does not replace assessment. C. G. Jung to Bill Wilson, 30 January 1961; C. G. Jung, Psychotherapists or the Clergy, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895); construction worker prevalence data, Prevalence and associated risk factors for suicidal ideation, non-suicidal self-injury and suicide attempt among male construction workers in Ireland, BMC Public Health (2024).
If you are in crisis in Ireland, Pieta is free and open twenty four hours on 1800 247 247, or text HELP to 51444. Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 112 or 999.
All international work is delivered by secure video. Online therapy by secure video.
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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