What You Need To Know About Addiction Transference

When Sam Thomas was 15 years old, he learned the word “bulimia” by reading an advice column in the paper. The person who had written in seeking help was a single mother who binged and purged after her children went to bed. While Thomas didn’t relate to her situation, he immediately recognized the behavior. He hadn’t known before that moment that what he was doing had a name.

“I thought it was something that I’d invented, something unique to me,” Thomas, who lives in the U.K., told HuffPost.

Thomas traces his eating disorder to the homophobic bullying that he endured at school, which left him with “low self-esteem, no confidence, no sense of self.” He did attempt to get help a couple of times during his adolescence, but found that the topic of male eating disorders was so shrouded in silence that providers were reluctant to connect him with the treatment he needed.

Without professional help, Thomas managed to leave bulimia behind as a young adult. He moved from Liverpool to Brighton and started volunteering for LGBTQ+ and mental health causes.

He didn’t start drinking until he was 23. He set up a charity for men with eating disorders, and traveled throughout Europe speaking at conferences, “but actually in the behind-the-scenes, this new addiction was sort of manifesting.”

Thomas said he initially didn’t realize alcohol was becoming a problem for him, and then he was simply in denial about it. Following his mother’s death, his drinking escalated. He went through detox four times.

“At that point, I was really beginning to realize that actually, I’m recovering from many different things, and not just from the alcohol or just from eating disorders,” Thomas said. “More important than anything else is the trauma [that] needs