The three red X’s on 55-year-old Liz Naylor’s right forearm are reminders of the three times she almost died. Sporting a hoodie, jeans, trainers and short, greying hair, Naylor describes how she discovered drugs at 14, and heroin in her 30s, before finally finding herself.
Born to a depressed mother and a father who died shortly after her birth, Naylor was, as she puts it, “a completely crazy young woman”. She was expelled from school and sent to therapists who she says patronised her. She took up jobs in the music industry (“where you chopped up lines of speed on the desk and snort drugs in the office”) and subsequently lost them (“I took loads of drugs and didn’t turn up for meetings and wondered why nothing worked”).
She made herself quit in 1999 because she kept overdosing. “I just thought, ‘I don’t want to die,’” she remembers. “As a human being, I just went, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
It took two years scouring London to find the perfect therapist. “I would wander into some drug service and go, ‘I think I need help,’ and they would say something bland to me,” Naylor says. She finally found a therapist on Portobello Road who, she says, “saved me”.
“Really early on in my therapeutic relationship with her, she said to me, ‘That’s bullsh*t,’” Naylor continues. “I was absolutely incensed – I remember going home and [thinking], ‘She’s my therapist, she should be nice to me’ – but it was the first time anybody had really challenged me.”
She went on to enroll in higher education (“I discovered I had a brain”) and in 2005 took up a part-time job at AdAction, a drug and alcohol treatment charity. In 2014, she co-founded Foundation for Change, a non-profit that runs psychology courses for people recovering from substance misuse. It understands substance misuse as a rational response to trauma, and offers training courses to rebuild recoverers’ self-esteem.
With a Master’s degree under her belt, Naylor is like the schoolteacher you wish you had. She can be dauntingly intellectual and refreshingly down-to-earth within the same sentence, referencing psychological theory like a tweed-clad academic while swearing like a sailor. She mentions Sonic Youth Riot Grrrl and Ludus, and Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault, all within ten minutes.
The way she speaks reflects the way she teaches at Foundation for Change. For Naylor, the way to help substance misusers is to see the person for who they are, not what they take.
“I wish there was some campaign that went, ‘Drugs and Alcohol: Not about Drugs and Alcohol,’” she says. “I’m sure that most people can relate to a time when you had way too much to drink at a really lovely event… But there’s also a time where you drank because you just didn’t want to feel.”
Her training sessions – psychological theory in the morning and exercises in the afternoon – are intentionally designed to be straightforward. “I don’t believe in alienating people from knowledge,” she says. “It’s counterproductive.”
Her motto? “We’re not above you, we’re not better than you. We’re people, so let’s learn about this sh*t together.”
Great Tuesday evening on our Psychology for Change course – looking at core beliefs & masks of self esteem #personaldevelopment pic.twitter.com/YeYFheoECz
— FoundationforChange (@FDNforChange) October 27, 2016
Naylor says she feels herself changing as she grows older. She has settled down. The young woman who loved punk now listens to opera and classical music with her partner, a Berliner who, Naylor says, is “very German”.
I ask her whether this means her house is tidy, and Naylor laughs and says her partner is “rather messy for a German”, although she’s “very good at organising” and “very Protestant about this”. Quite what this means in practice is a bit of a mystery.
“On a personal level, it makes me feel safe to be with somebody’s who’s so… German,” she snorts. “There’s something reassuring to be around Germans.”
We believe best approach to helping people who've been excluded is to teach them psychology so they can help themselves. #peoplehavepower. pic.twitter.com/LrLHDFyMsd
— FoundationforChange (@FDNforChange) December 5, 2016
So, Naylor has been off drugs for almost twenty years. She has overdosed three times. She has founded a charity. She has got married. What still scares her?
Writing funding applications and operating spreadsheets, apparently. “I feel like I’m at the very edge of my capabilities quite often,” Naylor says, walking her fingers along the edge of a windowsill. “I feel like I’m walking into unchartered grounds quite a lot, and I have to go, ‘No, just do it, just f*cking do it’. That’s the hardest thing — to push myself.”
She doesn’t feel that when she’s training, though. “They make me laugh, and they will surprise me – I don’t feel any fear there,” she says. “That motivates me. I don’t know what the hell else I’d do with my life.”
