Addiction Through the Lens of The Penny Model

This webinar explores addiction, not as pathology or weakness, but as a coping strategy rooted in emotional misalignment, unmet needs, and accumulated inner weight — what I call the pennies.

Using the Penny Model and the four core emotions, we’ll look at how addictions develop and see that it is a coping strategy linked to our formative years, that it is trauma-based and supported by limiting beliefs and internal judgements. We will see (no matter how unhealthy) that an addict’s behaviour is a coping strategy and a signpost of where the work is to bring about a healthier balance, and explore how change becomes possible when authentic emotions, beliefs and internal judgements are named and owned.

In This Webinar We Will Explore:

• What the Penny Model reveals about addiction, fatigue, and depression.
• How small, repeated boundary breaks quietly accumulate emotional weigh and miss alignment.
• How an addiction develops as a response of the unhealthy use of anger energy, retroflected aggression, unmet needs, grief and fear.
• How an addiction lives within sadness and is a coping strategy for depression.
• The three common coping strategies for depression are:
  medication, addiction, or explosions.
• Why insight alone isn’t enough — and what actually supports change.
• How to work with addiction without shame, blame, or diagnosis.
• That early trauma is the start of the slippery slope of addiction.

Key Ideas We’ll Work With:

• Addiction as a creative adjustment, not a moral failure.
• Anger energy, as a choice and boundary informative.
• Sadness as connection and release.
• Joy as the by-product of emotional alignment.
• Why do people keep doing what they say they don’t want to do?

Who This Webinar Is For:

• Therapists, counsellors, coaches, and facilitators
• People working with addiction, compulsive behaviours, or emotional overwhelm
• Anyone curious about a non-pathologising, emotionally intelligent framework
• Those interested in relational, developmental, and metaphor-based approaches

No prior knowledge of the Penny Model is required.

What You’ll Leave With:

• A clear, compassionate framework for understanding addiction
• Practical questions and clinical lenses you can use immediately
• A deeper understanding of how emotional currency gets stuck — and how it can move again