***Holistic addiction treatment - Do you sabotage your recovery?

Are you sabotaging your own recovery? How many times have you been in rehabilitation only to relapse back into the madness that you swore you would leave behind? You want to recover. You want to lead a recovered life, but in the end, the result is always the same. You sabotage yourself, your life, and return to addictive patterns of behavior. Holistic addiction treatment offers addicts the pathway to full recovery by treating the root cause of self-sabotaging behavior. The root cause of addiction and self-sabotaging behaviors can always be linked to trauma or unresolved situations which create false, conflicting beliefs that are programmed into our limbic brain. The limbic brain is all unconscious so we are not aware of these conflicting beliefs. To understand the power of these unconscious beliefs in our lives, it is important to know that the unconscious mind processes one million times more information that the conscious mind. Unconscious beliefs play the most important role in shaping our lives and our experiences, including addiction, depression and a host of co-occurring disorders. Changing unconscious beliefs is accomplished easily and efficiently through several holistic therapy modalities, including energy medicine and energy psychology.
To understand how unconscious beliefs play an important role in addictions and other limiting behaviors, lets follow an illustration:
Early in life, there is an innocence about a child that leaves them free to express themselves without fear. Without fear of ridicule, fear of judgment, fear of success, fear of failure; fear of rejection. As children grow and learn, their identity is shaped by their personality as well as molded and imprinted through negative and positive experiences with role models, parents, friends, and society. For example, the child who is often told that he/she will amount to nothing, will embody that belief internally and it will become their truth. This negative belief will become part of their life story and the child will begin to form a self-perception that his/her life will indeed amount to nothing.
As children transition into their teenage years, their childlike innocence lessens, their future is both questionable and uncertain; their self-identity, fragile like an intricate snowflake, transforms through external influence. Teenagers long to feel connected, to fit in, and to belong. On their road to self-discovery, they become easily influenced by friends and social situations. Negative experiences can start to validate any negative feelings. Without reinforced positive influences, deep rooted negative self-beliefs may begin to take hold.
As teenagers transition into young adulthood, they have already learned the ultimate power of self-talk and how to create their story. Their story is what they tell themselves inside their own heads, it creates their sense of self, their sense of reality, and ultimately their story becomes their self-perception.
As an adult, self-perception influences every aspect of a person’s life. How they feel about themselves, how their relationships will unfold; the direction their life will take. When a person’s life story has been filled with feelings of doubt, fear, worry, anxiety, worthlessness, despair, and loneliness, their self-perception becomes distorted and they will do anything to escape from themselves and find solace. For many, substance abuse or other addictive behaviors become the perfect escape.
While addicts may long to lead a meaningful life, they have been programmed with negative self-beliefs for so long that sometimes the road to recovery seems unlikely and close to impossible. Their conscious and unconscious self-defeating beliefs leave them feeling like they don’t deserve to be happy; they don’t deserve to live a meaningful life. Soon, the addict can’t imagine what their life would be like if they actually recovered. Some may make an attempt at recovery, but the attempt will often times lead to failure which, once again, validates their negative belief about themself. They sabotage their recovery. The root cause of self-sabotage lies in resolving the conflict between a person’s conscious and unconscious self-perception; resolving the imbalance within their collective mind, body, soul, and spirit.
Journey beyond Self-Sabotage
Traditional therapy and counseling, which focus at the level of the mind and the body, have been valuable in helping people identify how their self-perception was formed as well as an action plan to change their thoughts and behavior in a positive way. Through counseling, people learn tools to help them stop self-defeating habits, stop negative self-talk, and learn to think about and see themselves in a new way. As people who relapse know, identifying patterns of negative beliefs and perceptions; will power and emotional commitment are not enough to permanently stop the addictive behavior. People who suffer from addiction often find themselves unable to stop their self-sabotaging behavior despite knowing what steps to follow. Holistic addiction treatment offers the most progressive and comprehensive approach to treating addiction and recovering from acts of self-sabotage.
Holistic addiction treatment combines both traditional therapeutic treatments, like counseling, with various alternative healing therapies to bring a person’s mind, body, soul, and spirit into alignment. Holistic addiction treatment effectively addresses the root cause of the addiction and restores balance to all parts of a person’s being. New positive self-perceptions are formed at the level of the mind and the body and also at the level of the soul and spirit. Integrated healing and alignment at all levels of a person’s being is necessary or self-sabotaging behavior will continue to occur. One alternative healing method that has been successfully used in holistic addition treatment is energy psychology.
Energy psychology can be traced back over 5,000 years. However, through the works of Roger Callahan, John Diamond, Fred Gallo, and Gary Craig, energy psychology gained popularity in the treatment of emotional and psychological related issues including substance abuse and other addictive behaviors. Energy psychology “is based upon the ancient Chinese art of acupuncture, although instead of using needles to stimulate a change in the way you think and feel, energy psychology uses a simple tapping method of two fingers on specific points of your body.”
Energy psychology, works at all levels of a person’s being and is an excellent energy medicine healing modality for eliminating self-sabotaging behavior. In addition to helping people use the power of their own energy system to heal, energy psychology specifically treats psychological reversals which are most likely present in people with addictive behavior. “Experience has proven that when people are psychologically reversed, deep within themselves they are choosing (unconsciously) to be miserable. There is a conflict between their internal beliefs and what they are trying to achieve. When people are psychologically reversed, they sabotage their lives” 1. When you are psychologically reversed, “you literally act in opposition to what you are consciously trying to attain”1. For example, a person who suffers from substance abuse, has attempted recovery, and continues to relapse they are most likely psychologically reversed. If a person is in a state of psychological reversal, it is unlikely that any therapy will work. However, once the psychological reversal is treated, the soul and spirit become reconnected with the mind and body allowing positive energy to flow through all channels of a person’s being; recovery becomes infinitely possible.
Although many people remain skeptical that energy psychology is a valuable healing modality, the success of this treatment method has been an astronomical breakthrough in helping people with addictive behaviors. In addition, energy psychology has been instrumental in helping mental health clinicians throughout the world treat people with a variety of mental, emotional, and psychological disorders and issues. People suffering from addiction must move past the management of their symptoms, eliminate self-sabotaging behavior and heal their being at the level of the mind, body, spirit, and soul to fully recover. By progressively treating the root cause of self-sabotaging behavior, holistic addiction treatment methods offer addicts the most progressive pathway to full recovery.
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Works Cited
1. Gallo, Fred P., Vincenzi, Harry (2008). Energy Tapping Second Edition. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.