What is addiction really, and how to overcome it

Addiction is often described as a difficult challenge in life. It is treated as a disease that someone lives with forever and will have to “manage” their entire life. But I challenge that view and offer a new view that those that have “addiction” actually just have a coping skill that gives them problems.

When we attach someone or ourselves to having an addiction or “being an addict” there is a lot of energy that comes with that, the stigma of “being an addict” but also, the confinement and limitation “addiction” as a disease puts on people. People assume they need to attend AA/NA for the rest of their lives, they have to watch for triggers and cravings, they have to cope with the “symptoms” on a daily basis. I often hear “it’s a daily fight for recovery”.

What If Recovery From Addiction Could Be Easier?

What if a person can stop using, heal the reasons they used, heal the emotions, heal the ancestral patterns, heal the energy of addiction and just not have “addiction” anymore? What if a person that used for 20 years doesn’t have to take 20 years to undo those patterns? What life could they create if they knew they could be relieved from the difficulties of recovery fairly quickly?

It is possible and very real. In my work I help clients understand the why they use and the ways they can find their recovery, through therapy, coaching, energy healing, and spiritual enlightenment. This holistic approach is especially helpful for those in early recovery that feel lost and want direction in their life. One of the most common challenges people face when making a lifestyle change is what to change their life to. Often therapy alone does not help people find those answers but coaching helps to fill in that gap and provide the support for creating that vision and future. Therapy helps with understanding why things ended up the way they did while coaching helps people adopt a new normal and define their futures by visualizing it, feeling the emotions, sitting with the possibilities and then asking, now how do you get there? Energy healing adds relief of old stuck patterns from staying once someone is motivated and decides to make the changes.

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How Energy Healing Techniques Help With Recovery

I recently ran a session where I taught clients Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT and aka tapping). The technique requires that the person taps on certain meridian points to allow the release of the emotional energy behind an experience or feeling and allow the body to come to a calm and reset emotional space regarding the situation or experience. The technique can be used for anything from Money beliefs to traumatic experiences but the value for addiction is in the emotional balance, retraining the brain and body connection with the shame and guilt those with addiction often feel and then adopt new beliefs that help recovery such as self love and acceptance, belief in one’s self regarding ability to be sober, and elicit a new energy of future possibilities into the person’s physical, mental, and emotional states of being.

In another session I guided someone through a journey where he was able to reconnect with the vision of his daughter as a girl needing love and connection vs the manipulative child he believed her to be when he came into treatment. The man went from feeling anger, resentment, and wanting to control her to feeling love, connection, and wanting to help her within 15 minutes. That type of change in the emotions and responses of the mind and body to various situations and experiences including cravings and triggers for a person, can be a profound and transformational experience very quickly to someone’s life and recovery efforts.  This is how you get 30 days sober; how you stay committed to recovery. The stages of relapse begin when we get sober and still have all the emotions, feelings, and reactions to life the same as it was before we started using and while we were using. To achieve 30 years sober, we have to realize that all of the reasons why we started are still there when we quit and we need to heal those things before we can undo the patterns of addiction.

We are Energy and Spirit

As an atheist I always had trouble with the AA/NA approach. I thought it was outrageous to think a higher power could come in and save the day and that “only God can help”. Now I know it was because of the religious aspect of AA/NA that was the barrier, for me anyway. I found it’s true there is a higher power (the Universe) but I found it through feeling the energy of Reiki and realizing there is a real and measurable energetic world out there that we are not tapping into to help ourselves with both addiction and mental health and wellness. The great geniuses of history such as Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla were both enlightened and used this energetic world to bring in perspectives, new concepts, and inventions to our human/Earth world. The same energy they spoke about is the energy available to us all, for our healing, for our wellness, and for our abundance in this lifetime.

Spirituality Can Help Us Heal From Addiction

Healing with addiction is this idea that we need to take into consideration the spiritual component of who we are as beings. We are a physical being that has a physical body but we also have the mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies as well that we just cannot see with our physical eyes. We can sense these bodies though, like when we can sense the energy of an argument when you walk into a room even though no one said anything. This is the energy we can heal and work with for healing with addictions. The Eastern cultures understand this energy through the Chakras and the Chinese Meridians. The main 7 Chakras are energy centers that line up from the bottom of the spine to the top of the head (there are more but are not important for this article). The Chinese meridians are the same energetic systems acupuncture and reflexology work with for healing as well as the EFT tapping method mentioned above. Acupuncture has been linked to better outcomes for clients in addiction recovery (https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/treatment-program/can-acupuncture-help-addiction-recovery/).

Journey work also works on the energetic levels because it allows a person to release the emotions of anger, resentment etc out of the physical and energetic body and elicit and focus on the alternative energy of love and caring compassion that supports healing and wellness with ourselves and others. To expand our application of the energy system to recovery is just logical, especially if there are already many studies and findings to show that the energy focused strategies for physical, mental, and emotional health do work.

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Changing How Things Are Done In The Addiction Field

The energy psychology field has blended the emotional and mental work of psychology with the world of Eastern medicine and energy healing. With addictions, this seems to be a slower progression as addiction has always been viewed either as a moral failing or a medical disease in our society and thus been approached with very rigid, science and research only based approaches for treating and managing it. Many providers in the addiction field are uncomfortable with the shift as they are not trained or even taught about it at all in their education and internship programs. If you or someone you know is in a program that is against and is closed minded about energy healing and holistic options, I encourage you to seek an alternative program. You may also refer the program or therapist to someone like me that can train them in this approach and give them the tools they need to help you help yourself.

Value of Holistic Healing Options in Recovery

An important point to make is that none of these strategies are standalone strategies for recovery. The Holistic approach to wellness is always the best way to approach any human ailment whether it’s mental, physical, or spiritually based. Energy healing with mental health psychotherapy, healthy physical habits such as balanced diet and low impact exercise simply improves the chances that wellness will be found and maintained for lifelong balance. Each individual is different and will find what works best for them. The only requirement is that there is an open mind and willingness to try the various options for wellness that are out there.

So in summary, the mission of helping people with addiction is undergoing some major changes in how we view “addiction”, what ways we use to help those that use substances, and ensuring that people know that there are many different options for wellness including energy healing, using sound therapy, reiki, journeys, coaching, therapy, acupuncture, reflexology, medications, AA/NA meetings, non religious spiritual growth, inpatient and outpatient treatment, herbal medicine, essential oils, guided meditations, shamanic healing, rituals, affirmations, intention setting, connection to higher Self, chakras, Chinese meridians, and much more.

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