Self-medication through the use of psychoactive substances, including alcohol, is a serious and growing problem in societies around the world. The current methods of dealing with the treatment of substance abuse rarely identifies the underlying driving factors, some of which should be blindingly obvious, but are typically overlooked.
Why are they overlooked? Simply because the current raft of traditional psychological and physical treatments do not have rapid resolution tools for the underlying emotional and physical drivers for substance abuse. So the rule seems to be if you can’t change it, ignore it.
Over 35 years of specialisation in anxiety and depressive disorders, including trauma or PTSD, has shown a clear pattern in substance abusers.
In almost 100% of cases the nervous system is modified by the substance used to deaden or reduce the awareness of physical or emotional “pain”, more often than not driven by deep unconscious self-image / self-worth conflicts. In our society poor underlying core self-image or acceptance affects 95% of the human race, which in turn seriously affects what we do, the relationships we form and our perceived value to ourselves and others. The growing tendency for our society to create higher demands with less social interaction creates an environment of disenfranchisement. This in turn causes a level of emotional pain which drives the use of substance use to deaden that pain. But this is only the start of slippery downhill slope.
If you have looked at and understood the basis of the Neuro-Com Mind Model you will know that unconscious belief and Values systems can only be partially modified in 30% of cases by using conscious “let’s have a chat” processes used by the traditional psychological model.
This is because the memory groups that create the behaviour will not create change unless they perceive an error in their existing processing methods. The current models of CBT used in these processes, which call for the individual to implement, are blocked by the very part of the mind one is trying to modify. So no amount of talk therapy or conscious behaviour modification is going to work long term, creating a very high relapse rate. Every time the individual relapses just embeds the original behaviour deeper as the sense of failure grows.
Of course there are physical addiction models in place which must also be dealt with, but I will look at these in a different post.
To create permanent change in emotional and socially addictive behaviours one must:
- Identify the original environment / parental / social factors that created the poor self-awareness in the first place.
- Identify the dietary / nutritional regime that has been supporting the addiction. For instance ALL alcoholics become hypoglycaemic which in turn drives the physical addiction.
- Remove the physical factors supporting the addiction / anxiety / depression.
- Modify the unconscious programs supporting self-image conflicts and anxiety or depressive states. There are specific proven methods with which to do this rapidly which do not involve conscious processing in the normal use of the word.
In the next post we discuss the physical addictions that become embedded in regular substance abusers that also need to be dealt with.