Hypnosis can help people to stop taking drugs and alcohol.
The changes that you need to make when withdrawing from substance abuse are complex and multifaceted. There are several things that need to change.
Physical changes happen during withdrawal (including stopping smoking) and you need to focus on helping the body through those changes.
The body must change its physical expectations with regard to the previously imbibed substance. The body will protest initially at the withdrawal of the substance but in time, by focusing the mind through regular hypnosis, it will get used to the new level of stimulation or lack of stimulation, and return to its natural non-addicted state.
For hundreds of years Buddhist monks have carried out a similar procedure by using meditation to help overcome heroin addiction.
Both meditation and hypnosis generally work in what is called the alpha and theta slow brain wave states. The added extra of hypnosis is the suggestion can be given to help the body adjust.
If you are withdrawing from substance and alcohol abuse, you also need to make some fundamental changes in your way of thinking.
A person who is clean and sober thinks very differently from an addict. So just stopping the substance does not necessarily on its own result in you becoming clear and sober. There must be a deep psychological change. Hypnosis plus suggestion can help this happen.
Alcohol and drug abusers, unless their addiction is the result of medical prescribing, often have immature personalities. They have not progressed to be self-sufficient human beings, who are able to survive alone without external artificial stimulus.
A fully mature personality is self-sufficient. A fully matured personality can live more happily without outside artificial stimulation. They can satisfy their need to be stimulated without drugs or alcohol. Hypnosis and suggestion can help mature a person’s personality.
There is also the need for a behavioural and emotional change in becoming clean and sober and the two go together.
Addicts seek emotional satisfaction through substance abuse. Ultimately they never achieve this, and in the process, they distort their lives and severely affect the lives of those around them.
Through hypnosis and suggestion your mind can be reprogrammed to have a better, more rewarding set of behaviours as a clean and sober person.
This is new learning that you need to repeat until that learning has become second nature. The new neural pathways can be forged.
In helping people withdrawal from substance abuse I do not simply use hypnosis but also cognitive behavioural change. This is very important because the way the clean and sober person thinks and behaves needs to be dramatically different from how they functioned while they were an addict.
I am very clear with people who come to see me in my clinic that being a clean and sober person is a dramatic change and if they want to be clean and sober, they need to be prepared for dramatic change.
So hypnosis can help change the body, mind, behaviour, thinking and help to mature the personality of an addict to become a clean and sober person.
When an addict becomes clean as sober it needs to be about starting life again in a different way. No half measures, no pretence, but full commitment to a new way of living.
As a naturopath I also suggest several ways that you can help your body with food, herbs and exercise.
The 6-Step program LINK TO SALES PAGE I developed over the years is a way of giving people a framework by which to negotiate their recovery.
It is also a template for the way they can live their lives in the future as a clean and sober person with a rewarding life.
Speak Your Mind