Wholeness Healing Center

Treatment of Addictive Behaviors

Addictive behaviors often have their beginnings from our childhood, with learned patterns of behaviors, dysfunctional relationships, and inconsistent, non-existent, or violated boundaries; many people grow up not having a clear understanding of their roles in the relationships. Add to that any trauma (sexual abuse or physical or verbal abuse, repression of feelings, “body shame”, suicide attempts or ideation, financial concerns, or unapproved behaviors) and children can grow up keeping secrets, sneaking around, or not being honest. This leads to carrying shame, which then feeds an addictive behavior.

As a person seeks a way to deal with, manage, or avoid the shame, he or she turns to an addictive behavior, which then becomes the pattern of behavior one acts out in his/her life. We often think of addictions as being about substances, and while that is true, people can also be addicted to many other things. Addictions can be to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sugar, food, caffeine; to people by being involved in addictive relationships, love romance, sex, and being part of the victim triangle, as a victim, rescuer, or the villain or persecutor; and to a behavior, including being addicted to work, to gambling, to shopping, to exercise, or to sex.

Hypnotherapy can be used to address addictions. If there were past abuse, violated boundaries, or other dysfunctional family dynamics, these will be revealed in the regressive sessions, as the subconscious still holds that memory, even if the conscious memory doesn’t. Then the emotion attached, the anger, fear, or resentments can be addressed, with a release of emotion during the process. The conclusions that were drawn, as well as the resulting behaviors that are now the addictive patterns, are identified, as well as internal expectations.

New conclusions can be implanted, as the client re-parents himself or herself, getting in touch with the “inner child”. As this happens, new boundaries are put in place, with new affirmations, which then become the beginning of putting new expectations in place. The new behaviors are “anchored” as the client identifies new ways to satisfy the intent without the unwanted behaviors of the past. As the client is guided into forgiveness, he/she lets go of the reason for the addiction, reclaiming the “Real Self”.

Hypnotherapy sessions are longer than regular therapy sessions, usually 1 ½ to 2 hours, as the client is in charge of where the regressive work goes. Due to the fact that we often have repressed many things from our lives, it may be necessary to do more than one regressive hypnotherapy session, but this modality allows clients to access their memory much quicker than other modalities, allowing the healing to begin much earlier.

Hypnotherapy, with regressive sessions to address addictions, is available at both locations.

Tags: Treatment of Addicitve behaviors, using hypnotherapy to treat addictions