Heroes in Business - Addictions, Understanding and Healing

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Seven areas to understand & heal addictions. Healing the Addiction itself including EFT, Core Themes, Addiction as Protector-how it serves, Addiction to people-Envy, Contexts, Triggers, Habit in this episode of Guided Self Healing, Fearless Living with Dr. Andy Hahn

Hi, this is Andy Han, and this is episode 19 of Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And today, I'm going to do two episodes, and I want to answer a couple of questions. So one person asked, because I love your questions, can you talk about addictions and how you work with addictions? And I am happy to talk about addictions and how I work with addictions. So here goes. If someone comes in and they have an addiction, it doesn't matter what their addiction is. You have to think of it as some kind of story, obviously, about craving. So the first thing we might want to look at is any story that you have, wherever it is, that some kind of thing that you really, really need, you couldn't get.

And so there's this craving for it. And that could be in this lifetime or another lifetime. But if you find what I would do with addictions as I would with anything else is I would just put together this idea of feel the addiction in your body and feel the craving that is associated with the addiction. And then you put those two things together and you notice what's happening in the body and you bring your attention there. And then you let whoever that is share their story. And often, if that's what's going on, they will often need some kind of intervention. The most typical intervention under those circumstances tends to be acupressure. So in an earlier episode,

I taught you about emotional freedom technique. And if you're watching, all you would do is you would feel the sensation, bring all your attention there. And we're going to just say sensation, whatever the sensation's name is, what have you come to share about this addiction? And then you would have them focus on the sensation and share their story. And then they would tap and they would start. If you can see me, you would tap at the beginnings of your eyebrows, just very gently, and then right next to your eyes and then right under your eyes. And then the short version is you would tap between your lip and your chin. And then you would find a spot that you'd find, start with your collarbones,

where they start at your neck, go down an inch and over about an inch. And if you press in, you'll find someplace that really hurts and you can just tap or massage there. And the short version of this, which I'm giving you today, then you tap on the inside edge of your pinky, just below the nail. It doesn't matter whether it's right or left. And then you make a circle on your crown. That's the short version of emotional freedom technique and you would do that while you focus on the sensation. So that's the first thing I would do. I would do what I would call a standard balance because something's out of balance. And of course, it might be you work on the addiction directly or it might be that you have to find some pattern that is associated with the addiction, like neglect. So it might be that when you needed someone, like your life depended on it,

and you had every reason to believe they'd be there, they weren't there. So let's suppose you're an infant, and you're screaming because you're hungry, and you're looking for mother's milk, and there's nothing there, and you really want to take something in orally. Well, that can play out as alcohol addiction or an eating addiction or whatever it might be. So there might be some pattern. A standard pattern that often goes with addictions is something that is called an archetypal identity. And an archetypal identity is an identity that you take on as a protection in order to keep yourself from experiencing

something you're really afraid to experience about yourself, that you're really afraid to experience about yourself. For example, if you remember the Enneagram, which we've talked about, let's suppose that you are a point three, which is a performer. And let's suppose you've had some setbacks and you're not doing so well. And you're sort of like losing your focus and looking at doing things that are superfluous and, and you're anxious and things are going badly. Well, you might call in something to help you with that. And for example, alcohol might be something you would call in. So the alcohol then would be something that was trying to serve you, um, as a way not to feel the fear of being a failure. So it might say, well, I'll help you. Now, the interesting thing is now what you're going to do is you're going to talk to the

protector, which in this case would be, I am, I mean, let's suppose you're an alcoholic. You'd say, I am an alcoholic and you'd feel it in the body and, or I'm drinking excessively or whatever the identity is and you'd feel it but what you'd ask it would be an interesting question which is how have you come to serve me and interestingly the way it tries to serve you is it will try to protect you from the thing that you're afraid to experience about yourself but will also invite you into the thing that you're afraid to experience about yourself so what would that mean let's suppose into the thing that you're afraid to experience about yourself. So what would that mean? Let's suppose the alcohol says, you're talking directly to the sensation,

says I try to really help him loosen up so he would be more free, but he gets so free that he gets out of control and then he makes a fool of himself and that makes things even worse. So it's interesting, again, that the very thing that you bring in to try to protect you from the thing you're afraid to experience, invites you into the thing you're trying to experience. Or, well, we could go through all the Enneagram points and show how that might be so. So what we often want to do after we've taken care of whatever just working on addiction as a

sensation or any core belief like you know i need you when my life depends on it and you're not there for me and so i substitute something or it's a protector like protecting you from a core fear or it might be protecting you from some life experience you know that was too painful for you to handle so what you do is you numb yourself with alcohol so the alcohol becomes another kind of protector let's say something was you had such a terrible loss and you couldn't handle the loss whatever that was so the food or the alcohol might be a way of soothing yourself and it would say i'm trying to soothe you from this loss by filling you up or making you feel more relaxed or whatever it is but then again of course it will bring you back more into loss interestingly because then you're

likely even though it's trying to help you with that, it also will invite you to find the thing that you couldn't handle, the loss in this case. So there are three things right away. You work on it directly. You find some kind of core theme that's related to the addiction, which you can just sort of, we've gone through some of those and we'll go through more, or you can ask it how it's serving you, either from experiencing some kind of deepest fear about yourself or just some life experience about yourself that you couldn't handle. And usually the addiction and the kind of addiction will be a clue about the thing you couldn't handle. So now let's continue. The next thing you might have to look at once you've looked at all of those is contexts. What do I mean by contexts? And you might have to your own separate healing work on that. So it might be a context might be every day after lunch,

I have a cigarette. So the context would be after lunch, Or whenever I go to my parents' house and visit them, I overeat. And that triggers me into my food addiction. So you'd have to do something about the context. You might have to also do something about the trigger. And a trigger would be not a context, but a particular situation. Like whenever I drink coffee, I smoke a cigarette, for example. So that would be, there's an association directly with some event, not a time like after lunch, which would be the context or a time or a situation like I visit my family, but I'm

drinking coffee. So I smoke a cigarette or it's, you know, I've just finished my work. So I eat ice cream or whatever it is because it's a reward. And then you might have to deal with the reward element of this. And then that might take you someplace like, you know, whenever I was in childhood and I did really well at something, my parents fed me. So I associated sweets with success. Then you'd have to, of course, do a balance on the trauma of compulsively eating sweets in the context of success, which would bring us back to context again, even though we were talking about a trigger in this situation, then sometimes, of course, you have to do something about the habit itself. So the habit sort of takes on a life of its own. And if the habit takes on a life of its own, you would just have to feel the habitual nature of it, like it's become like a friend,

and you don't want to lose the friends you'd have to like you have to focus in the body but what happens when you really really allow the habitual nature of whatever this addiction or craving is so right away we've talked about many possibilities right that you can work directly on the addiction at which point feel it in your body and associated craving, and just bring your attention there. That's number one, and let it share its story. Two, there can be some kind of deep universal theme. Examples might be loss, so a deep feeling of emptiness that's associated with loss or neglect, and whatever sensations arise when you feel like I needed you there for me and I had every expectation you'd be there and then you weren't there.

So the pain was too great, so I drink, right? Or we could say, how are you serving? Which means I'm trying to protect you from experiencing something, which is sort of like the neglect trauma. But in this case, you would directly just ask it. is sort of like the neglect trauma but in this case you would directly just ask it you'd ask overeating or you'd ask excessive drinking which is its name uh or whatever the addiction is you would ask how are you serving and uh you know so something will be there. Parenthetically, if you're quote unquote, love addicted to a particular person or something, you can't let them go and you crave them.

You can do all the same things because, of course, we can be addicted to a person just as much as we can be addicted to a substance. Because in some ways, a person can substitute for a substance and then they fill you or they calm you and you can't get away from them even or of course if you're excited by them they can be a total addiction you know you can be erotically and sexually you know drawn to them so strongly that they really become an addiction because falling in love or those kinds of deeply lustful feelings are addictive in a way, if you think about it. And if that's the case, then what you often have to do is look at something about envy. Why do we get addicted to a person is basically because they have a quality in our imagination that we're lacking that we desperately want to have. So we see it in the other and we project

our lack, right? Because we really have it in ourselves someplace, but we don't know. So we idealize them and we crave them because they have this thing. So we'd have to look at our envy. And if you can feel envy when you're in some kind of addictive relationship with someone, you'll find the thing that feels lacking in you. And if you can sit with that, if you can sit with that sense of lack, you know, oh, they're so sexy, or oh, they're so intelligent, or oh, they're so beautiful, or oh, they're so sophisticated, or whatever it is that you think you're not. So you have to, oh my God, I have to have them, but you're not really loving them at that point you're craving what they have and of course all of this tends to be unconscious until you become aware of

it right so envy is a very good place to look even if you're not a romantic in the enneagram because we all can have you know we can all idealize somebody because they have some quality that we're lacking or it is really lacking in her life so we crave it and we see it in that person and then we substitute the person for the thing we crave whatever that quality is and you know for some of us that can be something in the present it can also be something in the past so it's like like, you know, why am I addicted to something? Because I had something and I lost it and I want to get it back. So I use fantasy and substances to try to regain the feeling, but of course it doesn't work. So all of those things we can work with. And then

again, so that's four things. Then we have context, which we said, you know, you go visit your family or after lunch or after, or before you go to bed, there's these contexts where you always do something. So there's a habituated element, but it's just in a particular situation. And then there's, as that's the fifth thing, and then triggers is the sixth thing, you know, like coffee and cigarettes, like we said. And then there is the habit itself. If you're going to use some kind of intervention,

acupressure tends to be really good, all things being equal, because what acupressure does is when you're like frozen and you're like, like, you know, like, uh, just frozen and nothing's flowing, you can restart your flow around whatever's got you nearly frozen. So this is a quick journey into how I deal with addictions. And I will tell you, the most powerful one tends to be the ones where the addiction itself takes on a life of its own, really, because you called it in in order to protect you from something you were afraid to experience. Because, you know,

that's not our typical model for addiction, though it ought to be because it's such a part of it um so if you can ask it how it's serving the other place parenthetically um where i was thinking of patterns right now because there's so many patterns power patterns where you feel really powerless or you feel like you know um someone has power over you when you're powerless and you can't do anything about it, one way you can like try to handle the situation is that you can become addicted because it's so hard to sit with that kind of powerlessness, particularly in some kind of situation where someone has power over you. So all of these things I hope will be a little bit helpful when you're dealing with addictions or if you're a therapist and you're trying to help

somebody with addictions. I can tell you that it usually works for my clients to some degree or other. And when I'm good enough with it, it actually even sometimes works with me but I you know keep climbing that mountain myself so as my teacher used to say you're only among us chickens so you know you know I keep working on it and you know if I have someone who I know has certain kinds of addictions that are close to my home so to speak I really try to work on whatever that addiction is in myself. And so I'm grateful for my clients because they invite me and inspire me to aspire to something better. So having said all that, I wish you well, and I wish you freedom, which is what this is all about. So you really are a choice and not compelled.

And until we meet each other again, again, my name is Andy Hahn. And if you ever want to reach me to ask a question or make a comment, which a few of you are doing, which I deeply appreciate, you can get me at ahahn, that's A-H-A-H-N, at lifecenteredtherapy.com. And if you want to know about the work I do, you can just go to our website, which is lifecenteredtherapy.com. So until next time, I wish you all well. And I wish you freedom,

be able to choose what you really want as opposed to being stuck in craving. Be well, my my friends and goodbye.