An Interesting Case of Addiction

"What a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you are hungry or not."

- Arabic saying

Addiction is something that is a terrible problem in our modern world. It hides itself in such a variety of manifestations that the number of ways it can appear is only limited by the uniqueness of the individual that is addicted to something.  According to the National Survey on Drug use Health for the year 2009 sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 21.8 million Americans reported that they used illicit drugs and alcohol for non medicinal purposes regularly, 3-5% of the total population have a Sexual Compulsion Disorder, it is also estimated that 25% of the total population are pathologically addicted to gambling, while 1% or people suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and 4.4% suffer from eating disorders such as Anorexia and Bulimia, additionally 45.9% smoke cigarette’s. This adds up to be a staggering 76.06% or 109,492,000 people in the continental US alone that exhibit the behavior classified by mental health professionals as an addiction, thus amongst the population of the U.S. 109,492,000 could be and potentially are classified as an “Addict” and this is just a short list of things that can and are classified as an addiction.

Addiction is defined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as: “A compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance or behavior.”

This definition from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is a very broad definition for a very common problem, just about anyone could be said to be addicted to any substance or a habit if you seemingly compulsively give in to the habit too frequently. In the Science that is NLP we have a list of core beliefs that teaches us how to look at our clients and their problems, this is a comprehensive list of over 25 beliefs that we assume about a client and the problem or habit they may present that they wish to be free of in their life. The one that I feel most directly relates to addiction states “The person is not the behavior that they exhibit or manifest.” Things like addiction are simply at base level a habit. As humans we have this learning mechanism in our minds that compares experiences and cross references solutions, then it applies the best possible solution it can conceive of to the problem and then we perform the solution in thought or action as needed in our lives. Take for instance smoking, most say that smoking is a very powerful addiction, but lets take a look at the thoughts and processes that potentially drive this particular habit.

Smoking:

 If you’re a smoker you may have noticed there are times when a cigarette is almost immediately mandatory and times when you go for hours without even thinking about them. For most smoking is a habit that is based on the need for relaxation, when we smoke most take a moment to clear their mind and just experience the moment of smoking, no matter the problems they may be facing at any given moment, they stop, light up, and what ever problem they have it immediately is down graded and they can relax. For many people this allows them to look at their problems in a less critical or in a less stressful way, thus allowing them to find new ways of coping with their problems or even solutions at times. So the mind equates stress = smoke, now this is a solution to a problem that happens quite often depending on how easily a person gets stressed but in this model we see the formula stress = smoking = relax, now the mind has this solution it believes and then it cross references, when they drive they like to relax and enjoy the experience so to truly enjoy driving we want to relax as much as possible to enhance this experience what’s a good way to relax? I know smoke, since  smoking = relax  if I’m stressed it should work great here, now we have a second equation driving = relax = smoking. So that is two situations where the habit of smoking are applied and we repeat this in another situation, the person wakes up, for many first waking up can be a pretty traumatic experience (some of us do wake up very rough, from my own experiences I can tell you when I wake up, it feels like I was just in a car crash at times.) Also let us not forget the experience of having bad dreams at night, thus what can be done to ease those rankled nerves? Smoking is a way to do this; our unconscious being helpful looks at it and say “well it worked on this and this similar situation so lets do that!” So, waking up = trauma / exhaustive state = smoke. This pattern repeats till we have a complicated web of behavior that has one end result in this case “smoke” and would seem simple in a surface level but in truth is used as a solution to many smaller problems so frequently that after a while we make the pattern of doing this so automatic we cease to notice even the idea of smoking beginning to surface other than the re-occurring thought, “ok time for a cigarette.” Now, yes cigarettes do contain nicotine that is an addictive substance, but the physical addiction to nicotine has been proven to only last for up to 72 hours from the last time it has been ingested by the body. So after 3 days the physical addiction has ended and everything after that is all mental process.

About 15 years ago an interesting study was undertaken by Dr. Richard Bandler and his colleagues, in the particular field of heroine addiction. They took a group of volunteers whom had a severe heroine addiction and checked them into a full time care facility for a period to last for 6 months. Then they explained to the participants that the would be put on a revolutionary detoxification program that would involve them to continue to use heroine for a period of time and that it would be administered by a doctor on a daily basis. One group was told they would be receiving medical grade heroine that would be far better than the illicit version they had been buying and that it was so excellent in fact that they would only require one shot per day to continue to not only enjoy they habit but also to avoid any withdrawal symptoms they might other wise experience if they didn’t take the multiple doses that they were used to, and they would receive counseling for the next 6 months and their dosages would decreased until they were weaned off of the drug through traditional drug therapy treatment standards. The second group was told that they would receive the same medication for the first six weeks of the program but then after that they would be given a revolutionary new medication that would replace the heroine they had previously used that would completely eradicate their cravings for heroine, by lowering their doses over the following 20 weeks and that they would receive counseling only once a week to simply check in on their status. Both groups would be constantly monitored by the personnel at the facility and completely taken care of full time and they would incur no charges for taking part in the study.

Both groups of patients were advised that hypnosis would be a part of the treatment for their addictions and that they would be expected to undergo hypnosis as a part of the program, all participants agreed and at the onset were hypnotized,  the suggestion that they were given were that the medications the doctors would be injecting them with was indeed medical grade heroine and for the second group first it would be initially heroine and then after that it would be the miracle secondary medication that would eradicate their heroine cravings. Secondly all of the patients were heavily medicated for the next 3 days during witch they were also subjected to dialysis to scrub their blood of any and all toxins.

On the fourth day each one was woken and within an hour given their first injections of “medical grade heroine” (which was actually nothing more than saline) and they all reacted as if they had indeed been injected with heroine, so much so most of them commented that it what they were given was far superior to any form of heroine they had ever experienced previously. Over the next six weeks the participants from both groups and experience counseling and are were hopeful about the treatment they were receiving. After that the second group now began to receive injections of a the “miracle medication” which also was nothing more than saline with a blue dye added to the mixture, they reported that the “high” effect they enjoyed from the “heroine” immediately stopped but they did not miss the sensation very much and felt no side effects of withdrawal. The first group then began to experience a gradual decrease of the “heroine” and reported minor tremors and cravings but nothing they felt was extreme or beyond their ability to cope with. As the dosages continued to decrease over the next 20 weeks they responded to the treatment just as if they were in a traditional heroine addiction treatment program.

All participants successfully reported at the end of the study in their almost final interview that they felt no cravings for heroine any longer and were glad to be free of their long time addictions.

At this point to fully test the success of the program the subjects from the first group were again hypnotized and explained that the entire time they had indeed been injected with only saline and had not had heroine in over 6 months. Each person immediately went into sever heroine withdrawal so intense that they had to be sedated before they could be re-hypnotized and suggested that the effects of the program were valid and that they had indeed been injected with heroine during the program and were now free of their addiction. The second group was also hypnotized to remove the suggestion that they had been injected with heroine but were suggested also that in the second course of the treatment they were given a medication that completely destroyed their ability to receive any of the effects from the usage of any form of heroine so that they could never be addicted to it again. Both groups were successfully free of heroine and so far to this day have reportedly never used illicit drugs ever again.

The most interesting part of this study to me is the fact that once the one group realized they had not had heroine at all in over 6 months they immediately went into withdrawal. They had long gone past any possibility that their bodies should have felt any effects of withdrawal. On average the physical addiction to most substances are completely gone after you have been without it for 3 days. So what remains are simply the mental habits that have been established and well rehearsed that remind us that these patterns we create and access usually with the intent to solve a problem or to put it into a perspective we can either forget or deal with as we wish.

The human mind is an amazing creation that processes information at high speed and actually with great precision, this mechanism that creates and maintains the habits of addiction is also the same mechanism that allows us to readily learn information so quickly that sometimes it only takes once to be exposed to some form of information to learn it instantaneously. Unfortunately it is what it is, a mechanism that is a valuable tool in our day to day existence that is a part of our unconscious mind that can be confused at times all too easily, but with assistance and true understanding can correct itself and the problems that seem impossible for us to rid ourselves of all to often.

Habits like addiction are programs we write in our own minds that we run so fast and so frequently we do not recognize that they are even there.  An example of this is shown to you right here and now. When you were born did you understand the English language? The answer is no, yet you are reading it right now, imagine for a moment how extensive the process of reading really is,  if you spelled it out by process one could use the following patter to explain how the process works; you see a letter then you match up in your mind with a sound, then you take that singular sound and put it together with other letters and their sounds to form a word, then we reference the meaning of the word and after that cross-reference the meaning of the word in accordance with the way it is used in the sentence with the other words that form a sentence. Then you compare that to previous sentences you have read or heard previously to figure out what its meaning is in reference to you. This is quite an extensive process we go through just to read a simple sentence! But you do it so quickly that you are hardly aware of it happening, if your are aware of it at all. And to think no matter how it works when ever you see something written in English and you really look at it you can not help but to be able to read it.

Addiction is truly what in the field of NLP is called “the chains of the free” and never have so many stood holding the their chains in there hands never realizing they are the masters of their own fate waiting for the right moment to set them selves free, never realizing that the moment is anytime they really want it to be.