Clearing Substance Cravings

By Dr. Jon Connelly  Founder, Rapid Resolution Therapy  I am very interested in making it possible for people to stay on track and live drug free, so I interviewed hundreds of people who had relapsed. Some relapsed after only a day or two clean, but others had acquired 20 and even 30 years of clean time. I asked people what was going on so that I could understand the causes of relapse. Some of the people told me about unhappy things that had been happening in their lives, but others told me about things that were happy. Many people also told me that life was just going along and that there wasn't anything particularly happy or unhappy when they relapsed. I just couldn't make sense of it, so I re-interviewed these people. I asked them this question: When you did the behavior or substance that led to the relapse were you planning to reactivate your addiction?  The answer I got was quite interesting. No, these people were not planning to reactivate their addiction. In fact they were planning NOT to. Even while taking the drink or using the drug, they were planning what they would do later that would have them back on track. I learned what the problem actually was. It has nothing to do with having a bad time in life or bad things happening. It had to do with only one problem. The processes I teach to clear substance cravings expose the real cause of relapse so that the client will never again be ambushed by a relapse. Further, these processes eliminate the possibility of relapse happening in the future as well.

Clearing Substance Addiction: Allergy Plus One

 By Dr. Jon Connelly

 Founder, Rapid Resolution Therapy 

People who have experienced active addiction and those who have relationships with these people struggle to understand what is going on. They wonder what causes this problem to take place and cause so much misery? Most people realize that addiction has nothing to do with intelligence. We know that there are brilliant people who have become addicted and that there are people of very low intelligence who have not. I find that in general people blame the problems associated with addictive behavior on issues involving mental health, family problems, a lack of will power, strength of character, values, integrity, ethics, or morality.

Imagine a shelf with beautiful hand carved figurines that have taken thousands of hours from skilled artists to create. There is a hand puppet that picks up one of the beautiful and fragile figurines and begins to smash it. One by one these priceless works of art are destroyed. A man confronts the puppet. He has tears in his eyes due to this senseless destruction. "Why?" He asks, "Why? Why? Why?" The puppets answers: "Ask the hand."

Addictive behavior has nothing to do with mental health. There are people who are emotionally disturbed and mentally ill who have never and will never become addicted. It has nothing to do with strength of character or will power. There are addicts who are best-selling authors, mountain climbers, body builders, and concert pianists. There are people with no morality or ethics who have never become addicted just as there are compassionate and highly ethical people who have.

The AA Big Book speaks about disease and about the concept of allergy. Most people in Twelve Step programs use the word disease much more than the word allergy but I believe that allergy is a more useful concept. An allergy simply means that a particular substance is bad for someone. With most allergies the individual has no interest in repeating what was bad for him. Someone who has an allergic reaction to a bee sting is not looking to get stung again.

Think of addiction as allergy plus one. It is an allergy with one extra quality. It causes an obsessive desire to do what one is allergic to again and again. When the addiction is strong it takes over the individual's mind in the same way as the hand controls the puppet.

For someone to examine himself or become introspective in order to understand his addictive behavior makes no sense. The answer does not lie within the puppet -- it lies within the hand. When addiction is strong it can withstand the forces of reason, logic, morality, or intelligence. If you have acquired clean time you have weakened addiction. When addiction has been weakened it can be controlled and contained. The key is to continue to weaken addiction and the way to do that is to starve it. Create an embargo - a no-fly zone. Make sure it never gets fed.

Guest RRT Blogger Mark Chidley: Our Weird Addictions

People have infinite ways of providing themselves comfort as an answer to emotional pain. Cutting, burning, picking or scratching the skin; pulling out hair, chewing nails down to the quick. Actually almost anything done excessively in an altered state can do the trick: shopping, spending, hoarding, exercising, sex, masturbating, gambling, and, of course, eating or restricting eating. Almost anything that can be put in the mouth, inhaled, touch the skin, or impact the nervous system in a dramatic way that releases endorphins is of great use to those suffering emotional pain. Many  modalities share the common advantages of being individually controlled, can be done in private and kept secret, pose no resistance of themselves, break no laws, and create a very efficient, alternate hedonic loop in the brain that gets the relief to where it needs to be in a hurry. An alternate route of satiety and relief that is much faster and effective than other routes. Actually, to understand how these methods alter the nervous system to relieve pain is to understand they are a rather brilliant idea.

But how can I, as a therapist, say that? Well, Jon Connelly, the creator of Rapid Resolution Therapy has reminded us that the human predicament is quite unlike any other animal’s walking the face of the earth. When a dog or a monkey has to deal with having to run or fight for its life, the brain’s emotional mechanism floods them with negative feeling and motivates them to profoundly pay attention and take action to get their situation to stop happening.  It is turned on and off quite efficiently. They are not in pain while it’s on. A rabbit running for its life is motivated, alert, and made unusually strong and fast.  It all lasts no more than seconds, at most, a couple minutes. 

The animal, if it survives, shivers a bit, shakes out its coat, and resets emotionally back to normal. It goes about nursing whatever physical wounds it has suffered matter-of-factly, without anything like emotional pain. If it is caught and its brain understands there is no chance for escape or successful counterattack, a kind of peacefulness settles over it and its mind exits the scene. There is no emotional pain there either.

But not so with us. For us, the flush of anger, grief, fear, betrayal, outrage, etc., can turn on and stay on for years. Think about the predicament of some people having to cope with the flood of something meant to meet survival challenge with all its original intensity every hour of their life. Unremitting jacked up anger, horror, terror, disgust. You get up with it, you spend your day with it, go to bed with it, and it is there in the night.  A switch that had it turned off would have been tolerable, but now stuck in the “on” position, spells excruciating pain. And then because humans can stick on meanings afterward, shame, guilt, or hate may also appear. Still another layer of pain. This guy is sitting on a bench and sees a pretty lady chatting happily with a man. He remembers his wife’s infidelity. That gal is riding on a subway and she smells a certain body odor. She remembers her rape. All you have to do is lightly push on the sore spot and even though it’s twenty years later the person is beside themselves. It no longer has anything to do with survival but the old brain doesn’t know that. It keeps sending the signal to get it to stop.

Take cutting. Imagine how sick of that pain you’d have to be to be willing to localize and control it by cutting on the tender tissues of the breasts or inner thighs or even genitals. Connelly points out that now at least you have it in one place and you know who’s doing it and how long the worst part will last.

From this perspective, it is not hard to figure how something damaging that also offers relief, containment,  and instant comfort could be recategorized by the primitive part of our mind as an old friend, a reliable one at that. But that is not how the parents who bring in their 14 year-old daughter to therapy see her cutting, or how the culture sees the 22-year old’s bulimia or the sex addict’s repeated immersions in pornography.  The culture to protect itself sees the behavior and wants us to put it outside the limits of acceptable with a label.  Instead, this attitude glues pathology onto the person’s identity even firmer as they are seen as weird, abnormal, and aberrant because people are more likely to go along with a consensual meaning instead of taking a longer look at a phenomenon for themselves.  And this is what is happening even if we give it a fancy diagnostic name.

And what if counselors buy into all this distancing and labeling? To me it’s like going up to a very lonely and desperate person and insulting them for choosing to hang with the one friend they’d found in the world. “Hey, Why do you keep hanging around with that jack**s?”, is not a question I want to lead with or imply. I want them to get that I get how much pain they’ve been in. Are there better ways to handle it? Without a doubt. But I won’t get there, won’t get a connection with that person in order to shift them into something better until they get that I get them.

It’s on me to convey that I understand how desperate they got and how frightening it would be to let go of that old friend. And that I have something better in view, like an end to the obsolete messages themselves; the start of a whole new life.

Mark A. Chidley, LMHC, Certified Rapid Resolution Therapist, CAP, a fully licensed mental health counselor and certified addictions professional, offers counseling services at his office Kelly San Carlos Executive Center in Fort Myers, Florida.He has been in private practice since 1997. He holds certifications in Rapid Trauma Resolution(2010), Imago Relationship therapy (2001), and now specializes in the treatment of couples as well as individual trauma recovery and anxiety issues. He brings rich experience from a combined 26 years of hospital work and mental health counseling.

Dr. Connelly Invited as Keynote Speaker at the The National Trauma and Addictive Disorders Conference

Dr. Connelly has been invited to speak at The National Trauma and Addictive Disorders Conference on Thursday, Nov. 3 in Delray Beach, FL. From 4 to 5:30 pm, Jon will present “Healing Posttraumatic Stress: Rapid Trauma Resolution.” The Rapid Trauma Resolution method enables the troubling influence from impressions left by traumatic experience to be cleared quickly, painlessly and completely. This presentation will include filmed clinical demonstrations of Rapid Trauma Resolution.

Dr. Connelly directs the Trauma Resolution Program at Palm Partners Residential Treatment, the 2011 co-sponsor of the conference presented by US Journal Training, Inc. The Conference on Trauma and Addictive Disorders is a premier training event, specializing in trauma, mental health and the addictions fields. U.S. Journal Training, Inc. and The Institute for Integral Development present a combination of nationally recognized faculty who can address a wide variety of today’s most relevant topics. The result is a highly acclaimed national training event featuring customized training opportunities for developing new treatment strategies and the sharing of research advances for clinicians and counselors.

The conference is being held at the Marriott Hotel in Delray Beach, FL, from Nov. 3 through 5. Licensed mental health practitioners can earn up to 20 continued education contact hours. To see the entire conference schedule, for further information or to register please visit www.usjt.com or call (800) 851-9100 and speak to Lorrie Keip.