Emotional Release Therapy

An Alternative Approach and Tool

In

Recovery from Chemical Addiction

By
DLScott CtHA / CDP
www.dlscottpersonalenergymastery.com
dlscott2@comcast.net

When someone talks to you about being an addict, just what is it that they are talking about? Are they talking about being addicted to some chemical substance, such as alcohol or cigarettes or maybe a harder drug like heroin? Are they trying to label you with some diagnosis from the DSMR III, so you can be classified and treated according to the standards of today’s industry? Or are they talking about something deeper, are they talking about the fact that you are actually addicted to the emotions or feelings produced by the intake of the drug?
A little discussed secret among Chemical Dependency Professionals is that studies have shown that most people, who enter into recovery from substance abuse, do so on their own without the assistance of a traditional treatment program. Now that flies in the face of traditional wisdom, and the prevailing culture of Chemical Dependency Treatment, but it is none the less true. In an article by Karen Schweitzer, (Love to Know Recovery, Drug Addiction Treatment) it is sited that there is no treatment program in existence that is right for everyone. A treatment program should address an individual’s needs and feelings as well as the drug addiction.
In working with clients in the chemical dependency field, there are a few givens that I have discovered that can enhance a person’s ability to stop the use of their drug of choice.
First off I would like to suspend the argument about whether Drug Addiction is a disease or not. We can write hundreds and hundreds of pages upon this argument, and still not agree on the answer. Whether Chemical Dependency is an actual disease or not, is not the issue. The Issue is that Chemical Dependency affects people in such a way that it mimics, or produces some of the symptoms of a disease.
The disease concept of Chemical Dependency is the basis of most standard methods of treatment, and are also embraced by such programs as the 12 step model. According to statistics generated by 12 step programs the success rate of this model ranges anywhere from 5% to 50%. What is not mentioned is that the statistics are based on a lifelong commitment to a 12 step program. This is one of the major complaints of people who do not wish to be tied to a program for the rest of their lives. Many clients complain that they are expected to exchange one habit, “drug use” for another habit, “lifelong 12 step attendance”.
So for the sake of this article, let us agree that it is actually the feelings created by the use of drugs that we become addicted to, the medium of the drug is just the way to experience these feelings. Let’s face it, if you didn’t get a benefit out of our chemical use, you would not continue to use the chemical. Some of the benefits for most people include:
1) Using drugs creates an avoidance of uncomfortable feelings, (even the avoidance of feelings is still a type of feeling in the body, it is called numbness).
2) Using drugs creates a happy feeling.
3) Using drugs causes us to feel more relaxed,
4) Using drugs causes us to feel more social in some situations.
When someone decides to stop using their drug of choice it is usually because the
consequences begin to outweigh the benefits, i.e. legal issues, job issues, relationship issues, health issues, to name a few.
The prevailing belief is that the primary concern is to stop the use of the drug, and the consequences will stop. While this may be partially true, it is also a well known fact that just removing the use of the drug will lead to a condition called white knuckling it. What this means is that once you remove the use of the drug, but don’t change any of the conditions that lead to the drug use in the first place, you will continue to have to deal with the those conditions and issues. In most cases this simply causes another addiction or behavior to replace the one that was stopped. This has become a complaint of many recovering addicts who are not involved in a 12 step program, for while 12 step programs provide tools to help change a person’s attitude and emotions, it requires the person to admit to being powerless over their own behavior, while accepting a belief in god, and requires that a person exchange the behavior of drug use for the behavior of attending 12 step programs for the rest of their lives.
What is needed is a method that can provide a person with the ability to regain power over their behavior, while supplying the same initial benefits of drug use in a quicker and more efficient way, without having to commitment to lifelong 12 step attendance. How can you accomplish this goal?
What I have developed and refined over the last 20 years, from an original tool taught to me at the Northwest School for Clinical Hypnotherapy, is a technique called Emotional Release Therapy.
It works like this; everything that exists is made of energy. You are made of tiny bits of energy, (some people claim it is atoms and molecules, Quantum Mechanics now claim the tiny bits of energy are actually called strings, billions of times smaller than atoms), the clothes you are wearing are made of energy, the air you breath, the chair you are sitting on, even the thoughts you think are made up of electro – chemical bits of energy. In fact we produce energy in our body, and the strongest energy we produce is our feelings. Now think about that, when you walk into a room, how many times can you recall being able to tell if someone where happy, mad, sad, glad, etc., and the person doesn’t have to say a word. You can argue that it is facial expression, body posture, etc., and while these factors play into the event, the fact is that some indefinable quality is alerting you to a person’s emotional state of being. This indefinable quality is the energy that the person is putting out.
To understand this, it is important that you understand that energy vibrates. That means that everything has its’ own vibrational pattern. Your heart vibrates in beats per minute, your brain vibrates in beats per second, the earth vibrates, the air vibrates, electrical currents vibrate, EVERYTHING vibrates.
There is a basic law of physics that cannot be changed, and cannot be broken. That basic law is that vibrations attract vibrations. To demonstrate this I want you to think about the simple tuning fork. If you have a room full of tuning forks and you strike one of the tuning forks, what happens with the rest? The tuning forks that are set to the same frequency will start to vibrate in response to the vibration of the first fork, and slowly other tuning forks will start to shift their own frequency in response to the prevailing frequency.
It is the same effect when you put out a very strong emotional vibration. Think about a time when you were in a room full of people, something happened and all of the people in that room were stressed out or experiencing some form of emotional chaos. Someone then walks into the room and is able to reduce the stress, with their own steady and powerful calming emotions.
We are at the mercy of these oceans of vibrational patterns throughout our entire lives. In fact we are looking at the world through layers of emotional vibrational patterns.
When you are first born, you have no strong emotional attachments, I know that some people well argue that you picked up emotional attachments in the womb, or from our ancestors, DNA, (see the book DNA of Healing by Margaret Ruby 2006 Hampton Road Publishing Company), or even from past lives, but at the moment of birth our brain is a clean slate, and such emotional patterns have not been activated. As you reached out to the world, it is usually because you were wet, hungry, or needed to be held, etc.. You begin creating Neuro Firing Patterns in the brain that produced images that create feelings. These feelings became your guide map of the environment. If, when you were young, you had caregivers who were loving, kind, having a good day, etc. and they responded to you with love and kindness, you began viewing your environment through layers of belief and feelings that told you that things were safe. (Think of each new experience as a layer of colored glass placed over your eyes. Each time you view the world, you see things in a tinted fashion. Right now as you read this article the way in which you are processing it, is based on the color and depth of your layers of colored glass). This same process works in the negative fashion. In other words, if you were treated in a hurtful, angry, less than positive way, you would have emotional patterns, “colored glass” that would tint each new experience with that type of belief system.
We as human beings are programmed for survival. We strive for things that will make us feel better, that will make us feel safer. In most cases the initial use of the drug was to try and loosen these negative emotional vibrational patterns. The first few times that you used your drug of choice you probably did get a feeling of relief and probably did feel much better, but eventually the consequences of the drug use started outweighing the benefits, and in most cases the consequences began creating even new images, new beliefs, and emotional patterns that compounded the old issues. Most people who become chemically addicted began using drugs in this inappropriate self medicating way.
While it is important to stop the use of your drug of choice, it is also important to deal with the initial issue, which, as I have stated, in most cases is the idea that the drug user is looking for a way of feeling better, a way of dealing with the emotional vibrational pattern that is hindering their lives. The emotional vibrational patterns are created by thoughts, or images, in our brains. Feelings are created by thoughts or images in your brain, it has been shown that every thought that you have, has traveled through your body and activated a physiological response. (See research by Dr. Candice Pert, “Molecules of Emotions” by Jon Franklin, 1987 Bantam Doubleday Publishing Group).
What if there was a way to release from the emotional vibrational pattern without using substances, such as alcohol, or other drugs? What if you could detach from the physiology of emotion without having to dredge up every memory, and every event that you have ever encountered in your life?
Emotional Release Therapy provides that ability.
By being inducted into an altered state of consciousness, through hypnosis, a client is then lead into a deeper trance, that swiftly alters, and lowers brainwave patterns activating the healing effects of the deeper alpha state of brain wave patterns.
It has been shown, through a device called and electroencephalogram, the human brain has four patterns of vibrations.
The first pattern is known as the Beta state. In this state, our brain is vibrating at about 15 to 21 cps, (cycles per second). This is considered our waking state of consciousness. In this state we are dominated by our five senses, hearing, vision, taste, touch, and smell. This is the state of consciousness that you are in during most of your waking hours.
The second pattern is known as the Alpha state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 8 to 14 cps. It is the same state of being that you experience when you are daydreaming, or when you are driving down the road, and can’t recall the last few miles that you have driven. This type of episode is commonly referred to as Highway Hypnosis. Interestingly enough our brains shift into this pattern on the average of ten or more times per day, for about 10 to 15 seconds. It is during these 10 to 15 seconds that the body is going through brief healing periods, trying to correct stress, and other abnormalities in the system.
The third pattern is known as the Theta state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 4 to 7 cps. It is the pattern you exhibit while you are in deep sleep.
The forth pattern is known as the Delta state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 1 to 3 cps. This is the pattern a person exhibits while they are in a coma. Not much is known about this state, since generally, if a person comes out of a coma, they don’t recall anything about the experience.
You will notice that each of these states became narrower, and narrower in their frequency band.
The important thing to remember here is that the healing takes place in the alpha state, and while you can be considered in an Alpha state at 14 cps, to experience Emotional Release Therapy, you have to reach a cps of 7 to 8 cps.
Once again, the client is lead into a light state of an Alpha vibrational pattern. This state of altered consciousness is obtained through a focus on the client’s breath, combined with specific guided imagery. Once this state has been reached a specific set of sound waves and tones is used to create conscious panic. After being inducted into the lighter state of Alpha vibrational pattern, the subconscious portion of the brain is more dominate. Then using tones, and sound waves the conscious portion of the brain immediately tries to become more dominate and the brain wave start to return to the Beta level. Due to the fact that the sound waves and tones are undecipherable by the conscious portion of the brain, the conscious brain drops back down into the Alpha state, but instead of the lighter state, it now drops down to the lower pattern of about 7 to 8 cps. (Many clients report that they fell as though they are experiencing a falling sensation.) Once this state is reached the brain begins immediately seeking out stressors and threats to the system, by wiping out the emotional connection to the original memory or images.
The benefit to this system is that the memory is not changed in any way, thus eliminating any problems with created or changed memories, but the emotional impact of the memory is eliminated. This allows the client to have the ability to then look at and deal with the initial image, and recognize that it is simply a thought, an image that has no real power or hold over them.
When a client can use his or her own brain to deal with these uncomfortable feelings, the need to use drugs as a coping mechanism is eliminated, and a swifter recovery path can be obtained.
Emotional Release Therapy is not intended as the only tool during a client’s recovery journey. It can, and does provide an incredibly powerful method that can accelerate, and make the journey safer and easier to take.

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