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| Photo by Rick Hustead |
The “addictive curve” is a behavioral model to describe the formation and
perpetuation of addictions. For example, a person takes heroin and gets a “rush.”
He then starts coming down, going lower than the state where he started, which
creates a new “bottom.” Most people shoot up again as soon as they start to
come down, which triggers the addiction. However, if the person waits to take
the drug until just before reaching the level he normally should be, he will
get even “higher” with this dose and then come back to normal.
A person can take any
substance that has an addictive property—including coffee—and never become
addicted to it if the individual doesn’t fall into the addictive curve. “What
makes a heroin addict a heroin ‘addict’ is the feeling of coming back down,” Hypnosis Motivation Institute founder John Kappas, Ph.D., explained. If you
avoid the addictive curve (usually 12 hours) and wait to take the drug until
you are back at that normal level, you won’t become addicted to it, he added.
Dr. Kappas demonstrated how he would help a client overcome a heroin
addiction during one of his clinical case history sessions. The process
entailed taking the individual off the drug “cold turkey,” then having him
experience all the symptoms of withdrawal very quickly during hypnosis.
Meanwhile, the hypnotherapist had the client release the feelings and go back
to homeostasis while giving the hypnotic suggestion that the person did not
need heroin. Dr. Kappas’s complete hypnotherapy-treatment strategy entailed taking
the client from the homeostatic state back to an artificial high, then bringing
him back down to experience withdrawal symptoms again, for 14 days.
“We can duplicate in hypnosis any feeling you can get from any kind of
drug, from heroin, marijuana, cocaine, etc. many times we duplicate that
feeling artificially so we can get the client down here to create artificial
withdrawals,” he said. After the therapy program described above, however, “there’s
no feeling (addiction) for heroin at all.”
A caveat: while alcohol addiction follows a similar pattern in terms of
the addictive curve, hypnotherapists do not deal with alcohol addictions. “The
alcoholic is much harder to deal with than the drug addict because alcohol is
an accessible social drug, and there’s too many ways to cheat on alcohol. It’s
a way of life,” Dr. Kappas said. The physical dependency on alcohol also tends
to be stronger than the physical dependency on drugs, he added.
As I have explained in previous
essays, the Business
and Professions Code 2908 limits the scope of hypnotherapists’ professional
practice to helping people achieve vocational and avocational self-improvement
goals. Hypnotherapists must also seek a
referral from licensed mental-health and/or licensed medical professionals when
there may be a physiological or psychological origin of the client’s discomfort,
which is outside of the scope of hypnotherapy. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are
great tools to help a person follow Alcoholics
Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous, etc. guidelines during rehabilitation from a
substance addiction. However, when I work with an individual to help
break this addictive curve I usually ask that the person continues to receive
support from a sponsor and/or 12-step program during this process.
Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified
hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors
from the Hypnosis Motivation
Institute in 2005. For more
information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an
appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
© 2016
