Stop Drug and Alcohol Addiction: A Guide for Clinical Hypnotherapists: A 6-Step Program on How to Help Clients Overcome Drug Addiction and Alcoholism - Fast - Through Hypnotherapy

Stop Drug and Alcohol Addiction: A Guide for Clinical Hypnotherapists

A 6-Step Program on How to Help Clients Overcome Drug Addiction and Alcoholism - Fast - Through Hypnotherapy

Also by Tracie O’Keefe:

Inspiration for Survive and Prosper: Personal Transformation Out of Crisis, Vivid Publishing, 2014

Walking the Path of Wellness and Kindness

(in Plant Powered Women, edited by Kathy Divine), CreateSpace, 2014

Overcoming Depression and Female Learned Helplessness Through Hypnotherapy

(in Women and Depression), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010

Trans People in Love (with Katrina Fox), Routledge, 2008

Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity

(with Katrina Fox), Jossey Bass, 2003

Self-Hypnosis for Life: Mind, Body & Spiritual Excellence, Extraordinary People Press, 2000

Sex, Gender & Sexuality: 21st Century Transformations, Extraordinary People Press, 1999

Investigating Stage Hypnosis, Extraordinary People Press, 1998

Trans-X-U-All: The Naked Difference (with Katrina Fox), Extraordinary People Press, 1997

Stop Drug and Alcohol Addiction: A Guide for Clinical Hypnotherapists

A 6-Step Program on How to Help Clients Overcome Drug Addiction and Alcoholism - Fast - Through Hypnotherapy

Tracie O’Keefe

All proficient hypnotherapists spend thousands of hours studying, practising, reviewing, and updating their knowledge and skills to serve the customer.

Is this what our clients deserve?

Disclaimer:

This book is designed to provide general information only for clinical hypnotherapists who treat or plan to treat clients for drug and alcohol addiction. This information is provided and sold with the knowledge that the publisher and author do not offer any legal, financial or other professional advice. In the case of a need for any such expertise, consult with the appropriate professional. This book does not contain all information available on the subject.

This book has not been created to be specific to any individuals’ or organisations’ situation or needs. Every effort has been made to make this book as accurate as possible. However, there may be typographical and/or content errors. Therefore, this book should serve only as a general guide and not as the ultimate source of subject information.

The examples stated in the book are not intended to represent or guarantee that anyone will achieve the same or similar results. Each individual’s success depends on their background, dedication, desire and motivation.

Any and all information contained in this book or any related materials are not intended to take the place of medical advice from a healthcare professional. Any action taken based on the contents found in this book or related materials is to be used at the sole discretion and sole liability of the reader.

Under no circumstances, including, but not limited to, negligence, shall the author or O’Keefe & Fox Industries Pty Ltd be liable for any special or consequential damages that result from the use of, or the inability to use, the book and related materials in this book, even if O’Keefe & Fox Industries Pty Ltd or an O’Keefe & Fox Industries Pty Ltd authorised representative has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

This book contains information that might be dated and is intended only to educate and entertain. The author and publisher shall have no liability or responsibility to any person or entity regarding any loss or damage incurred, or alleged to have incurred, directly or indirectly, by the information contained in this book.

FIRST EDITION, 2018

Copyright ©2018, Tracie O’Keefe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the author or publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review or critical article.

Published by Australian Health & Education Centre

An imprint of O’Keefe & Fox Industries Pty Ltd

Suite 207, 410 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia

Website: www.healtheducationcentre.com

International wholesale enquiries through Ingram.

Editing: Anita Saunders and Katrina Fox

Cover design by Ilian Georgiev

Text layout: Kassandra Bowers: www.lakazdi.com

ISBN: 978-0-9875109-1-4

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1: Drugs in a Global Society

Chapter 2: The Drugs You May Meet in Your Practice and Their Effects

Chapter 3: Prescription Drug Abuse and Alcohol

Chapter 4: Stop Drugs and Alcohol Hypnotherapy

Chapter 5: Stay Out of Denial

Chapter 6: Stop Taking the Substance

Chapter 7: Do Something Different

Chapter 8: How Did You Get There?

Chapter 9: Boundaries

Chapter 10: Being an Emissary

Afterword

Resources

Glossary

Acknowledgements

One of the most important parts of a therapist’s journey is to honour and thank those who filled their heads with knowledge, skills and a spirit of healing. For me it was Ray Keedy-Lilly, Michael Joseph, Milton Erickson, Caroline Miller and Richard Neves, among many others too numerous to name. We learn so much from others, even by just being in their shadow.

I would also like to thank all my supervisors who have helped shaped me as a therapist over the years and provoked me into extending the limits of my clinical expertise and expectations. Particular thanks to Pamela Gawler-Wright, Nadia Hjij, Stephen Clarke, Roxene Cossill, Matthew Kalitowski, Josephine Lyon, Marcus Rigby and Alexandra Pope.

Qualifying as a therapist is only the beginning of our professional life, as our success is only ever measured by our commitment to practising and willingness to become someone else as we grow.

I would like to thank those who have invited me to speak and teach over the years, including Bruni Brewin, Mailin Colman and Lydia Deukmedjian from the Australian Hypnotherapists Association; and Lyndall Briggs from the Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists.

I’m also grateful for the time I spent with Anne Peacock’s lovely Pimlico hypnotherapy group and the James Braid Society in London, and my respected colleague Leon Cowen from the Academy of Applied Hypnosis in New South Wales, Australia, for our always lively dialogue on how to take hypnotherapy forward as a profession.

To all my students for going out into the world and changing it through their therapy skills, I salute you. It has been and continues to be a privilege to share this journey with you. A special thank you to my devoted, lovely wife of 25 years, Katrina Fox, who has supported me putting this book on addiction recovery together to pass on my skills and knowledge. She is the consummate translator and editor of my ramblings and thought bubbles into comprehensible dialogue. Thank you for all the years you have supported me in private practice and teaching, even when I ignore you while I am studying and doing research.

Thank you to Simon Shaw, the biochemist who checked my science and drug listings, because without accuracy, as scientists, we are running in the dark with a bag over our heads. Thanks to my final copy editor Anita Saunders for finding the English in my Spinglish.

Finally, thank you to all my clients who have placed their trust in me to guide them out of the terrible torment of addiction to drugs and alcohol to go on to live a freer life. You may never read this because you are too busy carrying on with your lives and I honour you for your journey and accomplishment of learning to live a better life. What I learnt from you helps other people have better lives too, so your actions of bravery multiply tenfold into the world.

Preface

Millions of people die throughout the world every year as a direct result of damage caused by an addiction to drugs and/ or alcohol. Even more people suffer the long-term physical and mental health damage, reduced quality of life, social isolation and homelessness caused by the abuse of drugs and alcohol. It is one of our greatest health and social problems throughout the world today. The cost of our health system runs into the trillions of dollars every year.

I have seen many people come into my practice in various states of physical distress from addiction and post-addiction, including liver failure, kidney damage, brain damage, loss of mental focus, adrenal exhaustion, vascular collapse and long-term infection, including HIV and hepatitis B and C complications, to name a few.

Mentally addicts can develop high anxiety, panic attacks, depression, paranoia, schizoid-like personality fragmentation, reclusiveness, agoraphobia, and collapse of their abilities to interact with other people in healthy and wholesome ways. They can become unemployable, isolated and rejected by their families, get into trouble with the law and often end up in prison. While they are besotted by the substance they abuse, few in retrospect would have sacrificed the quality of their lives had they known what they would lose as a result of their addiction and how things would turn out for them. By the time the addiction had taken hold, however, they felt they no longer had a choice or the ability to stop using that substance.

Addiction is a medical emergency. It is a time when a person has lost control of their physical body and mental ability to maintain homeostasis, so the body deviates into sickness and disease. That person needs help and empathy. They may not want help or believe they have an addiction, sometimes for decades, and labour under the delusion they are in control of their lives, but they are not. Some come to the realisation they need help and some do not.

Simply giving someone with an alcohol or drug addiction more drugs of a different kind is not helping them get over their addiction; it is a substituted addiction of perhaps a more socially acceptable kind that does not profit the patient. It does, however, create big profits for pharmaceutical companies which may indeed, in the case of prescription drugs, have been contributors to the problems in the first place.

I have spent my entire life surrounded by addiction. My father was a drunk with mental health issues, violent, abusive and psychopathic. On pay day, during the few times he worked, he could not pass the pub on the way home without spending a great deal of his wages, leaving his family hungry and poor. In my early teenage years I was a child who was forcibly given LSD as part of a medical experiment.

At college when I was 15, I was surrounded by people experimenting with LSD, magic mushrooms and cannabis. The 1970s was a period of youth cultural revolution when young people wanted to challenge the old social order in the UK and students were caught up in the psychedelic movement. In the co-counselling group I started at college, we found that drug abuse was often a problem but it was too dangerous to disclose to the college for fear of sanction. Even the boy I lived with and was in love with when I was 15 and 16 died from a drug overdose.

When I was a dancer and singer in my youth in London and abroad in the theatre, I was surrounded by artists taking cocaine, amphetamines, opium and heroin, and smoking marijuana. Some of those who developed addictions died young but some of them who lived can often no longer remember those years and have aged poorly.

Like many young people, I experimented with various drugs and alcohol, none of which had any long-term appeal. For many decades I have lived a highly rewarding life, clean and sober, which has allowed me to be in a very strong position to help those who suffer addiction. My life has not been conventional, whatever that may be, so I probably fit into the straight edge movement of alternative people who live clean and sober lives. In the therapy room, the people who come to see me for help with addiction hail from a much wider sector of society, including accountants, lawyers, judges, royalty, anaesthesiologists, psychiatrists, stockbrokers, police and military personnel, politicians, clergy, train drivers, carpenters, homemakers and many others. Indeed, there is no sector of society that addiction does not affect. Given certain conditions, any one of us could succumb to substance abuse, at any time of our lives.

The human body is a biomechanical, biochemical machine with millions of years of evolution behind its development. As a clinical naturopath, I see it as a thing of exquisite beauty and sophistication. Given the right circumstances, it generally has the innate ability to self-repair and correct its functions when something goes wrong. If you take that ability away from someone or subdue it by drugging them, they often cannot find their way to health and healing.

Naturopaths use the phrase ‘clean living’ to describe the way of living that is closest to nature. It involves eating high-quality foods, not taking unnecessary drugs, low exposure to toxins, exercising regularly and living a low-stress life with good social relationships. We talk about having clean blood and organs, meaning they are without infection and disorder. People come to me to learn how to live clean, healthy and long lives.

As a clinical hypnotherapist, psychotherapist and counsellor, I see the human mind as a continuous series of opportunities to create self-fulfilment, enjoy life’s experiences and interact with the rest of the world in a sustainable, rewarding way. I am in awe of the capacity of human cognition, achievement and ability for compassion, and as a therapist, that is always at the centre of my clinical philosophy.

During addiction, the mind plays tricks on itself, deluding the individual that they are safe and not in danger as a direct result of the actions of taking drugs or alcohol. People will take themselves to the brink of death and beyond in a quest to experience one more time with the substance, devoid of all reason and logic. For them, the trance of being an addict seems unbreakable.

I, like many clinicians, have observed that of the thousands of clients I have worked with, there are common factors that help them recover from addiction. Clinical hypnotherapy and psychotherapy can help them develop their personalities to become a different kind of person and live clean and sober, as I shall show you in these pages.

The 6-Step Stop Drugs and Alcohol Clinical Hypnotherapy Model that I have developed over the years and teach to hypnotherapists is a clean and sober model. The whole premise of my methods is that they work fast. It is a substance elimination model, since it is the substance that has caused the addiction in the first place. For thousands of people this has improved their life beyond measure, allowing them to live a life fully recovered from active addiction.

To be a therapist who helps clients recover from drug and alcohol addictions is a deeply fulfilling experience for me. When I teach hypnotherapy masterclasses I know that those therapists will be more skilled to be part of changing people’s lives forever by helping them gain relief from the addiction.

How to use this book

This book is written as a teaching tool to help you systemise your approach as a clinical hypnotherapist with clients who are seeking to recover from drug and alcohol addiction. It is written solely for those trained in hypnotherapy or who are studying hypnotherapy. I work systematically in my practice. Although I may employ many different hypnotherapeutic philosophies, disciplines and techniques with a client, I employ structure in my work. Since I have worked with so many people to help them recover from addiction, I discovered not only does the therapist need a structure in therapy but so does the client, which allows us to achieve around a 90% success rate.

You will learn the six steps in the recovery program I teach you. Each step is broken down further to help you understand the mechanics of the techniques I use. They are the six steps that an addict must go through progressively to attain a complete recovery. If a step is missed out, the chance of a relapse becomes high.

When reading and practising the techniques, take time to familiarise yourself with the reasons I use each step and the sequences of those steps. Constantly observe and listen to the clients you are working with as you collect feedback about how the process works. You will have your successes and you will have your failures as you become more proficient and adept at helping alcoholics and addicts overcome their addictions. As with all learning and study, repetition, practice and adaptability is the road to success.

References

The references are organised chapter by chapter. Any single source of referencing is unreliable, including research, which is frequently biased and outdated. This is also the case for academia, the media, the internet and patients themselves. For greater balance of information, I have used a broad spectrum of sources. They are provided for your own further education to allow you to broaden your knowledge of alcohol and drug addiction and recovery.

Scripts

Scripts are used in hypnotherapy to guide hypnotherapists but they are not to be used verbatim for hypnotherapy itself because every client and session is different. I present them with bold type indications for important verbal marking where certain suggestions need more emphasis. The scripts I include offer you some of the pragmatics, semantics, psycholinguistics and hypnotic language patterns I have used for those clients. In the brackets, I have included comments on what hypnotic techniques I am aiming for and my thoughts behind the process of change I am inciting in the client.

Some of my students find it easier to highlight the parts of the script that the therapist actually speaks when practising verbal delivery, particularly if you have any form of dyslexia.

Each hypnotherapist uses their own particular and different language patterns. Continuous verbatim monologues do not allow clients to digest or process any unconscious changes as they process information. In the teaching scripts ‘…’ denotes time for rest, breathing and processing. It is almost a linguistic lyrical approach.

The scripts also include conversational hypnotic interchange between me and the client which guides and provokes them towards the psychotherapeutic change I am seeking, both consciously and unconsciously. All of this is hypnotic, whether it is conscious conversation or somnambulistic.

Addressing the point about using the phrase ‘clean and sober’

I am aware that some people and academics want to abandon the phrase ‘clean and sober’ because they associate the word ‘clean’ with implications of social stigma around addicts being ‘dirty’ people. Let us remember, however, that linguistically the phrase ‘clean and sober’ is in common usage with recovered addicts. It is a powerful phrase for many who carry pride and achievement in their identity as being clean, sober and free from addiction. It is, for them, a badge of honour. Hypnotically it is a strong, decisive, effective and direct command suggestion. From a naturopathic point of view, it denotes a life with minimal toxins. We give language its pragmatic value and political correctness by the way we use it, not by the way others want us to use it. In my work with clients, the terminology is used in a positive, reinforcing way.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please note that with the trance scripts, conventions for grammar and punctuation have been ignored. This is a deliberate strategy to demonstrate the flow of commands and depotentiation of conscious resistance by implementing cognitive overload, which happens with lack of pauses in communication.

I also include for your convenience a glossary at the back of the book so you can find a quick reference for words or techniques you may not yet understand.

Each hypnotherapist evolves their own way of working with people. I hope you enjoy learning some ways I work with clients to help them recover from addiction.

Every hour of every day thousands of people throughout the world are recovering from addiction to recreational drugs, prescription medication and alcohol, and I hope this book helps you to help even more people.

Shamanic practices around drugs and alcohol

The use of drugs and alcohol in shamanic practices has been a global, time-honoured tradition and little understood by Western academia or society. The word ‘drug’ is derived from the French word ‘drogue’, meaning supply stock or provision, referring to dried plants, spices or herbs that have been used by apothecaries. In less-developed cultures these were collected by shamans.

Potterton (1983) shows us how Culpeper used plants from an apothecary perspective in the 1600s for healing purposes. When we look back thousands of years at cave paintings we can see shamans using plants to induce altered states of awareness for healing practices, festivals, rites of passage, fertility worship and celebrations. McKenna (1992) opines that this is a different use of plants from apothecaries because the substance is specifically used to create altered states of awareness, such as psychedelic or hallucinatory experiences.

From an anthropological and philosophical point of view, we can see that those experiences do not fit into the Western medical model, as proposed by, for example, the American Psychiatric Association (2013), as that model is bourgeois, where the doctor is the authority and the patients largely submissive. What we have to be careful of when we look at the use of mind-altering substances in cultures is that we do not see this solely as substance abuse, because it can be ceremonial and not generally a day-to-day occurrence. In shamanic experiences the patient is guided on their own exploration by the shaman. It is important to note that this is a different kind of drug use from drug abuse seen in Westernised societies.

Harrelson (1969) shows us that early pagan matriarchal cultures used menstrual blood, probably mixed with alcohol, to induce altered states of awareness during fertility festivals. Pagan cultures fermented vegetables, grain and fruits to produce alcoholic beverages to mark their ceremonies. The Christian church uses wine to celebrate Holy Communion and represent the blood of Christ. Menstrual blood was also seen as strength to defeat the enemy. Alcohol was also used to celebrate intertribal battles in war-like and invading cultures.

Belief systems change from country to country and region to region, as does the use of different mind-altering plant sources. Kilham (2014) describes how in South America, native cultures use herbs such as ayahuasca, under the guidance of a tribal shaman. The person is under a hallucinogenic influence which is supposed to transport them into other worlds on a spiritual quest. The trip can last up to a week and members of the tribe stay with the person to look after them during their internal