Though the sacred indigenous medicines like Ayahuasca are among the most important healers in terms of alcoholism, when people first decide to work on their addiction, other trauma-informed therapies may be necessary first in order to calm the nervous system and give the addict a sense of control over their lives. We can’t emphasize enough the fact that Ayahusca, psilocybin, Sapito, Kambo, and the other sacred medicines were made to help people overcome addictions, but if you or a loved one is not quite ready to work with the sacred indigenous medicines yet, start with trauma-informed therapies to release trauma and stress from the autonomic nervous system.
The trauma-informed therapies are gentle and they produce permanent results. These therapies use built-in mechanisms in the brain and body to release trauma that causes people to experience cravings and to relapse. For those who aren’t willing or able to access the sacred medicines yet, the trauma-informed therapies are essential in protocols for at-home alcohol addiction treatment. We work with people at all stages in their journey with trauma-release using trauma-informed technologies like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR or brainwave entrainment therapy and guided meditation as well as the sacred indigenous medicines like Ayahuasca for alcohol addiction among other things. Our goal is to help people gain access to the treatments they need at an affordable price so that they can fully overcome alcoholism without rehab or other costly services. Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com for more information or to set up a health coaching session with us.
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Psychology, Psychiatry, or Trauma-Informed Therapy for Alcohol Addiction?
I have a master’s degree in psychology which means that I spent a lot of hours in a classroom with professors who knew all about how to appease insurance companies. In all my years of study at three different schools of higher education starting with my undergraduate degree, I never studied trauma. Trauma was never in the curriculum. Somehow, the school I attended was able to present a series of courses on grief, major tragedies, sexual dysfunctions, personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and psychosis without ever mentioning “trauma” as a major cause. The tragedy here is that trauma is something that can be released permanently and it is for this reason that nothing I studied in school was presented as a response to trauma. My program was geared at teaching me how to pander to insurance companies, not how to cure mental illness or addiction.
Most people know very little about the word “trauma” except that it rhymes with “drama” and the two are often related. We’re taught to believe that if we have a behavior or a feeling that we want to change, we go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist can prescribe a drug, but these days, the drugs on offer don’t do much. Or they do the wrong thing. Psychiatrists prescribe a drug to help people deal with the side effects of the other drugs they’ve prescribed. And the people who take 3 or more psychoactive drugs from the psychiatrist don’t really feel that much better.
The average person who is just trying to live their life and be normal is taught to believe that there’s little hope if something goes off the rails. If you feel depressed every day, the psychiatrist can’t help. The doctor doesn’t want to hear about it. If you have an alcohol addiction, it’s a disease and also, it might be your fault somehow. If you go to rehab and you relapse, then you have a hopeless case and there’s nothing else that can be done. But, if you wander outside the fence and the conventional treatments even just a little bit, you’ll find that none of these ideas are true. If you’re still alive, things can seem hopeless, but in fact, there are therapies in mainstream society that can help quite a bit. If you’re willing to work with the sacred indigenous medicines, almost anything you can imagine is possible once you unburden the body and the nervous system of its trauma.
Everything that I learned in my advanced studies in psychology ultimately was useless because all of the diagnoses, with rare exception, were caused by trauma. And trauma is something that can be released to provoke a permanent cure. But trauma is not a mental problem. Trauma lives in the body and it has to be released from the body. One of the tricky bits about trauma is the fact that while trauma hijacks how we feel and what think, trauma is a physical body-problem.
The mind-body connection is something that we, as modern humans, are acutely sensitive to. We have been taught that the mind’s problems belong to the mind. The body’s problems belong to the body. Emotions live in the mind. We believe (inaccurately) that we can think our emotions away. One of the key aspects of alcohol addiction treatment is all about treating the addiction as a body-problem. But the body is where the emotions live. The emotions do not come from the mind. The mind, in fact, is often at odds with the emotions that are felt and experienced in the body.
Click here to do a free trial of EMDR to Release Trauma.
Talk Therapy vs. Trauma-Informed Therapy for Alcohol Use Disorder
Addiction is emotional, but it also involves an action. Most people who have an addiction feel intensely conflicted about it. Their body has a desire, the object of the addiction, while the mind says it should not want that thing. In trauma-informed therapy, the body is regarded, more or less, as the right hemisphere of the brain. The left-hemisphere, in contrast, is regarded as the logical “mind” that prefers to follow the rules whenever possible.
Humans are naturally dissociative. Our bodies can want something while our minds can be firmly opposed to what the body wants. We are naturally inclined to be in conflict with ourselves. Talk therapy is the main type of treatment used in rehab centers and psyche clinics in the modern world even though talk really only engages with the rule-oriented left-brain, leaving the right-brain, somatic part of us left out and ignored. Addiction always requires an action of some kind to satisfy what the body desires. Leaving the body out of the talk therapy process is unlikely to produce results, and in fact, most rehab centers barely squeak by with a 15% “cure rate” because they rely on talk rather than working with the body using trauma-informed therapies that have been around for decades.
The sacred indigenous medicines are the original trauma-informed therapies that connect the mind and the body so that these two parts of us are not in conflict all the time. Ayahuasca, Sapito, psilocybin, and the other sacred medicines all have a way of connecting the rule-oriented part of us to the part of us that’s creative and that feels what it feels like to be a human on earth. But not everyone is ready, right out of the gate, to work with the sacred medicines to stop drinking so much. So let’s talk a bit about the trauma-informed therapies that can help release trauma from the body and begin the healing process that will make relapse significantly less likely.
The trauma-informed therapies that we list below work more quickly than talk therapy and they release mental illness permanently. That being said though, the trauma-informed therapies require more effort than the sacred medicines and they take much longer to produce results than work with psilocybin or Ayahuasca, for example. If you decide to work with the trauma-informed therapies, be sure to keep a journal or work with a practitioner who can help you notice your own trajectory of improvement because once the trauma is released, you no longer wrestle with it. As such, the people around you are more likely to notice a change at first in your behavior and demeanor because the release of trauma feels very much like you never had the trauma in the first place. Keep track of where you started so you can follow yourself and notice your own major changes while working with these therapies.
EMDR has been around for several decades as one of the most important trauma-informed therapies that uses back-and-forth eye movements to release trauma. This therapy can be done privately at home, but most people need to work with a practitioner first and talk through the basic steps involved in how to use EMDR properly.
When people work with psilocybin trips to release trauma, they often find that at moments on their trip, their eyes move very far to the right or to the left. This is because the eye muscles are connected to the muscles at the top of the spine and the bottom of the skull and when the eyes are pulled to the right or to the left (or back-and-forth over and over again), the muscles at the top, back of the neck move too. These minute movements of the muscles at the top of the spine pull the cranial bones ever-so-slightly to reduce pressure on the cranial nerves that supply the organs where we somatically experience our emotions (as physical sensations in the body). Pressure on these cranial nerves can cause emotions to get “stuck” in the body, literally in the organs and tissues and our bodies were designed to do Rapid Eye Movement / REM sleep to release trauma. Unfortunately though, our modern lives are no longer attuned to sunrises and sunsets and other natural cycles such that our sleep has been disrupted. REM sleep and deep, restful states of sleep are often disrupted in those with alcohol addiction because an overload of trauma creates a bottleneck (no pun intended) that has to be released in order for sleep to return to normal.
Releasing the pressure on the cranial nerves, in contrast, allows negative emotions to permanently release. For alcoholism, EMDR is one of the most important somatic treatments administered to release trauma. Many clients do EMDR with alpha-theta therapy with us, sometimes for a year or longer before they begin any type of sacred medicine work to overcome alcohol addiction permanently.
- Craniosacral Therapy
We recommend craniosacral therapy for alcohol addiction because it’s gentle, it’s appropriate for almost everyone, and it’s not scary at all. The patient doesn’t have to talk about their experience or their thoughts at all to receive this therapy. The therapist literally puts their hands on the patient to let the patient’s body tell the therapist its story. Most people experience a sense of calm during the therapy session with a very short dreamlike state that occurs fleetingly at the end of the treatment. This dreamlike experience is the release of the trauma from the body.
If craniosacral therapy is the only trauma-informed therapy that you’re doing, make twice weekly appointments at first to ensure that your body has plenty of opportunities to release in the initial stages of at-home treatment.
Alpha-Theta therapy is a brain-entrainment treatment that is done with the eyes closed. The patient, with closed eyes, stares toward a flashing light with sound that entrains the brain from a relatively wakeful alpha state down to a trance-like theta brainwave state. The purpose of this treatment is to be able to pass through the alpha “bridge” state to obtain unconscious material from the theta state and bring it into conscious awareness for release. This treatment is often done with a practitioner and it is often combined with EMDR.
Brain entrainment therapy for trauma release is a little bit different from alpha-theta therapy. Brain entrainment therapy uses patterns of flashing lights and sound to entrain the brain to a state of calmness and healing. This therapy is based on a natural reflex in the brain to respond to random light patterns that occur in nature such as when staring at a campfire or when sitting under a tree in the daylight with the sun passing through the leaves in a flickering pattern. These random flashing patterns activate the pineal gland and allow the brain and body to go into a state of trance and right-brain, left-brain connectivity in order to heal. In a trance state, the right-brain and the left-brain have an opportunity to communicate and thus, release trauma, often through Rapid Eye Movement / REM that is very similar to EMDR.
Brain entrainment therapy using tech produces a mental state that is very similar to Ayahuasca, albeit more short-lived. We recommend that people work with brain entrainment as they prepare for Ayahuasca of the other sacred medicine ceremonies if they’ve never worked with them before.
Guided meditation involves the use of words, but rather than using logic, guided meditation and hypnotherapy uses Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP, a type of communication that bypasses the logical brain to speak directly to the body. NLP produces a healing trance state that allows the left-hemisphere of the brain to connect, without conflict, with the right-hemisphere of the brain for the purposes of releasing trauma.
- Internal Family Systems Therapy
Internal Family Systems therapy was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, a psychologist, a trauma-informed therapist, and a mindfulness practitioner. This is one of few therapies that works through the use of words and discussion in a more conventional therapy scenario. In Internal Family Systems therapy, practitioners acknowledge that all of us are in dissociated states and these states are “normal” but they seem abnormal when the different parts of us are in conflict with each other. Resolving these internal conflicts is roughly equivalent to the release of trauma, which produces permanent results.
Some of our clients do psilocybin microdosing and we combine Internal Family Systems with EMDR and alpha-theta therapy in therapy designed to bring trauma to the surface for release.
- Trauma Release Exercises / TRE
Trauma Release Exercises / TRE was developed from the idea that the body was designed to “shake off” trauma. Trauma can cause pain in the body and certain postures that can be released if the trauma is “shaken off” using these exercises. Dr. Peter Levine talks in depth about the idea of shaking off trauma in his book Waking the Tiger. Click here to watch this video about a polar bear shaking off a traumatic experience to see how the body was designed to release trauma through shaking. Humans typically try to prevent themselves from shaking so as to release trauma which causes the stress / trauma to get trapped in the body.
Click here to learn more about the DreamLight.app, an online guided meditation and brain-entrainment tool.
Summary
If you intend to quit drinking without rehab and overcome alcohol addiction at home, make trauma-informed therapies a priority as these therapies are key in overcoming alcohol addiction. If you aren’t yet ready to work with the sacred medicines, consider trauma-informed therapies like those listed above as alternative options.