Addiction occurs when a person takes a substance or engages in an activity, for example alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex or shopping, that can be pleasurable but which over time becomes compulsive and interferes with work, relationships, and physical and mental health.

Physical addiction means that the body has become accustomed to the presence of either a particular external chemical (e.g. alcohol) or an internally produced chemical (e.g. adrenalin). The brain then creates a false need for the presence of this chemical as well as forming associative cues which prompt cravings for the chemical.

Unfortunately, addiction is not so simple; people use drugs, drink, gamble, or shop compulsively, nearly always in reaction to emotional stress, whether positive or negative, regardless of physical addiction or not. This is why people frequently change addictive behaviours from drug to drug or from compulsive behaviour to compulsive behaviour.

Very often the type of addiction is not important, but it is the need for the addictive/compulsive behaviour under certain kinds of stress that needs to be addressed. At The Hypnotherapy Practice we use Clinical Hypnotherapy to identify and resolve the reasons for that need for the addictive/compulsive response. This may mean identifying an initial sensitising event and re-perceiving it from a healthier/neutral perspective or resolving the unconscious reasons for that addictive response that have developed over time. We will also use Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to help break the associative cues that have been formed.

Our approach means that once the root cause of the addiction/compulsive behaviour is resolved any physical and psychological need for the addictive behaviour is eliminated permanently.

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