4-STAGE APPROACH TO ADDICTION
What are the 4 milestones that I look for regarding progress and transformation in my clients, while teaching the 3 Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought?
Milestone 1 – Hope
Without hope, there will never be any progress regarding the healing process of addiction. I have often stated that I would rather teach a low understanding client who is hopeful, rather than a high understanding client who lives without hope.
Hope is eternal because it opens one’s mind to the infinite possibilities of success. We all possess unlimited potential, and with hope, this potential is achievable, while without it, the possibility of releasing this potential is impossible to vision, impossible to believe in and impossible to reach.
Hope is the lubricant to optimism. Syd Banks stated, “Optimism is a spiritual quality and a guiding light that will lead you to your happiness.” Hope is the doorway to Faith. When hope releases the positive energy of optimism, the addict suddenly realizes that hope is a spiritual power leading to Faith. Not blind faith, but the fact that faith in one’s self is the same as faith in God. It cannot fail because Faith is the pathway to confidence and wisdom. It is a fact that faith heals, works and is truthful.
Milestone 2 – Good Feelings
All clients with addiction habits, who come for ACT’s help, are gloomy and serious. They feel like losers. They feel they are victims of their urges, which controls and dominates them. They attract bad luck, such as being arrested, or losing their cellphone, wallet or dignity. Their sense of themselves is low or re-stated, they have low self-esteem. And worse yet, they feel they are out of control, living in a losing spiral of repeating their bad habit and urges.
This is compounded by the outside world’s version of help and support. Outside help is weak with low results. Parents, friends and just about everyone feels they are weak. They feel this. They are not caught in addiction or being alcoholics on purpose. This is their life and they would love to leave it behind.
With the spiritual nature of the 3 Principles, good feelings are actually quite easy to achieve. Once felt, often by pointing to the wisdom and beauty of the client, a smile spreads across their face. It is a feeling that they often have long forgotten. Laughter follow. Humor can never be underestimated as a lubricant to good feelings.
Being home = Good feelings
Good feelings are essential to the healing process, as they are the door opener. Sometimes, they alone are enough to guide a person back inside as they catch a feeling of “being home.” In this case, the client values the good feelings more than anything else in the world, including the need to be addicted to a substance.
However, generally step 3 is required. Please note that all answers lie in spiritual or positive feelings.
Milestone 3 – Understanding
Many times, in a Native American Indian sweat, people arrive with heavy troubles on their mind. Once they experience the 4 rounds of spiritual Indigenous healing, they often look 20 years younger. Their personal minds have quieted, and they have experienced the uplifting spiritual energy of healing.
However, a strange thing often happens. They come out of the sweat and commence to talk about the same problems they had experienced before the sweat started. In a short 20 minutes, they have lost the healing feeling because they did not SEE “what happened.”. They felt the healing, but did not gain any understanding of how Spirit works.
This is often true with addiction. The spiritual feeling is experienced, but because they did not SEE what happened, they did not appreciate or gain a deeper understanding of what Mind (Spirit) is or its connection to the role of Thought.
This clarity or deeper understanding is garnished by SEEing the process of Spiritual power transforming into the psychological/physical being for yourself. This deeper understanding in 3P is called “raising the level of consciousness.” 3P is a spiritual psychology, rather than the separation of the 2 worlds of spirituality and psychology. This oneness demonstrates to the addicted that the only thing wrong was not the substance, but simply the unwise use of Thought This lack of wisdom creates the illusion of holding clients’ prisoners.
Once the falseness is seen for what it is or once the Truth is seen for what it is, (and I mean seen as a FACT), then the client is left to their own devices and path. You see it is no different if a person has marriage problems, mood problems or is addicted. The answer is the same – unwise thoughts lead to unwise feelings which lead to unwise behaviour and results in a stressful scenario that needs to be relieved. The best medicine is CHANGE THOUGHT.
One of the most interesting aspects of the above approach is for my readers to ascertain to what am I looking for in my clients. I am not evaluating the person’s inability to not relapse, overcome immature ideas or to have nightmarish thoughts when they are sleeping. I simply evaluate how the client is growing in happiness and contentment. This positive feeling opens up the portal of “being home.”
As a client grows in levels of consciousness, our conversations naturally revolve around the client experiencing their own wisdom. As they begin to share the positive feelings of their own wisdom; optimism grows and the smiles on their faces and their understanding of healing grows. True, the parents, friends, and other addicts may not see it, but that is part of the journey because the client will SEE it, and that is the fact that leads to true healing and leaving the addiction far behind.
Milestone 4 – Inside-Out Commitment
Strange as it may seem, God requires a commitment from the client to fully realize that they are a part of the healing process. The client reaches a stage where they fully understand, from an inside-out perspective, where the healing starts and where the experience comes from. They fully recognize, via Insight, that they do not want the ugly feeling anymore + accept this is part of their history of who they are.
NOW, it is time to live in a world without the bad habit ruling their life. They have reached the final milestone and have uncovered the secret to freedom of CHOICE.