If you are struggling with anxiety, depression, or addictions, your core issue may be unresolved emotional trauma.
We can help!
Our powerful and effective trauma recovery workshops give you the opportunity to resolve your emotional pain in just a few days, reducing and often eliminating the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and addiction.
If you are finally ready to released from the emotional weight from your past, then give us a call and begin your life!
Life is short.....travel light!
Seven reasons why our experiential workshops are so effective in treating emotional trauma, depression, anxiety, and addictions.
1. Depression, anxiety, and addictions are the most pervasive and treatable mental health issues, yet millions of people continue to struggle because treatment often does not address the hidden core issue.
2. All three of these issues are very often rooted in unresolved emotional trauma from as far back as childhood. The deep impact of this trauma may not be recognized even by the patient. This invisible "emotional baggage" weighs us down, making life a difficult chore instead of an exciting adventure.
3. While traditional "talk therapy" is clinically appropriate for some mental health issues, it has minimal success in resolving emotional trauma because talk therapy impacts the left brain. Emotional trauma is stored in the right brain and limbic system. Often trauma victims find little relief in therapy, and resign themselves to a life of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair.
4. The experiential treatment used in our programs has been recognized as the "treatment of choice" for unresolved emotional trauma because it accesses the right brain and limbic system where trauma is stored.
5. The dramatic increase in the use of psychotropic medication in an attempt to cope with unresolved emotional pain demonstrates the ineffectiveness of traditional talk therapy in resolving emotional trauma.
6. Effective treatment of emotional trauma reduces or eliminates the need to self-medicate with addictions or psychotropic medication.
7. Instead of masking the symptoms, our powerful and effective treatment cuts to the root of the trauma, eliminating the need to numb emotional pain with medications or addictions and eliminating the root cause of depression and anxiety.
Addiction is a symptom.
“In my professional experience, nearly every addicted patient has suffered an emotional trauma. And when you experience a trauma, it can trigger any predisposition you might have toward addiction. It is vital to uncover these traumas and to address them. Not doing so almost guarantees that an addict will relapse.”
Morteza Khaleghi, Ph.D, psychotherapist and founder of Creative Care chemical dependency treatment program, and author of the book Free From Addiction
Journey Trauma and Addiction Recovery is a clinical program designed to assist those with unresolved emotional trauma to address and resolve these deep seated issues in a few days through powerfully effective workshops.
Our focus is on the treatment of emotional trauma. However, because many trauma victims self-medicate to numb their emotion pain, our program treats addiction by treating the underlying emotional trauma necessitating the need to self-medicate in the first place.
Recent clinical studies and brain imaging research has conclusively linked emotional trauma and addictions.
Because the development of an addiction is often brought on by emotional trauma or crisis, the trauma is the root problem, with the addiction being a byproduct of our frantic and dysfunctional attempt to cope with overwhelming emotional pain. cure your addiction to alc
For those self-medicating their unresolved emotional pain, the addiction will not be overcome by treating the addiction alone. Treatment of the trauma is necessary. Without effectively treating the underlying trauma, true addiction recovery is almost impossible. The addict will continue to relapse whenever old emotional pain surface.
Treating an addiction without treating the underlying trauma is much like trying to kill a tree by trimming the branches. To "kill" an addiction, one must dig to the root of the addiction. The root of addiction is often internalized emotional pain. Simply trimming the branches of a tree will not prevent the branches from growing back. Simply treating the addiction will not prevent the addiction from growing back.
Will treating the trauma alone prevent a relapse?
While many addicts are able to permanently overcome their addictive behavior when their unresolved emotional baggage is resolved, others also need to address the addiction directly. An addiction, once ignited, can take on a life of its own. For those with unresolved trauma driving their addiction, treating the trauma is "sufficiently necessary" but not "necessarily sufficient" to conquer the addiction. Without treating the trauma, an addict will relapse. However, even with treatment of the trauma, traditional addiction recovery treatment may be needed. This traditional treatment may be an intensive outpatient (IOP) program or a 12-step program. But doing a traditional addiction program while leaving the trauma untreated is setting the addict up for failure. And failure can increase shame, driving the addict deeper into their addiction.
Addictions are rooted in unresolved emotional pain.
All addictions have a purpose. It doesn’t matter whether the addiction is drugs, alcohol, sex, food, work, exercise, gambling, or any other addiction of choice, there is always a purpose. And that purpose always makes sense given the users life experiences, internalized core beliefs, and unresolved emotional baggage. The purpose may not be clear, but the reason one engages in addictive behavior always makes sense, even when this reason is unconscious to the addict him/herself. Our behavior always follows our core beliefs and serves to numb our unresolved emotional pain. Until the purpose behind the addiction is discovered and the pain resolved, the symptom of the addiction will continue.
The overall purpose of any addiction is to numb emotional pain. This emotional pain can be internalized rage, anger, grief, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, depression, fear, guilt, or shame. The need to engage in addictive behaviors to take the edge off unresolved emotional pain continues as long as the emotional pain remains.
If you have a headache, you may take aspirin to numb the pain. Why? Because aspirin does the job and relieves the headache. If someone told you that you couldn’t take the aspirin and you had to live with a chronic headache, it would be very tempting for you to “relapse” and take aspirin because you know it will dull the pain.
The key to conquering an addiction is to heal the emotional trauma fueling the need to self-medicate.
This is the same principle behind your addiction of choice. You use your addiction to dull emotional pain. You may be able to tolerate this pain for a time, but just like the headache, eventually you will grow weary of the pain and relapse. As long as you have unresolved emotional pain, you will have the addiction hiding around the corner ready to offer you relief. Until your headache is gone, aspirin will be an attractive option. Until your emotional pain is gone, addictions will also be an attractive option. Once your chronic headache is gone, you are able to focus on things in life other than the aspirin bottle. Once your emotional pain is gone, you are able to focus on things in life other than your addiction.
Addictions work. They anesthetize your pain. The problem is not the addiction itself, because your addiction does what it is suppose to do. The real problem is your need for the addiction. Eliminating the need for the addiction renders your addiction unnecessary. Your addiction would cease to be needed because the emotional pain is gone.
The reason behind addictive behavior is to self-medicate in order to numb unresolved emotion anger, pain, fear, guilt, or shame. Until this underlying “emotional baggage” is resolved, the addictive behavior is still necessary and will continue. When the underlying emotional issues are resolved, there is no reason for the addictive behavior because there are no painful emotions to avoid. But until the core emotional issues feeding the addiction are resolved, the addictive behavior will continue. One may be able to stop the addictive behavior temporarily, but when something in the here and now triggers these buried emotions from the past and they come flooding back, we will do what worked in the past to numb this pain. The core problem is not the addiction itself, but the emotional pain necessitating the need to self-medicate to feel better. This dance makes perfect sense, because most of us would chose to be numb than continually be in emotional pain.
Why traditional addiction recovery programs have limited success.
All addiction recovery programs have a limited success rate. Why? Because the vast majority of these programs focus on the symptom (the addiction) and not the cause (unresolved emotional pain). In these recovery programs you may learn how to avoid relapse, but you don’t deal with the reason you would want to relapse in the first place.
Addiction recovery programs are asking the question what and how: WHAT you are doing (your addictive behavior) and HOW to get you to stop this behavior (recovery and relapse prevention). For us the much more crucial question, and the one that most addiction treatment completely ignore, is WHY. Asking why you engage in addictive behavior cuts to the core of the particular behavior. If you don’t find out why one uses drugs, then attempts at sobriety will fail because the need to use will still remain.
Treating the symptom of addiction without treating the underlying reasons why someone engages in addictive behavior is a little like treating the symptom of high blood pressure without addressing the core life stresses that causes the high blood pressure in the first place. It is much easier to treat what is obvious and visible (the symptom), when the real issue is much deeper, hidden, and difficult to treat. Treating the symptom of addiction will seldom be successful as long as deeper unresolved emotional trauma remains. Relapse is almost always inevitable.
“If the underlying conditions aren’t treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we’ll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That’s the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent on alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependence. When the underlying problems are discovered and cured, the need for alcohol and drugs disappears.”
Chris Prentiss, founder of the Passages Addiction Cure Center in Malibu, California, and author of the book The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
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