Matthew Perry, a famous actor best known for his role in the TV sitcom Friends, had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse. He spent over nine million dollars and much of his life in and out of treatment centers and sober-living facilities. By the age of 26, he had undergone 14 rehab stays, detoxed 65 times, and undergone 14 surgeries related to his substance abuse. Perry also attended more than 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings throughout his relatively short life.
On October 28, 2023, Matthew Perry passed away at the age of 52. The coroner’s report revealed high levels of the drug ketamine in his postmortem blood specimens.
People often turn to drugs, whether illegal, prescribed, or alcohol, to escape uncomfortable emotional states. They seek relief from their negative feelings, not the highs or lows these substances offer. However, while these substances may temporarily numb the pain, they often lead to more severe problems, sometimes resulting in death.
If you’ve ever experienced severe pain, like breaking a bone and going to the ER, you were not thinking about getting high—you just wanted relief from the pain. Similarly, when having a great day, the idea of getting drunk or taking drugs is likely far from your mind.
In my 79 years of life and 40 years as a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed that new therapy modalities emerge slowly within the mainstream therapy community. This reluctance to change stems from people’s general discomfort with leaving their comfort zones. Furthermore, entrenched interests often resist new, more effective therapies to protect their status quo.
Surprisingly, addiction services still rely heavily on the outdated 12-Step AA Model, which has a discouraging success rate of only 13%. Despite its lack of effectiveness, billions of taxpayer dollars continue to support these methods, benefiting stakeholders who are invested in preserving the current system. Meanwhile, long-term talk therapies like CBT remain the primary modalities taught in graduate programs, even though they frequently fall short in effectively healing trauma.
Therapies that rely on using the cognitive brain to heal the emotional brain frequently fail. Emotional healing needs to come first; only then can behavior change follow. This is why CBT, for example, may not effectively heal trauma.
People do not come to therapy for explanations—they come to change their emotional experiences.
To truly heal emotional states, clients need to do something different when revisiting their trauma. When people recall a past memory, they are recalling the last time they thought about it. Introducing new information during this process can alter the original emotion tied to the memory, much like rewriting a cassette tape rather than accessing a hard drive.
You don’t need a deep understanding of brain physiology to help clients heal. The key is to guide them to break their habitual responses to trauma. For example, when I began my practice in 1985, I observed that clients would often display the same physical reactions to traumatic emotions or memories, like a robotic trance. I termed this the “thousand-mile stare” and saw my role as a “Trance Buster.”
To break these patterns, I introduced clients to the NLP Trauma/Phobia Cure, now known as the Rewind Technique or Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories (RTM). This technique involves clients visualizing themselves in a cinema, watching their younger selves experience the trauma in black and white, then rewinding the memory from a first-person perspective. This method worked for over 90% of my clients. Yet, even after four decades, it is still not widely recognized as an evidence-based practice.
Over time, I developed more than 20 different ways to help clients heal trauma and phobias by encouraging them to do something different while experiencing their limiting beliefs or unwanted feelings. Creativity in therapy can significantly alter a client’s emotional state due to brain elasticity.
Several effective trauma-healing modalities don’t require drugs, electricity, or surgery, nor do they need a deep understanding of brain physiology. Techniques like Clean Language, FreeSpotting, EMDR, and BrainSpotting can provide emotional resets within minutes. It’s essential to have various tools at your disposal because what works for one person might not work for another.
If a therapeutic tool doesn’t show positive results after one session, it may be time to try a different method or therapist. Each client is unique, and having a diverse set of modalities allows for a more tailored and effective approach to therapy. Some clients may even experience significant improvements after just one session, although others might need multiple sessions or different interventions.
- We can do better in therapy by embracing and integrating diverse, effective modalities. Joel Blackstock, LICSW, has created an excellent video discussing this topic, which I highly recommend watching.
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