Choke the addiction cycle

Can We Choke the Addiction Cycle by DE-emphasizing it?

In general there are no shortages of triggering events that effect people dealing with addiction and self-sabotaging behavior. However, the holiday season is particularly fraught with them.

As addiction counselors we have our work cut out for us: help steer someone down a narrow and difficult path. However, have you considered that our continual attention to our client’s addiction, success, and at times failures may feed their addiction cycle?

Consider this for a moment. When we talk to our clients, there is a huge focus on the negative impact of addiction, not only to themselves, but also their families. As enticement, we may even discuss the positive aspect of living without addiction. Notice, however, our emphasis continues to be on addiction. This in turn feeds the powerful momentum in the minds of our clients that continues to revolve around addictive thinking, fantasizing, and behavior. And strange as it may seem, it’s not their fault!

That’s the power of the Law of Attraction. Not only does each thought attract another like it, the next thought has a greater level of momentum, or intensity. Therefore a simple conversation about overcoming addiction may actually be a trigger for many people. Ever tried going on a diet and NOT thinking about food? It’s the same principle.

Ernest Holmes, teacher and author of The Science of Mind reminds us that “life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” With that in mind, how do we help our clients release their momentum on one subject and develop it on another if we can’t even talk about the subject?
Start by changing their focus. For example, instead of building your process around overcoming addiction (notice the focus is still on addiction), emphasize the joy of living a life filled with freedom, self-fulfillment and excitement. In other words, place the emphasis in the area that you want to build momentum in – joy, well-being, self-care. Why is this important? Nobody relapses when they are only focused on the momentum of their well-being. Just like you cannot put your car in reverse and drive forward! Unfortunately, many people have split energy as they also focus on their addiction and when triggered, can relapse.

It’s important to recognize that this process takes time as they have already built up a powerful momentum in one direction and we are asking them to shift course mind stream. I find Phentermine online that explaining how momentum works as evidence of their powerful thoughts fills my clients with much needed confidence and a feeling of control over their lives. For many this is a new and unfamiliar feeling.

Next month I’ll discuss how momentum from your thoughts and beliefs impact your clients’ recovery.

Naheed Oberfeld is an EFT practitioner, coach, and speaker based out of Germantown Maryland. She uses EFT and the Law of Attraction to help her clients live their full potential by releasing patterns of behavior that keep them stuck. She has helped her clients grow their business, reach their career goals, and mend broken relationships, all while creating a life of ease, joy, and passion.

If life is a journey, Naheed helps you enjoy the ride! She can be reached at naheed@oberfeldcoaching.com. Her website is www.OberfeldCoaching.com.


Visualizing Your Way Out Using Your Emotional Guidance System

Last month I talked about the 3 step system to help you move yourself up the emotional ladder.

Hicks Emotional ScaleStep one starts with acknowledging how you feel right now. Step two, which can be the hardest, is to accept yourself as you are. When I was deep in my depression and feeling a lot of self-disgust, I had to believe that I was worthy of a better life, even though I had no external evidence for it. This is the juice you need to fire your engine and get out of your behavior cycles. And finally, step three is reaching for the next higher feeling.

After reading my article last month, a reader asked how do we move from the lower levels of guilt and shame to living a healthier and self-affirming life? This is the focus of this month’s article.

It starts with an understanding of the Law of Attraction – your life is a giant mirror and your outer world faithfully reflects your inner emotions about yourself, the world, and your place in it.

Are you in a situation where your past or present behavior makes you feel guilty, shameful, undeserving of love? If so, you are experiencing the lowest vibration (emotion) on Abraham Hicks’ Emotional Guidance Scale. Click here for the full sized scale. What you may not realize is that the more you focus on these emotions, the more you recreate them in your life. The goal is to reach for the next higher level emotion inside of you.

Start by taking 15 minutes daily and thinking about one aspect about yourself that you can appreciate. For example, with my weight loss clients who claim they hate everything about their body, I ask, even your eyes? How about your fingers? If you have trouble with it, go back to childhood. Perhaps you were a curious child, or was imaginative, full of live? Reconnect with that piece of you, no matter how long ago that was.

As you focus on this part of you that you appreciate, what feelings come up? Can you feel any positive emotion for that part of you, no matter how trivial it may be? Take deep, full breaths and allow these feelings to penetrate every cell in your body. How does it feel? Does it make you feel light? See if you intensify the physical feelings and emotions. As you focus on these feelings, ask yourself if there is one positive situation that you feel you deserve today. It does not have to be big. It could be a smile from a stranger, or maybe a word of kindness or appreciation. But it does have to be something that you do not emotionally reject because you feel undeserving.

Regardless of what your life looks like now, it is important to realize that our current circumstances do not need to define our future reality. Every sports star has to first visualize order Phentermine herself as a winner many years prior to the first competition. As you spend time visualizing appreciating yourself, the Law of Attraction will do the heavy lifting for you. It will bring you the next thought of appreciation, which will be matched by another. Soon you will experience people responding to you in positive ways and circumstances and situations will literally rearrange themselves to match your thoughts and emotions. That’s the power of the Law of Attraction! All it requires is spending a few minutes sending kind thoughts your way.

“The Law of Attraction is responding to your thought, not to your current reality. When you change the thought, your reality must follow suit. If things are going well for you, then focusing upon what is happening now will cause the well-being to continue, but if there are things happening now that are not pleasing, you must find a way of taking your attention away from those unwanted things.” – Abraham Hicks (Money & the Law of Attraction)

By doing this exercise you have the ability to quickly change your patterns of thought, and eventually your life experience. You can read more about it in The Astonishing Power of Emotions: Let Your Feelings Be Your Guide by Esther and Jerry Hicks.

Naheed Oberfeld is an EFT practitioner, coach, and speaker based out of Germantown Maryland. She uses EFT and the Law of Attraction to help her clients live their full potential by releasing patterns of behavior that keep them stuck. She has helped her clients grow their business, reach their career goals, and mend broken relationships, all while creating a life of ease, joy, and passion.

If life is a journey, Naheed helps you enjoy the ride! She can be reached at naheed@oberfeldcoaching.com. Her website is www.OberfeldCoaching.com


Addiction and the Law of Attraction - Two Girls Smoking

Addiction and the Law of Attraction

Many of us are familiar with the principle of the Law of Attraction – that which you focus on is what you’ll create in your life. Some of us may even practice a version of it to create our desired life. However, how many of us have given thought to the idea that cycles of addiction (drugs, food, sex, or even undesirable thoughts and impulses) are evidence of the Law of Attraction powerfully at work?

The basis of the principle, as explained by Abraham in the book Law of Attraction by Jerry and Ester Hicks, states that when we give our attention to something and anticipate it with strong emotions, it becomes more sharply focused in our lives.

There are many theories that explain the reasons why addictions have such a powerful hold on us. One of them is the positive-incentive theory which states “that addicts are first and foremost caught in a web of expectation.” According to this theory, the anticipation of the pleasure (or release) outweighs the actual experience. Award-winning professors of Psychology who study addiction, Terry E. Robinson and Kent C. Berridge “emphasize that it’s not the pleasure of the drug that is fundamental to addiction. Rather, it’s the wanting, the anticipation of a joyful high, or the release and disinhibition of drunkenness.”

The emotional highs that Robinson and Berridge describe are exactly the types of emotions that Abraham talks about. The problem is that addicts are using the very real power of the Law of Attraction to create deeper cycles of addiction. The driving force, the fuel of any manifestation is their singular focus and strong emotion.

If misplaced emotions lead to self-sabotaging behavior, what’s the solution? In the 1990s a Stanford engineer by the name of Gary Craig developed a system he called Emotional Freedom Technique, better known as EFT or tapping (because we tap on acupressure points). It was adapted from an earlier therapy created by a psychologist named Dr. Roger Callahan. The benefit of EFT (or tapping) is to experience freedom from conscious, but mostly unconscious emotions that keep us stuck in undesirable behavior patterns.
How does EFT work? You start by tuning into a distressing incident, such as a recent relapse. You tap on your acupressure points as you recall the event. The focus on the event can bring about a full body stress response which creates a visceral and emotional reaction. Typically the emotions are layered. An example might be feeling a sense of self-loathing for being “weak.” As you continue to “tap” the primary emotion subsides and it may be replaced by another one, such as feeling “out of control.” During the course of one session, you can uncover and release close to a dozen different emotions. Often times you also uncover an unwillingness (at some level) of letting go of the anticipatory high, which justifies the need for the addition.

As we “tap” on old traumatizing events and emotions, our brain goes through a period of reconsolidation, and our emotions related to that event change. This in turn shifts our beliefs related to those events. In other words, as we release the emotional high we have associated with an addiction, we release the belief that props up the emotion, and ultimately the behavior begins to collapse from the inside out.

Only at this stage will an addict be emotionally willing to redirect the strong emotions felt for the anticipated high towards more self-affirming behavior, once again harnessing the power of the Law of Attraction!

Naheed Oberfeld is an EFT practitioner, coach, and speaker based out of Germantown Maryland. She uses EFT and the Law of Attraction to help her clients live their full potential by releasing patterns of behavior that keep them stuck. She has helped her clients grow their businesses, reach their career goals, and mend broken relationships, all while creating a life of ease, joy, and passion.

If life is a journey, Naheed helps you enjoy the ride! She can be reached at naheed@oberfeldcoaching.com for a no-obligation, complimentary coaching session. Her website is www.OberfeldCoaching.com.

[1] James L. Furrow, Johnson S. M., Bradley B. A. (Eds.) (2011). Emotionally Focused Casebook: New Directions in Treating Couples. Routledge.


"An approach to the treatment of offenders which emphasizes the role of altering thinking patterns in bringing about change in an offender's life."