So, you have an addiction. Alcohol, drugs, coffee, porn, pasta, cake, gambling, shopping, shoplifting, chocolate, running, novels, news, your phone, facebook, twitter, and on and on. Starting to sound a little like everyone is on this list somewhere?
Almost everyone is on the list. Almost everyone has a behavior or substance that they continue to overuse in order to fend off the root problem. Addiction is not causal. Oh sure, addiction may have caused you some consequences, perhaps some serious ones… but, in and of itself, addiction is a symptom. Of what?
Addiction, whether a substance or behavior, is a method to ward off the discomfort of anxiety. At a deep level, the gateway drug to any of these substances or behaviors is childhood neglect, abuse, or trauma at any age. It doesn’t have to be major, nor a single event… essentially, in many ways, these are events that happen to all of us. We are all survivors of childhood. Some horrific, some wonderful, but none perfect. Everyone seems to carry some anxiety.
Our goal is to both raise your resilience to anxiety, while at the same time making changes to help lower the anxiety you experience. In order to beat addiction, stopping is one thing, staying stopped requires a deep therapeutic effort to address these underlying causes. Let us help.