Past Reality Integration
Addiction
You can become addicted to anything: alcohol, drugs, (not) eating, gaming, sports, watching TV… What initially feels good grows into something you can no longer do without and that dominates your daily life.
Types of addiction
There are two types of addictions:
- to substances (such as sugar, fat, alcohol, medicines and drugs)
- to behavior (such as buying, working, sex, porn, social media, telephone, watching TV, gambling and gaming addiction).
An addiction often starts with occasionally taking or doing something that makes you feel good right away. But then, imperceptibly, you need a 'shot' sooner and sooner, and also a larger amount or longer duration.
In extreme cases, it can happen that you are focused on your addiction all day long. You can no longer function normally and even lose your job, friends and family because of it.
Why do you become addicted
An addiction helps you not to feel bad feelings. It is a survival mechanism that dampens negative emotions such as fear, anger, insecurity, stress, loneliness and gloom.
From PRI's perspective, we know that even deeper pain lies beneath these kinds of emotions. Painful experiences from our childhood that we could not process and that still unconsciously influence our everyday lives.
Moreover, the addiction makes you believe that you can still get what you needed as a child by giving in to your addiction. Because suppressing your bad feelings feels good, and the idea that you can get what you need too, it is so difficult to stop your addictive behavior.
Addiction and PRI
Ingeborg Bosch explains how PRI views addiction to medication use.
Illusions
About liberation from the maze of destructive emotions
How PRI can help with addiction
PRI gives you concrete and practical tools to break your mental dependence on your addictive behavior. The physiological dependence that plays a role in certain addictions is not that difficult to break. Usually it is only a matter of a few days of abstinence.
The mental dependence is more difficult to break because on the one hand it suppresses your painful feelings and on the other hand it constantly creates the illusion that you get what you need with it. In a PRI process you will learn to allow feelings step by step and together with your therapist you will discover which old, painful feelings fuel your addiction.
By allowing these feelings, you will see that there are no threats in the here and now that you need to numb with your addiction. In this way your addiction loses its function and you regain your independence.
