Positive Support for Addicts & Their Families
This page will hopefully give addicts & their families some support & helpful hints to staying positive during their addiction treatment and/or recovery.
At Enterhealth Life Recovery Center, we encourage our clients to do positive affirmations daily. Whether you are going through, thinking about starting, or just finishing some form of addiction treatment, we encourage you to do the same…
Visit www.enterhealth.com or call us at 1-800-388-4601 for more information.There are two types of affirmations:
1. Traditional affirmations that you repeat to yourself.
2. Those that you receive from others.
In the latter case, your goal is learning to receive, to take in the support from another person. Learning to accept support and accept the love, kindness and offerings from others is not a natural skill. If you think about it you’ll realize that many of us do not even take in the abundance that is all around us!
As clients become more grounded, they notice more. They can take in more from others and they feel real gratitude.
And they didn’t even have to work at it! It came naturally as they progressed in therapy and the nervous system became more balanced.
Most people don’t use affirmations effectively.
Most are familiar with “I statement” affirmations (e.g. “I am a creative person”). The idea is to repeat this so many times that you overlearn it and so change how you feel about yourself.
The effectiveness of affirmations is based on the notion that thoughts affect the way we feel. That’s true but based on how the brain actually functions there’s a more effective way…working from the “bottom-up”.
Here’s what neuroscience tells us about how the brain and nervous system actually work:
As you know the brain is split into two hemispheres, the right and the left. When we are “thinking” of something it’s the left brain that lights up. The specific thought may have an emotional tone or “charge” that triggers parts of the right brain, but “thinking” is mainly a left brain activity.
Right Brain Functioning
By: Dr. Suzanne LaCombe & Terry McGraw, June 2006.
Updated: July 16, 2007.
You’ve probably had a “moment” in your life. You know, a moment of awareness, of being totally in the here and now. Well, you were in your right brain. Our present moments are right brain based. That’s because all our sensory information comes through the right brain.
It’s the right brain that gives us that sense of being connected to one another. It’s called the relational right brain for a good reason. From PET scans and neuroimaging technology, we have learned that the right brain regulates or influences many aspects of our behavior. And, it’s often those aspects that we’re trying to change through psychotherapy.
Those things often have to do with our relations and connections with others:
- Self-awareness,
- Empathy,
- Identification with others,
- Trust,
- Emotion,
- Nonconscious communication,
- Attachment and,
- Recognition of emotional faces.
Other right brain functioning includes visuo-spatial recognition (imagery), autobiographical memory, stress modulation and holistic thinking. The right side of the brain also has an integrative map of the body.
The right brain in counseling
When you’re in counseling it’s often useful to understand the role that the right brain plays in the process. Because it’s the center for processing emotion and of our sense of identity, it has a huge influence on how we feel about ourselves and how we manage our relationships.
Modifying the habitual patterns of feeling and behavior that are “encoded” in the right brain is the primary goal of all therapies, although many don’t say this explicitly. But because these changes can be made more readily in a working relationship with the right therapist, we suggest a new approach to counseling.
The right brain defined.
We use the term “right brain” to refer in a general way to those brain systems responsible for regulating our ability to interpret, navigate and thrive in the world. In particular, these systems also determine the quality of our relationships with others, including the ability to form secure emotional attachments.
Technically speaking, the right brain encodes the implicit procedural memories which accumulated in the earliest years of life, well before the analytical left brain came online.
Developmentally….
This right hemisphere develops and becomes active in the first two years of life, whereas the left hemisphere doesn’t come online until about age two. Although the right brain develops first before any verbal or conceptual ability appears, an intense amount of learning happens in those first years.
We learn about ourselves and the world through direct experience, not through words, and our experiences, especially those of our caregivers, will be encoded in procedural memories that form the basis of our emotional life.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of procedural memories is their non-conscious operation. Analysis, thought, and language are all conscious operations of the mind and are characteristic of “left brain” abilities, whereas the influence of the right brain occurs largely outside of our awareness.
This is the achilles heel of psychotherapies that take a verbal, investigative approach to personal change. The procedural memories that fundamentally condition our emotional lives are laid down long before the rational mind appears and are unaffected by intellectual efforts to change them.
Only by recreating as much as possible the initial conditions in which the procedures were encoded can these deep neural structures be modified.
This is the primary insight of somatic therapy.
Which should be dominant, the left brain or the right?
Note that both concepts are fictions–there is no such thing as a right brain, separate and independent of a left one. They are not in conflict, nor is one “superior” to the other. For example, when you’re having a conversation, your left brain will focus on the meaning of the words exchanged, while your right brain will observe whether the other person gets what you’re saying.
We use the terms “left brain” and “right brain” to refer to the two basic ways the brain processes information. Thus, when we say that someone is “in their right brain” it simply means that they are processing their experience in a holistic, “big picture” way.
In fact, no one functions on one side or the other all the time, as you will see. It’s just that distinguishing these two brain functions helps you to understand how some counseling techniques work and why they are effective.
Counseling and the Right Brain
This is why we emphasize an understanding of the crucial role of the right brain on this site. It turns out that we’re born already wired for connection, and we strive for it from the very beginning. Without connection with another person (another brain), the brain literally can’t grow. That original connection has consequences, good and bad, that can persist for a lifetime.
Most importantly for counseling, it means that if you want to change the deep, non-conscious patterns that determine your reactions to life’s events you need an attuned connection with another person. In effect, you need to recreate the original conditions (as much as possible) in which those patterns were laid down in the past.
And there’s no one better equipped to take you through this process than a professional counselor who has worked hard in their own therapy to develop a high level of integration and empathy. That enables the right therapist to create an environment where it’s safe to feel and stay with your emotions and body sensations (i.e. affect regulation) as you explore them in your sessions.
Why right brain-based counseling is important
The right hemisphere is dominant in the first three years of life; it’s the first to mature, before the left brain. Emotional experiences, especially those involving caregivers, are unconsciously stored and processed in the right brain during those first years.
What gets encoded is an ability to handle social relationships as well as knowledge and expectations about how others will react to our efforts to communicate and connect.
The right brain is central for counseling because it regulates all the crucial conditions for establishing a successful therapeutic relationship: attunement, empathy, resonance, sense of safety, and unconscious communication and processing.
So when we talk about brain plasticity, “rewiring” the neuropathways, and restoring healthy, implicit self-regulation, we’re referring to the right brain.
Although you don’t need to know anything about neural anatomy, brain plasticity, flight-fight responses and the rest in order to take advantage of counseling, we believe that knowing how the mind-body-brain works can reduce the mystery (and the fear) out of going to counseling.
It will also help you maximize your counseling sessions because when you understand what the therapist is getting at, you will:
- reduce anxiety and misapprehensions,
- enhance and solidify your connection with the therapist, and
- increase your courage and determination to stay with the emotions and body sensations that arise.
Left Brain Functioning
By: Dr. Suzanne LaCombe and Terry McGraw, June 2006.
The left brain “thinks” in language. It’s that “calculating intelligence”1 that tells us not to forget to pick up milk on the way home from work.
You’ve probably seen a human brain, that two sided grey mass with deep groves cut into it. The two sides or hemispheres each has separate ways of organizing our experience of the world: simplistically speaking, the left brain deals with thinking while the right brain processes emotions.
The Left Brain Function in Personal Counseling
Psychotherapy has had a long tradition of using left brain “talk therapies”. Creating meaning from our experiences is undoubtedly one of the most useful aspects of left-brain talk therapy, and what often draws people into counseling.
All psychotherapies use a left brain approach to some extent, since we typically use the left brain when we talk or reflect on our thoughts.
However, given our greater understanding of the mind-body connection today, left brain approaches when used on their own are overrated in terms of their ability to produce long term results.
Let me explain why.
Using reasoning (ie. the power of thought) to make decisions is a valued aspect of our culture. Indeed, those who do this well are highly regarded.
One example of left brain decision-making is considering all the pros and cons of a difficult choice. As we think through a decision we have the feeling of control. We have a sense of mastery. It might go something like this: “I will think through this decision, make a choice, and do it!” This sense of empowerment is often why a strategy of relying on the left brain to make decisions is so attractive.
It’s in the “doing” where the problem surfaces. When you fail to follow through on your decision you will likely blame it on faulty thinking–or worse–a lack of will power.
However, if you reflect on this process you might find that what is often left out is the emotional element, in other words your feelings. Yet our feelings do not lend themselves to easy interpretation and that’s the difficulty. Emotions tend to be messy–and don’t give us the same feeling of control.
I believe the popularity of left brain approaches can be attributed to this fact. One can feel more in control (solely using one’s thoughts) and be more comfortable in the counseling session (i.e. for the client and therapist).2
Traditional “talk therapies” focus on the left brain in order to create change. The theory is that by changing the way you think you automatically change your emotions, and thus your behaviour. These approaches (e.g. solution-focused, cognitive behavioural) have been very successful in changing discrete aspects of behaviour and we have several decades of research that confirms this fact.3
You can imagine that using a left brain approach is a good way to start the change process especially if you are really nervous about starting therapy. You can always move on to an approach that utilizes both right brain and left brain strategies when you’re ready.
However, as we have tried to explain on this site, in comparison to a right-brain focused psychotherapy, the left brain strategy is limited in its ability to effect fundamental change. Progress is much faster and the potential is there for more significant shifts when the right brain is included in therapy.
In summary…
On this site we use “left brain” to reference the fact that the left hemisphere is the physical location of our capacity for logical thinking, abstract analysis, and verbal dexterity.
In short, the left brain specializes in processing information in a conscious, specific and linear way, while the right brain specializes in unconscious, global and holistic processing.
We could say that the left brain sees the trees, while the right brain takes in the whole forest!
Related Topic
Left and Right Brain Functioning
Notes
1 From an awesome video by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor as she describes her experience when she lost a good chunk of her left brain functioning.
2 Karen J. Maroda was pretty honest in her estimation of what it’s going to take to do good work as an analyst: “The type of emotional availability I am discussing requires so much energy and attention from the analyst, as well as self-awareness, that it severly limits the number of patients that anyone could see in a given day. Thus, practicing this way is not only potentially personally threatening, but also places significant limits on the analyst’s personal income.
From: Maroda, Karen, J. (1999) “Show Some Emotion: Completing the Cycle of Affective Communication”. In Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press pp. 121 – 142.
3 There are probably few therapists who actually solely use left brain strategies. A therapist who is attuned to the client is using their right brain strategies to calm the clients’ right brain. Cognitive behavioural therapy often includes the use of relaxation. Most relaxation exercises are calming to the right brain.
