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Many of us who treat chemically dependent persons have seen the agony, the guilt and the shame chemically dependent persons experience when they are unable to maintain their sobriety. We have seen the chronic anxiety, the "white knuckles", the constant vigilance, the thoughts that won't stop day or night. We have come to see many chemically dependent persons "locked in" to a more or less continuous state of stress, tension and anxiety. We have heard from the mouths of the alcoholics we treat that they "can't feel comfortable", "can't express their feelings", they "can't loosen up and unwind". They cannot find the inner peace and calm that they seek. We know that they then turn to alcohol or their drug of choice to find at least temporary escape from this condition, beginning the spiral of chemical dependency once again.
Researchers in the Veterans' Administration Hospital system now appear to have demonstrated the positive effects of a non-drug therapy which normalizes the chemically dependent persons emotional state and relieves them of the desire to drink. These researchers are reporting 80% abstinence after as long as five years in very severe chronic alcoholics who have failed to improve after multiple traditional treatments. With EEG biofeedback, small flat metal discs are placed on the person's scalp and the actual electrical activity going on in their brain is fed into a computerized feedback instrument. The computer then automatically lets the person know when they are moving into a slightly more relaxed state than the one that they start in. Sometimes a person is born with a brain that simply doesn't do "relaxed" very much. This person may be very, very susceptible to the effects of drugs and alcohol - the familiar "self-medicating" idea. The good news is that your brain is very much able to learn to get into a deeply calm state. EEG biofeedback can be thought of as electronically guided meditation. If you've got a very noisy or a very sleepy mind, learning meditation can be tough. EEG biofeedback may help you learn faster.
Over the course of about thirty neurotherapy sessions the chemically dependent person learns for the first time how to voluntarily create the state of inner peace, calm and tranquillity and focus that they had been mistakenly seeking from their drug of choice. Accessing this kind of calm becomes a new skill, much like having learned how to ride a bicycle, the effect is that the person no longer seeks their drug their personalities appear to normalize and they become more mellow and less uptight and irritable. The effect also appears to be quite permanent and retraining has been necessary only in isolated cases. The technique does not work for everyone, but it works in a very high percentage of persons who have had multiple treatment failures in the past.
Neurotherapy appears to be a powerful addition to the help that can be provided by traditional treatment programs and the support that chemically dependent persons can get from Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and other support groups working toward long-term abstinence and maintenance of sobriety.
