- Updated on August 3, 2019
By Dr. Artour Rakhimov, Alternative Health Educator and Author
In the video above, Dr. Artour Rakhimov discusses with Lynn Himmelman about stopping addictions.
Dr. Artour Rakhimov introduces Part 3 where they discuss how NDT helps clients to solve problems with specific symptoms and situations. He asks Lynn Himmelmann: can she can provide practical cases and are there many cases, with a review of her clients, who solved these particular issues with NDT? And how common is it effective? Starting, for example, with addictions to alcohol and drugs?
Lynn replies that in terms of focusing specifically on New decision Therapy if it is going to help with an addiction the person who has the addiction needs to want the help because NDT is a process that is done from a state of willingness. That is the starting point. For those that have come to see her who have that willingness, who want to get to the other side of their addictions we have had great success.
The other thing that needs to be qualified is that it usually requires more than just New Decision Therapy to create really satisfactory and long-lasting changes. So there is a follow-up technique that we use in NDT that helps to dismantle the years of habitual behavior that have been set in place as a result of old coping defaults. Usually, with these old coping defaults where a person is trying to push down severe amounts of emotional pain, the addiction has become a way of coping or self-medicating. So when you are able to clear those raw unprocessed emotions out of the system, there is no longer such a driving force to keep the addiction alive any more.
However you do still need to debunk all those accumulated habits that have been patterned into the system and that’s what we do in the second phase that comes after NDT, called �cantillation� and Kandis Blakely based that on the work of Dr. John Diamond, drawing on a lot of his wise and wonderful work. Then she modeled it into something that was well-matched with the New Decision Therapy process.
Given this general overview, how does it work in relation to specifically alcohol and drug addictions? How does it help people? So first of all, it is dismantling the underlying trauma that is driving the addiction in the first place and also dismantling the old patterns of habit that are also driving the person towards addiction can make a world of difference. Not just for drug and alcohol addictions but also, for example, an addiction to sex, which is out of the normal range of what a person would need or want and the sex is just taking over, including addiction to pornography.
If a person is finding that the addiction is still continuing even after they have cleared the trauma, that’s when we go into the cantillation process. It is the cantillation where you can find or get the greatest success in terms of dismantling the addiction permanently but we do not even enter into a cantillation process without having taken someone through New Decision Therapy first. That’s very important.
Cantillation looks like it’s more about projecting a person into the future because NDT is dealing with what is past and cantillation is relating more to what’s coming next. Fears and anxieties about the future and what’s ahead and it taps into a whole other set of meridian points other than the ones we have used with New Decision Therapy that are connected to the qualities of life.
Food addictions, for example, to sugar and the area of eating disorders are also suitable for New Decision Therapy and cantillation and can be extremely beneficial. Lynn talks about how she has worked with clients who have gone through many years in various clinics to get past the eating disorder and this combination of NDT and cantillation finally got them through that tunnel and out the other side.
The trauma was the starting point and once they were able to get past all of that and out of that state of being stuck then they were able to get out of the constant eating addiction cycle which could be overeating, anorexia, bulimia all those different layouts of eating disorders.
In this YouTube video, Dr. Artour asks Lynn Himmelman about if addictions are caused by traumas.
