Medication addiction can creep in. Not only in the United States are there medications that people can become "addicted" to, even in the Netherlands there are medications that you can become dependent on, or that feel so good that it's hard to stop taking them.
These are often medications that help with pain, give peace of mind or make you sleep better. You often get these medications for a reason, and when they work well, this is super nice. However, often you can only use them for 2 weeks and if you stop taking them then your problems are just there again.
Frustrating!
If you then manage to persuade your doctor to keep giving the medication, which is now much more difficult than it used to be, you run a risk of becoming addicted to it. If you used to convince your doctor that you need the medication and you've been taking it for a very long time now, there's even the possibility that the medication will no longer work properly.
This is because most tranquilizers and sleep medications are drugs that your body gets used to. So then you need more each time, which is something doctors don't really do.
And then, because you are truly addicted, you can step into "the night pharmacy," where you don't even know if the pill you are given is safe or if the person you are dealing with is safe for you.
Enough reason to quit your drug addiction.
What is drug addiction?
Drug addiction works similar to "normal" drug addiction, but is often difficult to diagnose. For example, if you suffer from chronic pain and are given painkillers for it, it may not always be clear to the practitioner whether someone is using or abusing the pain medication responsibly.
Meanwhile, though, there are specialists who can make this distinction very clear[1].
If you use painkillers like candy or panic when you can't find them for a while, this does indicate drug addiction.
You can also "make sense" of the medication. A cue in your environment can trigger such a "craving," which is often also a major cause of relapse if you did manage to stop taking the medication[2].
Effects of drug addiction
Despite medication often being well researched so that you don't experience too many side effects, misuse of medication can still cause problems. Opioids can even be deadly in the case of an overdose.
In addition, long-term medication use can cause kidney damage and liver damage[3]. Very inconvenient if you have to go on kidney dialysis early just because you couldn't stay off certain medications.
With long-term medication use, you can also become dependent on the drug causing withdrawal symptoms if you stop taking it all at once. Habituation also causes you to need more and more[4].
With tranquilizers and sleep medication, habituation can make it difficult to put you under anesthesia if you ever need to go under the knife. Therefore, at an intake for surgery at the hospital, always be honest about medications you are taking (even if you do it through the night pharmacist), this will prevent you from waking up in the middle of surgery because they didn't give you enough anesthesia.
Drug addiction treatment
If you are with a doctor who determines that you suffer from drug addiction, work can first be done to reduce the medication incrementally until you no longer need anything. Physically, this is something that works. The steps taken are small, making it easier for your body to stop taking the medication.
But addiction is often also mental, and then taking something less each time often feels exciting. So there is often a mental element to treating drug addiction as well.
For addictions, regardless of source, cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing[5] and family therapy are then often used.
This type of treatment often works best when combined with tapering off medication or having substitute medication.
Rewarding achievement of certain goals also helps treat addiction. For example, consider achieving a certain low dose, or stopping medication completely and maintaining it for a certain amount of time[6].
Hypnosis can also play a role in quitting addictions, such as drug addiction[7]. However, it is not a standard solution. Hypnosis can also be reimbursed as an alternative therapy. So for this, you have to have additional insurance, or people pay for it themselves.
For example, hypnosis can play a role in behavior change, such as stopping medication abuse, and improving one's self-control[8].
Hypnosis against drug addiction
A hypnotherapist can help people with drug addiction. Depending on the problems a person is experiencing, and for which medication was once a solution, a hypnotherapist can choose from a variety of techniques to help people with their beliefs about medication, health and how things in life are "supposed" to be.
The cool thing is that many medications people are addicted to are classified as hypnotic medications (sedative hypnotics). So the state you achieve with the medication could theoretically be achieved with hypnosis as well.
For example, hypnosis is also used to promote relaxation. So if you are given muscle relaxants or other tranquilizers and become addicted to them, knowledge of self-hypnosis and relaxation can be a good alternative to replace the medication with. Especially if you don't actually need the medication.
Research also shows that people taking barbiturates, a certain type of medication, who would like to stop taking that medication can be helped by hypnosis[9].
Hypnosis to improve sleep
For example, if you have been put on sleep medication and have become addicted to it, a hypnotherapist can help you sleep right out of it, fall asleep faster or sleep through it.
Hypnotherapy, for example, can help you fall asleep faster. This is then done with visualizations that help you relax and become sleepy[10].
A summary study also shows that for most people who have a sleep disorder , hypnotherapy has a positive effect on improving sleep. In only 9% of people was there no result at all. This means that hypnosis can affect sleep for 91% of people with sleep problems[11].
A hypnotherapist can help people with sleep problems in several ways. For example, by promoting relaxation.
Thereby, people often have sleep problems all their lives. Because of this, anchoring the feeling of falling asleep can also play a role in evoking the mental state that helps you fall asleep.
This usually involves regression, retrieving the memory of being able to sleep well and how that felt, and the NLP technique of an anchor.
On the contrary, if there are traumas that prevent people from sleeping well, resolving the trauma can help. For example, using a conversation with the inner child or a technique that clarifies that the event of trauma is really over can help calm the nervous system and reduce wakefulness.
In this way, stopping sleep medication can already be much easier.
Hypnosis to relieve pain
However, if a person is addicted to pain medication, then anti-pain techniques can actually be used . In any case, the state of hypnosis already helps to interpret pain differently. People who are very good at self-hypnosis can often cope well with pain during a medical procedure and can reduce chronic pain[12].
Especially since pain medications can stop working over time, it is helpful to have knowledge of hypnosis and self-hypnosis to still be able to manage your pain or get off the medication altogether (very helpful with drug addiction)[13].
In pain management, promoting relaxation also plays an important role in hypnotherapy. It also looks at your thoughts about pain, how pain affects your life and techniques that help you experience more control over pain.
A hypnotherapist, in addition to stopping thoughts that only make pain worse, through fear of the future, can also give visualizations that help you with control.
For example, at Hypnosis Institute Netherlands, trainees learn how visualizing some kind of button, such as volume control or heat button on the oven, and using that button can help people change the experience of pain.
This may sound very crazy when you read this like this, that such visualization can help, but exactly how this works is what you learn during the training. If people can do this, the fear of stopping pain medication is a lot lower and this can help people get rid of drug addiction.
Learning hypnosis for drug addiction
Do you already help people suffering from drug addiction or want to help people in general? If so, knowledge of hypnosis can be invaluable in furthering treatments.
Come to the free master class for an introduction.
Or register directly for one of our events or trainings.
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