Wiki Progetto di Ricerca Metodo Paret

Addictions — An Integrated Method


Hub page of the Addictions portal of the School. Addictions (pathological dependencies on substances and processes) constitute one of the clinical fields where the Paret Method is most in demand, and one of the areas where the three angles of the Method — magnetic phenomenology, alchemical-hermetic work, polyvagal neurophysiology — meet with the greatest operational clarity. This page is the landing point of the portal: those seeking information on the School's approach to addictions start here.

A Position, as an Opening

The Paret Method does not conceive addiction as a disease in the strict medical sense, nor as a vice in the moral sense, nor as a choice in the voluntaristic sense. It conceives it as a dysfunctional solution to a real pain — an attempt, successful in the short term and failed in the medium term, to regulate an internal state that has become unbearable, replacing with an object or a process the natural regulation that human relationships and one's own nervous system are no longer able to provide.

Everything else follows from this position. Addiction is not fought with willpower — will is precisely the faculty that the addictive process neutralizes first — and it is not cured by abstinence alone, because the substance or process was the response to a question that remains open when they are removed. Instead, one works on the underlying pain, on the reconfiguration of the autonomic state, on the reconstruction of natural nurturing relationships, and on reopening the possibility of a life that has meaning and presence. The substance detaches itself, durably, when the ground that called for it has been worked.

One Person, Many Readings

The Paret Method's approach to addictions fully applies the epistemological principle set forth in One Person, Many Readings and in From the Hermetic to the Neurological — Correspondences: man is always the same, and different disciplines do not describe different people, they describe the same person from different angles.

Addictions are readable — simultaneously, without reducing one to the other — in four converging vocabularies:

Polyvagal neurophysiological reading
Addiction replaces the natural activation of the ventral vagal circuit: where the person should find regulation through human connection, contact, shared presence, they instead find a substitute pathway through an object or process that produces a rapid and predictable state change. This reading is explicitly proposed by Stephen Porges in Polyvagal Theory (2011) and the clinical literature that follows. See the in-depth entry under construction: Addictions and Polyvagal Theory.
Trauma and dislocation reading
Bruce Alexander, Gabor Maté, Vincent Felitti, Bessel van der Kolk have shown the massive correlation between childhood adversities (ACE Study Felitti 1998) and the development of addiction in adulthood. Maté summarizes: «Only people who are chronically and severely disconnected are vulnerable to addiction.» Dislocation — the enduring lack of psychosocial integration — is the ground; addiction is the symptom. Entry under construction: Addictions as Dislocation.
Typological and hermetic reading
Ancient and modern typological systems have described the stable patterns of reaction and defense that today's psychophysiology studies as fixations. The Hesychastic tradition cataloged eight as logismoi — intrusive passion-thoughts that hinder presence; contemporary enneagram articulates them as Eight Fixations; Stephen Wolinsky treats them as identity fusions with an object/process, and developed the model in six defusion stages that the Paret Method directly integrates. Addiction in this reading is a clinically manifest fixation: the same structural mechanism underlying a logismos or an enneagram fixation, brought to the level of clinical manifestation where a specific object/process has captured the reward system. Entry under construction: Logismoi, Fixations and Addictions.
NLP/behavioral and neuroplastic reading
NLP and applied neuroscience describe the erroneous learning process by which a person has learned, and neuroplastically reconfirmed over time, a dysfunctional association (substance/process ↔ state regulation). The work of Jeffrey M. Schwartz at UCLA on OCD and neuroplasticity has shown that new circuits can be established to bypass malfunctioning circuits, and that this process is applicable to addictions as well. The Paret Method integrates Schwartz's 4+1 Steps (Re-label, Re-attribute, Re-focus, Re-value, Re-create) as one of its procedural cores. Entry under construction: Schwartz's 4+1 Steps in the Paret Method.

The four readings describe the same person. It is not about choosing which is true: it is about having, for each subject and each moment of the work, the most operational perspective.

Sources of the Method

The method for addictions developed by Marco Paret and taught through ISI-CNV is explicitly an integrated method: it does not descend from a single school, and draws from scientifically and clinically diverse sources that are read in the unitary perspective described above. The main declared sources are:

  • The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (and their adaptation in other twelve-step program families) — read in their basic operational structure, independently of their original religious guise. The School adopts a secular version of the twelve steps that maintains the program's operational power while making it accessible to subjects from different cultural backgrounds.
  • The polyvagal theory of Stephen Porges — as a unitary neurophysiological grammar of the state transitions involved in addiction.
  • The mesmeric-polyvagal work of the Paret school — the integration of magnetic phenomenology and polyvagal theory as an operational tool for state modulation.
  • The felt sense of Eugene Gendlin (focusing) — as a practice of bodily listening that rebuilds the interoception lost to addiction.
  • Luxmind© — the School's method that uses work on inner light to activate creativity, imagination, and new possibilities for choice in an altered state.
  • The 4+1 Steps of Jeffrey M. Schwartz (UCLA) — a neural restructuring protocol for obsessive-compulsive disorders adapted to addiction, with the addition of a fifth step (Re-create) developed by the School.
  • The clinical thinking of Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, 2008) — on the role of trauma and dislocation as the ground of addiction.
  • Stephen Wolinsky's six-stage fusion-defusion model — as a technique for operational disidentification from the addictive object/process.
  • Work on energy constellations (development of the School) — as a method for working on the family and generational loads involved in addiction, distinct from the classic Hellingerian family constellation.
  • Mesmeric crisis and autonomous movement — as operational phases of emotional liberation and release of bodily contractions involved in cravings.
  • The ACE study by Vincent Felitti (1998) — as the empirical basis for the link between childhood adversity and addiction.
  • Daniel Siegel and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) — on the role of coregulation and attachment in the development of the child's autonomic system.
  • Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014) — on the implicit memory of trauma in the body and the pathways of somatic release.
  • A. H. Almaas — on the hole as the basic structure of identity deficiency that addiction attempts to fill.
  • The work of Marian Diamond on neuroplasticity from environmental enrichment, as the biological basis of therapeutic hope at any age.
  • Contemplative traditions (Buddhist, Hesychastic, alchemical) as sources of the presence practices that the School integrates as anti-addiction tools.

The Three Dimensions of Work

The method is organized on three interdependent levels, derived from the clinical literature of Wolinsky and Kiloby and redefined within the School's framework:

Tier 1 — The bodily contractions of trauma
The foundational level. The physical contractions of the body that hold the original trauma are the deepest driver of craving. Working here means working with autonomous movement, the mesmeric crisis, polyvagal touch, the felt sense.
Tier 2 — The deficiency stories and the false self
The structural level. The deep deficits («I am not enough», «I am unlovable», «I am inadequate», «I am incomplete») that the person has incorporated as a core identity and that addiction masks. Working here means working with Wolinsky's defusion, Kiloby Clearing Method inquiry, refocusing, and the unification of personalities (the Real Self and the Addict).
Tier 3 — Surface behaviors
The symptomatic level. The actual use of the substance or the addictive behavior, and the anxiety that accompanies it. Working only here produces unstable results: forced abstinence without work on the underlying tiers is the main source of addiction substitution (alcohol → workaholism → codependent relationships → food).

True recovery — distinct from mere superficial sobriety — requires continuous work on all three levels, with sequences and cycles adapted to the person.

Phases of the Method

The procedural structure of the method, as articulated by Marco Paret in the School's teaching material, goes through the following phases (not always all present, not always in the same order — the method is cyclical-recursive like the alchemical work).

0. Motivational Interviewing
Based on the work of Miller and Rollnick (2002), before any intervention a motivational interview is conducted that activates the subject's internal readiness, frees from ambivalence, and establishes the relational framework of safety within which everything else will be possible.
1. Building the felt sense
Without presence in the body there is no method. The first step is the reconnection of the subject to their own felt sense — the direct bodily sensation — according to the tradition of Gendlin and with the School's hypnotic relaxation techniques.
2. Understanding one's own neurological system
The subject learns to recognize their own polyvagal states and to read their reactions as survival reactions of the nervous system, not as moral defects. This dissolves shame and opens the working space.
3. Empowerment of the inner self
The subject is guided to recognize themselves beyond their addictive states. The Real Self existed before the addiction and will exist after. This is the condition for the next step.
4. Pendulation between states and crisis management
The subject is accompanied in guided oscillations between polyvagal states, in order to reactivate the mobility of the blocked autonomic system. When a crisis emerges (vibrations, crying, motor discharge), it is accompanied as a mesmeric crisis until release.
5. Energy constellations
On a single subject or group, work is done on the family and generational loads that support the symptom. This is not Hellingerian family constellation: it is a distinctive work of the School that aims to dissolve the memory of the load in one or two sessions, not to stage it repeatedly.
6. Refocusing — Schwartz's 4+1 steps
The procedural core of neural restructuring for exiting the addictive automatism:
  • Re-label — recognize the addictive thought/desire for what it is (a false message from the brain), distinguishing it from the real need.
  • Re-attribute — assign the source of the desire to the learned neural configuration, not to the self.
  • Re-focus — shift action to a healthy alternative activity for the time needed for the impulse to decay; use of Luxmind© to generate creative, non-automated options.
  • Re-value — recognize the real damage produced by the addictive pattern in one's life, in a non-judgmental but clear way.
  • Re-create — a development of the Paret Method, it is the phase of active reconstruction of a new possible life, not just the absence of the old one.
7. Defusion (Wolinsky's 6-step model)
Systematic work of disidentification from the addictive object/process and from the false self that demands it, through Unfindable Inquiry, Anxiety Inquiry, Compulsion Inquiry, Boomerang, and Kiloby's Clearing Method.
8. Relapse prevention
Recognition of the three stages of relapse (emotional, mental, physical), use of the HALT protocol (Hungry-Angry-Lonely-Tired), and the Big Three of prevention: Remember when, Play the tape through to the end, Actively avoid high-risk situations.
9. Developing presence as a lifestyle
Integral Presence as a background state that, once stabilized, makes addiction structurally less necessary because the void that called for it has been largely inhabited. Brief presence practices (the 3-5 second Stop, Awareness of Breath, Inner Body Awareness, Noticing Thought) integrated into the day.

Typologies and Addictions

The system of six character types has direct applications in work on addictions. Marco Paret distinguishes in particular two major patterns of the addictive subject:

Sensation seekers
Subjects for whom addiction is a search for intensity — sensation, excitement, high arousal. They confuse intensity with intimacy: a strong sensation produces an illusion of real closeness. Typical of addictions to cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA, high-stakes gambling, sex/porn addiction, some profiles of binge eating disorder. On the typological side they tend towards the Sulfur-Mercury (☉☿) or Mercury-Sulfur (☿☉) barycenter, with warm sympathetic prevalence.
Power seekers
Subjects for whom addiction is a search for control — over themselves, over others, over circumstances. Workaholism, extreme food control, some forms of strategic gambling, some dominant-type sex addiction. On the typological side they tend towards the Salt-Sulfur (♁☉) or Sulfur-Salt (☉♁) barycenter, with a tonic sympathetic posture stabilized by the dorsal.

A third configuration, less described but clinically important, is the satiation seeker — a subject for whom addiction is a search for closure, for numbness, for a protective block of painful experience (heroin, passive chronic alcohol, food as filler, binge eating, passive chronic marijuana, some forms of compulsive TV/social media). Typological barycenter tends towards Salt-Mercury (♁☿), with a dorsal vagal prevalence as a chronicized defensive modality.

These typologies are not clinical diagnoses and do not replace the DSM: they are operational maps for choosing, at the beginning of the work, the most suitable mode of engagement and sequence of techniques.

Application Areas

The method is applied by the School to the main areas of addiction, with specific adaptations developed in the teaching material and seminars. The dedicated in-depth entries are under construction and will be progressively linked from this page:

  • Alcoholism
  • Substance addiction (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, chronic cannabis)
  • Gambling
  • Sex addiction and porn addiction
  • Binge eating, compulsive eating, food addictions
  • Smoking
  • Workaholism and success addictions
  • Relationship addictions (codependency)
  • Digital addictions (social media, gaming, compulsive scrolling)

Most Frequent Objections

«You can't change at my age»
False, and empirically disproven. The studies of Marian Diamond (Berkeley) have shown that even adult brains — and even brains compromised in childhood — develop new connections and cortical enrichment in an enriched environment. Neuroplasticity has no age. Subsequent studies (Diamond et al.) have documented up to a twenty percent increase in cortical thickness in adult rats transferred to superior housing. The method is founded on this biological basis.
«It's a matter of will, you just have to want it»
False and harmful. Will is a specific function of the prefrontal cortex, and it is precisely the region that substances and addictive processes inhibit first. Asking a clinically manifest addictive subject to «want it more» is equivalent to asking a blind person to see better. Will can, however, be used differently: not against craving (where it always loses), but in support of the daily practice of the method (recovery group, reading, meditation, presence).
«It's genetic»
Only partially. The most up-to-date studies assign 40-60% of the risk of developing addiction upon exposure to genetics, and 40-60% to the environment. Prenatal exposure to maternal stress, childhood adversities (ACE Study Felitti), and contemporary social dislocation are heavy environmental factors that genetics alone does not explain. The «familiarity» of alcoholism reflects much more the environmental transmission of dislocation than the transmission of a gene.
«You have to hit rock bottom»
False. The idea that the subject must hit bottom before asking for help is one of the most harmful commonplaces in the discourse on addictions. Numerous subjects reach their bottom only when it is too late. The School's method does not wait for the bottom: it works on creating safety, activating the ventral vagal, opening relational space, from whatever point in the parabola the subject finds themselves.
«Once an addict, always an addict»
A statement that needs contextualization. The Addict part of the personality, built over time, remains as a learnable neural configuration in case of extreme stress or repeated exposure. But the Real Self is and remains broader than it, and true recovery — distinct from mere abstinence — is the stabilization of the Real Self as the person's center of gravity. Not «addicts forever»: people who have integrated the experience of addiction into their own history and transformed its meaning.

Status of Linked Entries

This is the hub page of the Addictions portal. The in-depth entries are under construction and will be progressively linked. The current status is as follows:

In planning
All in-depth entries: Addictions and Polyvagal Theory · Addictions as Dislocation (Maté, Felitti, van der Kolk) · Logismoi, Fixations and Addictions · Schwartz's 4+1 Steps in the Paret Method · Wolinsky's Defusion Applied to Addictions · the specific entries for each application area (alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex/porn, binge eating, smoking, workaholism).
Awaiting
Entry Sambucy. The School recognizes in Sambucy's chapter on addictions a direct convergence with the method presented here. The text is to be scanned from the copy in Marco Paret's possession; the entry will be opened after scanning, and will provide the historical-magnetic reference for the School's work in this field.

Linked Entries Already Online

Bibliographic References

Contemporary clinical work on addictions
Maté, G. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Knopf Canada, 2008.
van der Kolk, B. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., et al. «Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study». American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14(4), 1998: 245-258.
Alexander, B. K. The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford University Press, 2008.
State neurophysiology and neuroplasticity
Porges, S. W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton, 2011.
Schwartz, J. M., Begley, S. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. ReganBooks, 2002.
Schwartz, J. M., Stapp, H. P., Beauregard, M. «Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: A neurophysical model of mind/brain interaction». Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 360(1458), 2005: 1309-1327.
Diamond, M. C. Enriching Heredity: The Impact of the Environment on the Anatomy of the Brain. The Free Press, 1988.
Siegel, D. J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford, 1999, 2012².
Felt sense, focusing, defusion
Gendlin, E. T. Focusing. Bantam, 1978.
Gendlin, E. T. «Thinking beyond patterns: Body, language and situations». In B. den Ouden, M. Moen (eds.), The Presence of Feeling in Thought. Peter Lang, 1991.
Wolinsky, S. The Tao of Chaos: Essence and the Enneagram. Bramble Books, 1994.
Kiloby, S. Natural Rest for Addiction: A Revolutionary Way to Recover Through Presence. Non-Duality Press, 2014.
Twelve-step tradition
Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book. 1939, 4th ed. 2001.
School publications
Paret, M. Teaching materials of the Master in Hypnosis (addictions section), ISI-CNV, various years.
School reference website for polyvagal work: https://www.polyvagaltherapy.org
Estratto da "https://wiki.marcoparet.com/index.php?title=Addictions_—_un_metodo_integrato/en&oldid=2627"