Healing Your Inner Child, The Neuroscience of Addiction & NeuroRepatterning

SDC, welcome back to another episode. My name is Barti Arez. I'm your host on the stop drinking coach and happy New Year. It's been a little while since my last episode and I'm super excited to come out with today's episode. I'm going to be talking about the connection between our past and the present, namely the connection between our inner child and our relationship to alcohol. I've talked a little bit about this before and some of my previous episodes, my episode titled The Brain is a predictive modeling system. I go quite deep into it, but I really just want to focus this one in specifically because if you've been listening to my podcast, you've heard me talk about in my last couple, this new emergent technology that I've built called neuro repatting. It currently does not exist on planet Earth. It's a brand new system for addiction recovery and I'm going to explain it to you as we kind of move through this process because it's going to help you better connect the dots and understand number one, why you drink, number two, why you're pulled towards alcohol, why three, why you keep going back to alcohol despite consciously and intelligently knowing that alcohol is bad for you. It's causing damage and destruction to your health and to your family and how to actually quit drinking in a way that doesn't involve like feeling the loss of alcohol, feeling raw will power continually 24/7 and feeling like you're just holding your breath until your next drink. Okay, so what we're looking at here is this. So when you're born, right, we've talked about this before, when you're born, you are effectively an empty vessel, you're an empty sponge. There is no programming, your nervous system has no data, no code, everything is clean. You are literally a sponge waiting for instruction and most adults are products of their environment and who they were and who they were around and what happened between the ages of zero and seven. So by the time you're seven years old, the baseline architecture of your brain and nervous system is formed and built. The subtleties of how you feel about yourself, your identity, beliefs around what's possible, what's not possible, how to engage humans, how to engage groups of people, what's safe and what's unsafe, all get sort of programmed in by the time you're seven years old. Now the reality is is how many adults do you know yourself included if you were to reflect? How many adults do you know, like understand the process of being a human and immediately jump into therapy at 13, 14, 15 or at some point in their teenage years in order to begin working out sort of the chinks in their armor so that they can go out and like live up to their potential and be the best version of themselves. Almost none, right? It's like we go to therapy if something really bad is happening or something is going on and we need that extra support. Otherwise, people are not proactively going to therapy to sort of rewrite their brain, their nervous system to explore their thoughts, habits, beliefs and the way that they show up in life. So what happens is because we have this baseline architecture now that now has been dysregulated or maladapted to some degree, we now get into high school and we're exposed to alcohol, right? Maybe we're not drinking alcohol because we're sad and hate our life or hate our parents, but we're drinking alcohol because that's what teenagers do, right? It's the time of socializing, of developing our own identity, of slowly starting to break away from our parents, of developing independence. And so yeah, we start drinking alcohol, we start going to parties and we start experiencing this side of life. Now, the other piece that we really have to think about and consider here that I talk a lot about that you don't get a lot in the traditional recovery spaces is just the impact of alcohol on our brain. So I've talked about this before, but let's quickly reiterate it because if you've struggled to quit drinking, you keep flip-flopping back and forth, it is essential that you understand this as perhaps the core reasoning why you haven't been able to figure it out yet. Okay, as human beings, our brain is designed for one thing to pursue pleasure and to move away from pain. That is what human beings have been doing since the dawn of man for hundreds of thousands or millions of years connected to our ancient ancestors, all the way back to the very beginning. We have been hunting for food, we have been operating in small tribal communities, and we have been trying to move towards things that make us feel good and move away from things that make us feel bad. Okay, and when we introduce alcohol into our system, especially at such a young age when our brain is still developing, right, what we do is we basically alcohol hijacks our dopamine reward system and it begins to produce high levels of dopamine in response to drinking alcohol. Now what this does is it begins to teach our brain that alcohol equals relief. And throughout high school, we might go out and drink several hundred times with friends at parties, etc, etc. So we're building the neural wiring in our brain. We're building the neural pathways that alcohol is a sustainable source of relief, a predictable source of relief. Every time we experience any level of discomfort, the discomfort could be social anxiety, the discomfort could be sadness, fear, overwhelm, our boyfriend or girlfriend just broke up with us, our parents got pissed off at us, whatever the case may be. We go up, we meet up with our friends and we have a drink, right? And so what this is doing is it's teaching our brain that alcohol equals relief. And over time, the brain records each and every single one of those experiences. It records where you were, the temperature outside, who you were with, what day it was, what time it was, literally all the subtle cues connected to drinking are recorded. And as a result, your brain begins to build something called salience. As he moved deeper and deeper into addiction, your brain builds something called salience, which it begins to tag those moments, those cues with dopamine. So your brain starts producing dopamine, not just when you get the drug, not just when you drink the alcohol, but around the specific cues. It's like, ah, last time we were here, we had alcohol and it made us feel better. So if you're the type of person, for example, who drives straight to the liquor store after you get off work every day, right? After you get off work, your body is going to start to produce cravings and urges and you're going to experience a sense of discomfort. That is your brain literally saying, hey, last time we were in this similar situation, we had alcohol and it made us feel better. So what a little actually do is it'll produce a craving or an urge for alcohol and it's releasing dopamine. So dopamine is what is connected to pleasure and reward. It's also connected to anticipation and movement towards. That's why it feels like you almost go into autopilot when it's four o'clock or five o'clock or you put your kids down to bed or you get on that plane or you're sitting down at dinner with your co-workers, etc. It's like consciously you know you don't want to drink but your brain is taken over. You're moving in an autopilot state because drinking alcohol and addiction is not a conscious choice. It goes beyond that with consistent repetition and use of alcohol or any high dopamine producing substance or agent, whether we're talking about porn, meth, gambling, cocaine, etc. Your decision making moves from conscious intentional decision making to automatic decision making. It's now moved into the survival circuits of your brain because remember several hundred thousand or millions of years ago we would only receive these hits of dopamine when we did something that was good for our survival. We wouldn't really nearly get these hits of dopamine and have the jackpot floodgates of dopamine go off in our brain for no reason. We had to apply effort. We had to go out and hunt. We had to exert all this energy and strategy and sort of tactical forward progress in order to get the reward in order to get the goal. And so as a result survival biology would say, "Hey, that was good for you. You found food. Do that again. Let me reinforce that process. Let me reinforce that behavior because it's going to keep you alive." Now the brain doesn't care that alcohol is poison. It doesn't care that it's a neurotoxin. The intelligent part of you does not give a shit that your wife or your husband or your kids are about to never talk to you again. All it cares about is that this thing produces dopamine and it equals relief when you're in a moment of distress. Okay? Very, very important that you understand the neurobiology of addiction. This isn't just about quitting drinking. When you consistently drink alcohol for many, many years it causes real neural adaptations to your brain. There's changes in your brain that can be tracked with regard to your prefrontal cortex, your amygdala, your nucleus accumbens, and these different areas of your brain. And when these things change, you change as a person. All of a sudden you're not as present as you used to be. All of a sudden you're not able to fully track your inputs and your outputs. All of a sudden you're not really able to consider the downstream consequences from the decisions or choices you're making in the moment, right? And this is what leads to the sort of this toxic, destructive cycle of abusing alcohol. Now it's not your fault, right? And all this ultimately goes back to the inner child in understanding that, listen, who you are in the present moment as an adult. Number one, never need an alcohol. Number two, the reason you're using alcohol is a reason to, excuse me, the reason you're using alcohol is because at some level you're trying to compensate or experience some sort of relief from something. Maybe you're trying to compensate for your social anxiety. Maybe you're trying to experience relief from your social anxiety. Maybe you're in an unhappy relationship. And so you're using alcohol to numb out the way that you feel at home because it feels like you're walking on eggshells, right? Maybe you're in a job that you hate or maybe you're in a high pressure leadership position where you're managing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars or tens of hundreds or thousands of people and they're dependent on you, right? And so the pressure is weighing you down. You otherwise don't know how to release that valve or maybe you do, but you've practiced using alcohol for it so many times over such a period of time where your brain now is prioritizing that hack in that shortcut over everything else. So what is the connection between your inner child and alcoholism or addiction? Well a large part of sort of the underlying psychological, emotional or behavioral dysfunctions we have with alcohol are often rooted in the experiences we had as a child and specifically the relationships we had with our mom and our dad. And so if we experience big T or little T trauma at some level and we're not able to resolve those experiences and those experiences at some level remain unintegrated, meaning they're still alive. We haven't found a way to resolve them. We haven't found completion. Then they're going to show up within our consciousness, our internal architecture as some sort of limitation, as some sort of dysfunction. Maybe it shows up in our relationships, maybe it shows up in our communication, maybe it shows up as a form of self sabotage, maybe it shows up as some sort of limiting belief around what's possible or what's not possible. And as a result of attempting or wanting to move forward towards an ideal that sounds good, looks good and is favorable, we're not able to do that because again at some level our internal system feels limited or dysregulated. A lot of this comes up as limiting beliefs. A lot of this comes up as I'm not worthy enough or I'm not good enough. And so what happens when we think about doing that thing, when we think about making forward progress, our nervous system goes into fight or flight, it goes into collapse, we freeze, and as a result we just end up drinking alcohol instead. So if you want to quit drinking, a big piece of this journey is learning how to heal your inner child. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. Or maybe some of you have been going to therapy for many, many years and you've done a couple sessions, but maybe you haven't gotten the results that you're looking for. So here's what I want to transition into neuro repaturning. Okay, I've coached over 500 people over the last few years around sobriety, around addiction. And you best believe that I've talked to every single type of person with every single type of possible background as it relates to alcohol and how they got here and their family life and everything in between. And when I look at addiction recovery as a whole, when I look at things like AA, IOP, counseling, rehab, I look at the timeline of these things, I look at the day in and day out practices and processes that these things sort of suggest. When I look at what's actually available to people versus what actually needs to be done at a deeper mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and neurological level, there's a massive gap. There's a huge, huge gap. There's something that's missing. And it's why it feels like people who are struggling through addiction tend to be on this merry go round where, okay, they drink for a while and then they get sick of it and then they stop and then they take a week off for a few months off and then boom, they're right back at it. Right? What's happening here is that they're willpowering and white knuckling their way through sobriety. But remember, alcohol was never the problem. It was the solution. So if you get fed up with drinking, you take off two months and then all of a sudden, like what's happened is you haven't really, you don't know what to change. You don't know what to integrate. You don't know what to update. All you're doing is abstaining from alcohol. Well, you've just lost your primary coping strategy. Even the way you might go to the gym and the way you might do some yoga and read some books. But if you're not making changes at the deeper neurological level, your brain and body eventually is going to revert back to alcohol during moments of stress or during moments of load or during moments where everything seems to be getting better and everything seems to be fine. It's going to trick you into believing that, hey, one won't hurt. I can just have one. I clearly never had a problem because I've gone to a month's alcohol free. Let me just have one. It'll be different this time. Almost everybody listening to this podcast knows how that goes. You pick up a drink. Maybe you manage it or handle it for a week or a few weeks or even a month or so. But then you're going to end up right back at square one and it's going to be like no time at past. What neural repaturning does is I've been thinking about this. I've been contemplating this. After thousands and thousands of coaching sessions, I've been wrapping my mind around, how do I reduce relapse rates? How can I get everybody to get the information and tools and structures and strategies they need to be able to support the healing of themselves without having to have me there in every single moment? What I developed is neural repaturning. What neural repaturning is is effectively a, at this stage, I've got a 90 day system and what I've done with that is I've effectively reverse engineered alcoholism or addiction through the lens of the brain in the various regions of the brain that are affected. Prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, nucleicumbenz, hippocampus. We've also are looking at the different regions of, so we've got the brain, we've got the nervous system. Then we're looking at all the mental, emotional, behavioral and at some level, even identity level and spiritual sort of dysfunctions or aspects of somebody that may have been dysregulated or are not attuned or are experiencing some sort of dysfunction. I've integrated those into a daily system. Every single day, you listen to a neuroscience fact and guided audio session. You can almost think of it like a guided meditation, but it combines a variety of other different modalities that have never been combined before into a system where it literally takes you through a self-guided experience that one, at the first level, calms your brain, calms your nervous system and creates an environment where your brain can finally update. Something that most people don't realize is that as you go through sobriety, early sobriety and even mid-subriety, when I'm talking, you know, the first few weeks, the first few months out, up to six months, your brain and your nervous system is still often going into fight or flight. It's still constantly being triggered from time to time. Maybe not every day, but you might see that person or that place or that thing that triggers you. There still might be a lot of unresolved baggage from your past that you haven't figured out how to deal with or manage or heal or integrate. What your repounding does at the baseline level is it helps create calm and safety in your brain and your nervous system. And by doing that, it finally creates the space for your brain to truly learn new information and update the prediction error. That is my thesis and philosophy going into 2026 and beyond, not only with neuro repaturning, but with all the information I'm bringing out into the sobriety and recovery space, is that alcoholism or alcohol use disorder effectively is a prediction error. Your brain is predicting that alcohol is going to bring you relief. And while it does momentarily, it's not looking at the full picture and it's not looking at the downstream effects, which ultimately it does not bring you relief. It brings addiction, it brings slavery and it brings an incredible amount of downstream consequences that are harmful to the self and the family unit and society at large. So what we need to do is we need to update the prediction. When you go into a state of fear, overwhelms sadness, social anxiety, film the blank, whatever the reason you use alcohol for it is your brain as soon as it experiences that discomfort, you've trained a million times to say, okay, now it's time for relief through alcohol. Your body and brain creates craving and compulsion. You move to the alcohol, you get short-term relief. You feel worse after the cycle continues. What Neurorepatroning does is it calms you down, it creates safety and it allows you to process the sensation while teaching you a ton of different skills, tools and strategies that I almost can guarantee everything that you have never heard of, that you've never done before, not in your therapy sessions, not in your counseling sessions, not working with any coaches. There's these very unique techniques. that you can use that will help you self-regulate through those, not just through breath, but with many others. And what that does is it not only teaches you like 25 to 50 new coping strategies just within a nerve-racking itself, but it updates your brain and your nervous system to teach it that like, "Hey, this sensation that my body thought was so scary, so hard, so overwhelming, whatever it is, call it craving, urge, fear, anxiety, some type of childhood trauma, whatever it is, because you're being put in this state where you're incredibly calm and incredibly safe, you're able to move through that process and regulate in a way that's healthy. What happens is the brain updates the data around that. It literally begins to prune out the old neural pathway that said this pain equals alcohol for relief, and it begins to create new neural pathways and it impacts your nervous system in a way where you expand your nervous system's window of tolerance to handle that specific sensation. So if that sensation used to be like a 10 out of 10 or an 8 out of 10 in intensity, it's going to start to soften to a 7 and a 6 and a 5 and after a few sessions, maybe that sensation feels like a 3 or a 2 and you're able to move through it, it just doesn't feel the same. And that's why neural repattering is such a profound and powerful and novel approach. Most people who have tried to go to AA and rehab and all these different things have been like, "No, quitting drinking is hard, but I'm going to miss it, but I love being high, I love being fucked up, I just love the feeling of being drunk." But what you're not understanding is that when you create change at the neurological level, there's a profound cascade of shifts that happen mentally, emotionally, behaviorally and within your identity where literally your system interprets sensation differently. Not only does it increase its capacity to hold sensation, but its ability to move through sensation without catastrophe. And so as we look at our relationship to alcohol, most people have various experiences rooted in their past from their inner child within their belief structures, within their identity about who they are, as they think about the future, what's possible and what's not possible. And there's a lot of dysregulation and unintegration around those things. And so it's like this people are trying to climb out Everest and they're like, "Dude, I don't even know what path to take and I don't even know what I'm trying to solve for." And the beautiful thing about neural repattering is it does that for you. You just literally play the guided audio, step by step, day by day, and each session builds upon the neck. So in the beginning, you're basically just dropping into your body. It's teaching you safety, it's teaching you calm, it's activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It's teaching you various techniques to be able to do that quickly and effectively, even on your own. And then every single day, it's basically like teaching you the structure of consciousness. It's teaching you the structure of your mind and body and how you can begin to go in and heal it and regulate it using a variety of different tools and strategies that most people have never heard of. And it goes from day one to day 90. I also have an extended series that's called nervous system mastery that specifically just goes in on some of the deepest emotional wounds like pain, resentment, anger, challenges with your mother or father that are unresolved. And so much more. So I'm incredibly excited to bring this forward. There's so many things that I've been working on in the back end that I'm excited about. Nuri patterning will be done here very, very soon. And I will be reaching out to everybody who has reached out to me via email and offering you an introduction to Nuri patterning in the ability to access Nuri patterning at a discount. Now, I just want to let you know as well. You've heard me talk about updates to SDC updates to the program here very, very soon. I will no longer be taking like sales calls with SDC. SDC is moving towards a different model where the primary product is going to be Nuri patterning. And over time, if you want to get more support and more structure and accountability and coaching and actual integration for Nuri patterning, you can join the program. But as of now and moving forward, I'm not going to be taking many, many sales calls as long as you see, www.TheStopDrinkingCoach link in my bio on Instagram. Or you go to stopdrinkingcoach.com and that's what it is. You're more than welcome to book a call with me. I'll probably continue taking them for maybe about another month or so. But after that. Yeah, the whole thing is going to change. So it's the new year. If you've been wanting to work with me, if you've been sitting on the fence, I encourage you to not wait because the cost of the stopdrinkingcoach is also increasing. And there's going to be a lot of things that are updating to the program. All good, all for the better and all ultimately designed to help improve outcomes and reduce relapse and to make the process feel easier and more manageable than you've ever tried before. Super excited to come out with Nuri patterning. I hope this was helpful for you. And I hope that as you reflect in your own relationship with alcohol, your own journey with what I've explained, you can begin to connect the dots as to why you haven't been able to quit drinking, why you've been flip flopping back and forth, why AA or some of the other attempts that you've tried just haven't been fruitful. Right, it's one thing to just abstain from alcohol. It's another thing to teach your brain, your body, and your nervous system safety. It's another thing to teach it resilience. It's another thing to teach it the ability and capacity to move through any sensation without having to catastrophize it and immediately numb and run towards alcohol. So, yeah, thank you so much for listening. I plan on putting out some more content soon. If you haven't yet, please go to either Spotify or Apple and leave a five star review of your experience. I would so deeply appreciate it. If this has, if this podcast has helped you in any way, that's a way to just give back to me. If you want to work with me, go to www.thustoptrinkingcoach.com. Right now, between now and like the next month or so, you can still join SDC at the rate that it are before it increases. And yeah, if you aren't on my mailing list, at least go to my website www.thustoptrinkingcoach.com and fill out an application just so I have your email. So when I launch nor repatterning, I can send it to you and you can access to what I believe is going to be one of the most profound, powerful, and effective addiction recovery systems on the planet. So yeah, thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode.