Belief change is deeply intertwined with harm reduction in the context of substance use disorder (SUD) recovery. Traditionally, harm reduction focuses on reducing the negative consequences of substance use, such as overdose or transmission of diseases, rather than insisting on complete abstinence. It involves strategies like needle exchange programs, safe consumption spaces, or medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to manage the risks associated with drug use.

However, when we consider belief change as the critical factor, it offers a deeper, more transformative layer to harm reduction. Here’s how belief change connects to and enhances harm reduction:

1. Shifting the Belief about Substance Use as a Coping Mechanism

• Harm Reduction Focus: Initially, harm reduction might support individuals in continuing substance use but in a safer manner.
• Belief Change Focus: Through belief change, with BEMT, the idea that “I need this substance to cope” or “I can’t function without this” is challenged. When individuals adopt a new belief—“I have the strength to face challenges without substances” or “I can cope with life in healthier ways”—it not only reduces harm but can also gradually lead to recovery and abstinence as a natural result of the belief shift.

2. Addressing the Root Cause of Relapse

• Harm Reduction Focus: Harm reduction strategies may reduce immediate physical risks but often don’t directly address the root cause of addiction—the beliefs that drive continued substance use.
• Belief Change Focus: By targeting permission-granting beliefs (e.g., “I deserve this because life is hard”), belief change directly intervenes at the cognitive level that allows substance use to persist. This makes recovery more sustainable and less reliant on just managing risks or minimizing harm.

3. Empowering Individuals

• Harm Reduction Focus: Harm reduction aims to minimize the dangers of active substance use, which can empower individuals to feel safer but not necessarily empowered to stop using.
• Belief Change Focus: When beliefs shift, individuals no longer see themselves as victims of addiction but as people capable of recovery. The empowerment through belief change shifts the focus from simply managing harm to transforming identity and behavior in a lasting way.

4. Reducing the Need for External Interventions

• Harm Reduction Focus: Many harm reduction strategies rely on external interventions (like MAT, supervised consumption, etc.) to manage the effects of substance use.
• Belief Change Focus: Once core beliefs are transformed, the individual internalizes the tools to cope with life without the need for constant external intervention. This could lead to sustained recovery, where individuals need less reliance on external harm-reduction measures.

5. Increasing Long-Term Success

• Harm Reduction Focus: Harm reduction helps mitigate risks, but without addressing the root cognitive beliefs, it often falls short of achieving long-term behavioral change.
• Belief Change Focus: When individuals change their beliefs about themselves, their worth, and their ability to manage life without substances, long-term recovery becomes more attainable. The internalized belief system creates resilience that supports ongoing recovery efforts.

Conclusion:

Belief change enriches harm reduction by addressing the underlying cognitive drivers of substance use. While harm reduction is crucial in reducing the immediate risks and consequences of substance use, belief change works at a deeper level, transforming the individual’s internal framework and offering a path to sustainable recovery. By changing the beliefs that perpetuate addiction—such as “I need this substance to cope”—harm reduction can evolve from simply minimizing harm to genuinely promoting long-term recovery.

Thus, belief change doesn’t replace harm reduction; it complements it, turning short-term solutions into long-term, transformative recovery.

Ellis’ ABC-DE Theory is the perfect paradigm to effect change using Belief Eye Movement Therapy. It’s a hand and glove fit for harm reduction and behavior change. Ellis, “It’s the beliefs about events that lead to behavior.”

Wanberg, Milkman and Beck state, “There will be no long-term behavior changes unless you change core, permission-granting beliefs, first.”

Are we simply reporters or agents of change? Reports don’t change people. Empowering beliefs can lead to change. That can reduce relapse, recidivism and the destruction of families. Learning how is made easy with this book.

“Belief Eye Movement Therapy” is available on Amazon.com. It can be your first foray into this new skill. Why not give it a go?

Paraphrasing a LinkedIn contributors: “Belief-change with BEMT is a powerful reframe of harm reduction? Doing Belief Eye Movement Therapy for clients helps them to change limiting, permission-granting beliefs and moves them beyond surface-level strategies to address the core beliefs that sustain risky behavior…”

“The idea that belief change is not just therapeutic, but a form of harm reduction is both clinically sound and humanizing…

…Based on that, Belief Eye Movement Therapy offers a proactive path to internal transformation. This is the kind of depth we need more of in recovery work.” This is the opinion of the LinkedIn contributor.

Maggie Langley: “The belief-change harm reduction connection just makes so much sense! Without starting with beliefs, it seems to me like trying to build on an unstable foundation.”

If I could show you how to do this work for your clients, would you be interested in seeing how it works?
Amazon.com: Belief Eye Movement Therapy: Change Can Occur in the Blink of an Eye eBook : DOKMANUS, STAN: Kindle Store

Milkman and Wanberg tell us, “There will be no long-term behavior changes unless you change core beliefs first.” (Criminal Conduct and Substance Abuse Treatment, P 145.) Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Theory adds, “…permission-granting belief.”

The usual harm-reduction methods are CBT, needle exchanges, MAT, etc.

The ultimate in harm- reduction is eliciting and changing the core, permission-granting beliefs around alcohol and other drug use and criminal thinking and conduct. It’s a specific skill.

If No B, therefore No A, where B=Long-term behavior changes and A=Belief changes.

This is the way to reduce relapse, recidivism and over-dose deaths. Change the core, permission-granting beliefs that allow these behaviors. Ellis’ ABC-DE Theory fits this paradigm perfectly. It’s the ultimate in harm reduction.

If I could show you a way to change these limiting beliefs in as little as 20 minutes, would you be interested in seeing how it works? Belief Eye Movement Therapy is available on Amazon.com.

BEMT can be used for personal development and wellness. It’s about your beliefs and behavior choices.

This applies to all areas of our lives: School, marriage, family, children, career, performance, income potential and retirement.

Regarding substance abuse treatment, Marich and Danziger report that “relapse rates are as high as 60% in the first year of treatment and 80% by the end of the second year.” This is regardless of what testing in various treatment centers reflects.

Further, relapse, recidivism and drug court graduation rates have not improved in the last 20 years. What’s really going on?

According to Wanberg, Milkman and Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, “There will be no long-term behavior changes unless core, permission-granting beliefs are changed first…as soon as possible.”

Here’s a counselor example:
“If counselors are supposed to help clients learn, and clients must learn to change beliefs to change behavior,
then counselors and therapists must learn how to help clients change beliefs…

Contrapositive:
If counselors don’t learn how to help clients change beliefs,
then they cannot help clients achieve real behavior change.
✅ This is airtight.
✅ Bulletproof logic.
✅ No counselor or trainer could logically argue against it without denying the necessity of belief change itself — which the top experts (Wanberg, Milkman, Beck, Ellis, Miller and Rollnick) have already confirmed.”

Administrators, counselors and therapists might recognize the need for specific training to help clients learn how to change limiting, permission-granting core beliefs about AOD/CTC. This could minimize the probability of R&R, errors and omissions problems or being harmful for clients and public safety.

I’m inviting you to learn how to do BEMT, Belief Eye Movement Therapy. We can do it online. Why not DM me now to set up a training plan?
P.S. This is excellent for salespeople who want to sell more. Change your beliefs and you change your sales achievement.
Stan Dokmanus, CLU, ChFC, LUTCF, CCJP, CSAC

Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) emphasizes the interaction between beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Belief Eye Movement Therapy, BEMT, is perfect for this pattern and ABC-DE Theory.

How can this help AOD counselors, therapists and patients with treatment?

His ABC-DE Theory and Beck’s CBT go hand in hand with BEMT. Why is this important?

Professionals and clients have told me, or complained, that treatment and recovery are not linear. I suggest they can be. They are directional and interactive as Ellis posited.

Is it the same for alcohol, other drugs and criminal thinking and conduct?

Consider “Old You” beliefs and behavior on the far left. Visualize the change process going from left, what you have and don’t want, to the right; the ideal you. The one you want. The “New You.”

To illustrate this interaction using a linear equation, we can consider each component as a variable in a mathematical expression. Here are simplified representation equations:*
B + T + F + H = R
Where:
B represents Beliefs
T represents Thoughts
F represents Feelings
H represents Behaviors
R represents the Result or Outcome
In this equation, the result R is influenced by the sum of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
This aligns with Ellis’s idea that these components are interrelated and can influence each other.

Properties of Math Applied:
1. Associative Property: The way in which variables are grouped does not change the result.
B + T) + (F + H) = B + (T + F) + H
This shows that changing beliefs and thoughts together can influence feelings and behaviors, and vice versa.

2. Distributive Property: A change in one variable can be distributed across others.
a(B + T) = aB + aT
For example, a significant change in beliefs A can affect both thoughts and feelings.

3. Commutative Property: The order of variables does not change the result.
B + T + F + H = H + F + T + B
This indicates that the interaction between these components is linear, flexible and can occur in any order.

By using these properties, we can see how changes in one area (e.g., beliefs) can influence other areas (e.g., thoughts, feelings, behaviors), supporting Ellis’s concept of directional and interactional change.

We need to know how to elicit, understand and change the different levels of beliefs with BEMT.

Listening intently to the language of CTC, criminal thinking and conduct, we can hear where clients are stuck. Nominalizations are clues. Offsetting these with gerunds, action verbs leading to desistence, creates Transcendence and wellness. DM me for more information.
*Equations by AI.
Activate to view larger image,

Arrests have been made. Five People have been charged in connection with Matthew’s death.

As a Certified Criminal Justice Professional, and addiction counselor I often contemplate the AOD/CTC Cycle. CTC is criminal thinking and conduct.

Addiction and crime drive one another like gear wheels.

There will be no long-term behavior changes unless you change core [permission-granting] beliefs about AOD and CTC, according to Wanberg, Milkman, Beck, Marich and Dansiger. The latter calling them “blocking beliefs.”

Question: Did Matthew Perry and the five offenders have limiting, permission-granting, core beliefs?

Change is needed.

You decide, after reading the article: https://lnkd.in/gmCZ3jC5

The CBT map below applies to criminal justice organizations just like it applies to people.

What is your organization doing differently than it was 20 years ago? You are probably doing the same thing with some different people.

Every person and every organization have a next level. A better level.

Is there a need for change? Marich and Dansiger report that relapse rates are 40-60% in early treatment and 80% the year after treatment. (“Healing Addiction with EMDR.” 2023)

Matthew Perry spent $8M and half his life in treatment. What’s really going on?

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Treatment providers could listen to their own advice. What about the Stages of Change for treatment providers and drug courts?

Precontemplation: Highlight the importance of recognizing the need for change. Look at your limiting beliefs and practices.
Contemplation: Discuss the process of acknowledging issues and considering change.
Preparation: Outline the planning phase for implementing changes.
Action: Describe the implementation of changes. Implement empowering beliefs.
Maintenance: Emphasize the importance of sustaining ABC-DE Theory changes.
Termination: Explain the final integration of changes into the organization.

I’m willing to be your sounding board. You can discuss ideas with me privately.

DM me to book an appointment.

The CBT map image is from Drug Court Treatment: The Verdict. Amazon.com
Read the Foreword before you decide to buy it.

It’s easy to sit just wishin’ and hopin’. That won’t get you to where you want to go. It sounds like a song doesn’t it. Wishin’ and Hopin.’

To meet your goals, whatever they are, you need to take massive, consistent and relentless action, as Tony Robbins has stated.

You’ll be beset by critics, both outer and inner critics. The critical voice in your head that says, “who do you think you are? You can’t do that. You’re not good enough.”

Whose voices are those? Stop. Listen. You can recognize the voices. They are your parents, neighbors, childhood friends, teachers, coaches, etc.

These are the people who started the whole thing. Beware of strangers. Stranger-danger.

That was good advice when you were a kid. Now, you need to get along in this world, work and play well with others, network, etc.

As adults or older people, you are now responsible for understanding and correcting that. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Albert Ellis gave you instructions about how to overcome these deficits. Read about him, ABC-DE Theory, REBT and RET. You can watch and listen to him on Youtube. It will be worth the time.

As Jim Rohn says, “Don’t wait for the world to get better. Don’t wait for the soil to get better. Don’t wait for work to get better. You must get better.”

Ellis tells you how to do this. If you want help with this, contact me. Call me. Hit the call me button.

How do the Open, Blind, and Unknown of the Johari Window affect drug and alcohol use?

The Johari Window presents an interesting concept regarding us of the CJS as treatment providers, counselors, and therapists.

How does it apply to addressing changing limiting beliefs of staff and clients in treatment?

Regarding addiction and criminal thinking and conduct, “There will be no long-term behavior changes unless you change core permission-granting beliefs first.” Beck, Wanberg and Milkman.

The same applies to employees of the CJS

Consider the Johari Window as it pertains to us and helping clients change beliefs that keep them “stuck” or “blocked” as Marich and Dansiger explain.

The Open, Blind, Hidden, and Unknown areas can give us new perspectives about the importance of “Addressing permission-granting beliefs as soon as possible in treatment,” as Beck suggests. See the link below for a great graphic.

What is the impact of the “hidden” or “unknown” areas? We as practitioners need to know how to do this for our clients.

How soon in treatment should you address limiting beliefs? How would you do that in order to help clients get “unstuck” as soon as possible?

Otherwise, if nothing changes, nothing changes.

What are your thoughts about this? Your input is welcome. Please comment on your experiences with belief change methods. An exchange of ideas will be helpful for everyone.

Jenny Nurick did a nice job with her version of the Johari Window.

I’m reaching out. DM me if you want more information.