Ebook

From Addiction to Connection

Taking back control over your life in 5 steps

Including free exercises from the 5 steps of transforming your addiction method
by Lucien Lecarme
Your addiction gives you temporary relief, but in the long term, you suffer from the
consequences–Gabor Mate
Introduction
Addiction is the biggest invisible problem in today’s world. It took me 30 years to fully
transform my addiction. Just before the addiction got rid of me, I gambled most of the money
I earned away. Only a handful of very close friends knew about this.

All addiction comes from trauma, and everybody on this planet suffers from light or heavier
trauma. Addiction is a way to deal with your trauma, to not feel your pain.

Looking back on my healing, I discern 3 main keys that transformed my pain and addiction
into gold. Breaking the addiction cycle, establishing deeper connections with others, and
fixing the dopamine factory. To support and help you slay your addiction dragon, I’ve
extended them into practical tools in my 5 Steps of Transforming Addiction Method. (5STAM).
The main aim of this method is to give you back your control over your life.

5STAM will work for every addiction. From drinking just a little bit too much to being a
hardcore addict. It’s specially designed for addicted Men. I’ve been working with men in
weekly men's circles for the past three years and I came to understand that addiction is one
of the biggest hidden themes’s for men. Not only on a personal level, but also in society.

When you fix your addiction, everyone around you will benefit too.

To successfully applying the method, you need to do three things

1. Read this Ebook and understand the 5STAM method fully

2. Apply the first steps of the method in your life on a daily basis
3. Find a trusted buddy or group of people

Within half a year my book on Addiction will be published, with content that will elaborate
much more on the subject. This Ebook is a summary but does contain the 5 steps. I give you
2 exercises per step, the book will have more.

The first step in transforming your addiction to the gold of your life is acknowledging that
you’re addicted. By signing up for my newsletter and reading this free Ebook, you made your
first step today. Congratulations.
My Story is everybody's story of addiction
I have been addicted to gambling for over 30 years. I threw €350.000,- over the cliff,
including 3 full Bitcoins.

Before crypto, the Casino was my second home where my money went down the drain with
roulette, blackjack and sometimes slot machines. For extended periods of time, I visited the
gambling underworld about three times a week, till deep in the night. It excited me that
nobody knew about my dark secret. Many times, hearing the roulette ball tickle the wood felt
like ultimate freedom. Brief moments of winning, playing with warm tokens in my hand,
sparked the famous ‘Gamblers Trance’. Now everything will be different. Soon I’ll walk out of
that door with €100,- bills piling out of my pockets. This never happened.

Every gambler knows that to lose is what you're really there for– U2 lyric

The destructive part of my ‘expensive hobby’ is that I’ve never been able to buy a house or
save good amounts of money and thus creating financial safety. My addiction made me live
on a financial edge for decades. Although visiting the Casino brought me all kinds of
dopamine-infused short-term reliefs, I suffered from long-term consequences and in a way
still do. I managed to have an overall good first part of my life. I could afford to live a good life
because of my other addiction: Work.

I made long hours, worked weekends, and everything looked pretty impressive from the
outside. I’m adopted, and my adoptive parents, nor my sister, ever knew anything about my
gambling problem. They had no clue about the battle that was going on in my heart. In my
inner reality, I was cast between sheer isolation and often despair. I slowly lost more and
more control over my financial life, cast in this cycle of gambling doom.

This loss of control expressed itself not at the moment I woke up with an empty wallet next to
me. No, it was the harsh merciless reality that I had visited the Casino again. Against my
solid plan, my iron intentions. Against my own will almost, believing I had finally slain that
dragon. This time it would be different. Sometimes after years of being clean. The essence of
this is being out of control. Powerless.

That’s why the aim of this book is for you to learn how to get control back over your life.
On addiction
You might ask yourself whether you’re addicted. When you truly are, you know. You clearly
suffer from long-term consequences, whatever your mind makes up to find excuses.
There are also grey areas of addiction. The medium and lighter cases. What about excessive
screen time or Whatsapp?

Once I met a man in our men's circle that clearly diagnosed his excessive screen time as an
addiction. In three years of circle, it was only one man identified his screen attachment as an
addiction.

There is one golden rule in relation to the question of being addicted or not, before diving into
the SSTAM. All behavior identified as innocent can grow over time to true addiction when the
underlying pain is not met. When the soul deepdive isn’t undertaken. But for now, everything
might look great from the outside.

What you resist persists, and might eventually kill you–Christian Pankhurst

Reading this Ebook might be a sign that you’re actually addicted. Your subconsciousness will
always lead you to a guide, in whatever form.

That’s part of the magic of life. Maybe you don’t realize yet that you suffer deep inside from
your behavior. What makes this a challenge is that it can be fully socially accepted behaviour,
like going out with your mates and getting pissed every weekend.

There might be a growing voice inside your head asking why all your friends need to drink
and take drugs all of the time while going out. When you announce your intention to stay
sober, the group will call you boring or a loser. A deep fear of being expelled might kick in, to
becoming an outcast. The group pressure will be intense, they might shame you to avoid
you pointing at the collective insecurity: The need for real connection and intimacy.

I am not far from the truth when I say that my gambling addiction functioned as a regulator for
experiencing my deeper emotions, my wounding, my inner pain. The problem, however, is
that addictions are so addictive. It's easy to drink that bottle of wine and forget. With alcohol,
the body even can become substance dependent, at least, it believes it does. It's way more
difficult to sit with what is, and become present with what you really feel. It’s almost
impossible to do this alone.

I only was able to break my cycles of addiction by meeting my guides. They showed me a
crack of light, they gave me direction, and they made me connect with a deep trust in life.
They spoke directly to the light and power hidden deep inside of me, obscured by layers of
shame, doubt, unworthiness and low self-esteem.

Let this book be a guide, and my method a muscle training to take control back over your life
Introducing the 5STAM method
Before going there, it is good for you to know and establish where you are on the scale of
addiction or even to acknowledge maybe for the first time in your life that you’re actually
addicted. My first personal story above contains the three main elements you’ll face when
you suffer from addictive behavior patterns. These elements will help you find the truth about
your behaviour. My first personal story is also about the first step in my method of 5 steps for
transforming your addiction (5STAM). This step is acceptance. Let’s start with this
acceptance part. Here are the three elements for discerning addiction.

The Three Elements of Addiction

The first element: Being a slave to your addiction

Your addiction gives you temporary relief, but in the long term, you suffer from the
consequences–Gabor Mate

The first element is losing control over parts of your life,or even your whole life. Addiction
becomes an addiction when it has the ‘too much’ part in it. You're not being able to stop,
which leads you to suffer from the consequences. Maybe just drinking those 3 glasses of
wine a day, those cigarettes, the daily joint before you go to sleep. You tell yourself you can
stop any moment, but when you’re really honest with yourself, it’s controlling you instead of
you controlling your behaviour. You’ve become a slave to it, otherwise, it's just a guilty
pleasure, not an addiction.

The second element: Pain from Trauma

All addiction starts and ends with pain–T. Hahn

The second element is less visible and yet equally important. All addiction arises from lighter
or heavier trauma, often from the first three years of your life. In my case, even before. The
word Trauma has a Latin root that means Wound. You get wounded. Trauma causes
psychological, mental and sometimes even physiological pain. This bruise either stays open
or you develop scar tissue.

Addiction is nothing more or less than numbing out that pain.

The third element; The Broken Dopamina Factory
The third element I call is the broken dopamine factory syndrome, It’s something you might
not know about addiction. This knowledge and wisdom comes from the groundbreaking work
of Dr. Gabor Mate. When I finally understood the consequences of the dysfunction of my
dopamine factory in my brain, everything fell into place. I literally could not wrap my brain
around why I would return again and again to the Casino. This is because exactly my brain
was part of the problem. To be more exact, the lack of certain important neural connections.

Addiction makes you feel human again for that brief moment in time. For years, my
gambling-dope made life bearable. Slowly mending the broken dopamine factory in your
head is an integral part of healing your behaviour patterns through feeling more love,
belonging, and connection, by just being you by simply being enough without adding any
outside stimuli. To feel worthy daily. That’s your challenge when you’re addicted.

How the method works

First, you need to sit with these three elements and adapt them to your own life. That’s part of
step one of my method, the acceptance. You need a notebook, a pen or laptop, and complete
honesty towards yourself.

Write down the three elements, and answer these three simple questions with each element
1. On a scale from 1 - 10, how much control did you lose over your life, your health, your
income, and your relationship? Zero is no control at all.
2. What is the level of awareness around your wound(ings)? Write down how much your
trauma affects your addiction behaviour and how.
3. On a scale from 1-10, how much happy hormones is your brain able to produce in
ordinary life because you are just… you.?Nothing added.

By bringing more awareness to these 3 elements, you start to consciously strengthen your
core worthiness. Unravelling the trauma, mental disorders and behaviour patterns will take
time. In fact, it might take years of your life, and fallbacks are a natural part of your process.
Introduction to Trauma
Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way
we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest
wounds’--Gabor Mate

When you’re not too familiar with trauma and how trauma works, here is a short introduction.
To understand and heal your trauma, it’s crucial to get awareness around your trauma(‘ s).

Let’s take the example of a car accident that is traumatic for both your psyche and your body
and dive into what is really happening. This example can also be applied to all kinds of
trauma, from abuse to violence to instant abandonment or the lack of attention and love when
you were crying as a 1-year-old baby and nobody attended to you. My general definition of
trauma in this sense is

Something that happened to you that is too painful and/or threatens your safety and
survival in such a way that your brain checks out while your nervous system fights it,
flies from it or freezes completely.

When you have a severe car accident and break your neck, some of your mind will check out
to simply not feel the pain. On a physiological level, vast amounts of adrenaline will take care
of this. You need your energy to instantly heal your injury or protect the injured place with
muscles. Now the moment of the accident and all the details is disconnected from physical
hurt. Later, your mind needs updates from your body, bit by bit, to get the complete picture of
what happened. Not only what happened, it also needs to connect to the pain of that
moment. To integrate it, to become one whole with the body experience. To become one.

Healing means becoming one

The 5 step method Introduction
Step 1: Accepting your addictio n
In the 5 STAM, the first step gives you tools and insights to accept that you’re addicted. This
acceptance comes when you share it with the outside world in an honest way. I say this in
one easy line, but it took me a decade to finally share that I was addicted with an intimate
partner.

Why is it so hard for most people to share that they’re addicted? You would probably say it's
the shame around it. It is, but there is a deeper cause. When your trauma isn't dealt with yet,
and your addiction is directly related to it, admitting that you’re addicted opens a door to
actually healing it. It's in fact a massive first step.

Admitting to my partner that I was addicted took so long because of huge fears. Most of all,
she would slap me in the face and kick me out of the house. In other words, abandon me.
See the perfect relation between my wound here (abandondment) and my fear of exposing
my addictive behavior? She didn't kick me out of the house and loved me even more.
Exposing this on our first romantic dinner would have been way too early though.

A safety bond and a common ground of trust needs to be created first. In one word, finding a
buddy and sharing that you’re addicted is a very vulnerable step. For me, it felt like dying. But
finally I did it and so can you.

Make a list of one or more trusted souls

on this planet that you feel save enough
to share your addiction patterns with.

This important share is the first step that actually brings your addiction and everything behind
it to the light. After this first important mark, 5STAM provides a framework to get more aware
of your behavior pattern related to your addiction; Your Addiction Cycle.

Every change starts with acceptance, awareness and compassion. Starting the journey of
healing the wound of your addiction starts with acceptance.

Before continuing to step 2, write down as clear as possible what your addiction(s) actually
are? It’s you who’s judging them, so it doesn’t mather how big or small they are in our world.
Use the definition from the introduction of this Ebook. You must suffer long term
consequences. Write as much about it as you can.
Step 2: Understanding your addiction cycle
Life consists of cycles; your learning on this planet moves in spirals, fractals. Around smoking
your cigarette, drinking your drinks, watching your porn, visiting the casino or that poker
website, your excessive shopping, or those extra late night hours with work, around that
direct thing that makes you a slave, are very human aspects.

The five main reasons for fallbacks or needing to numb yourself out are;
● Stress
● Anxiety or fear
● Feeling alone and isolated
● Experiencing a direct recurring trigger
● Experiencing mental pain

Step 2 in the 5STAM toolbox gives you a practical tool to map your addiction cycle. You will
find that using the substance or engaging in the addictive behavior always happens in the
context of other, mostly external events. Understanding your addiction cycle will give you tons
of insights on your behavior related to your addiction, and more importantly, being OK with it.
This is a very important element and it's different than accepting that you’re addicted.
Becoming aware of your unique cycle will stop you from making yourself wrong about it.

Exercise: Create your own addiction cycle chart. Just use a big piece of cardboard or paper,
and sketch out the step. Write them down first. Use my cycle as inspiration when you need to

- Feelings of depression and deep isolation while being succesfull at the outside
- Numbing out by gambling, feeling alive and human in a casino
- The reality; loosing big amounts of money,
- The next day being faced with deep shame and feelings of guilt, confirming my core
unworthiness, making the isolation deeper
- Working hard on my money, self esteem, self respect… periods of constructive work
and building up something in the world
- A fallback, the deeper isolation coming back since working hard to make ends meet
also became an addiction
- Feelings of depression… etc (back at step 1)

With the cycle at hand, you’ve made the individual steps more clear for you. First of all, this
will the reduce the change of fallbacks. You know when you’re aproaching the fallback.
Second, with more awareness of your behavior, you can actively influence that behavior. The
third, is the combination of the first two, the ultimate goal is to move faster through your cycle.
Like a fractal that is spiralling upward.
Step 3: Feeling deeper
This step is at the core of healing your addiction. It can be broken down in three elements
1. Getting to know where you avoid feeling deeper
2. This will allow you to actually practice feeling deeper in the moment and ultimately
this will open you to feel your pain
3. Knowing your pain, the next step is learning how to father and or mother your small
hurt child inside

Addiction to some degree is numbing yourself out to not having to feel your pain. Or the more
existential pain of life in general.

The addiction IS the mechanism to avoid pain and at the same time feel human, experience
love, a high. The final challenge is taking out the addiction high, and instead feeling deeper in
what occurs next when you don’t have your fallback.

This is an exercise with the aim to oberserve where you avoid feeling deeper.
An example and strategies from my life are being hyper. When I’m in the fast life, I rush over
feeling deeper. Or humor. I can be super witty in groups, make jokes all the time. All seems
fine, but I’ve found out that this behavior is actually covering up a deep insecurity and even
groups-trauma. It’s very difficult for me to feel save in groups just like that.

Write down 3 to 5 coping mechanisms or behavior patterns that you use for covering up
insecurity, pain, and/or unsafety.

For your psyche, feeling your pain, and thus being very vulnerable, is dangerous for your
survival. In fact, that’s why your behavior to deal with your trauma and pain are called
survival mechanisms. Over time, you get very used to these patterns, and when you never
learn to bring awareness to them, your inner growth will stagnate and addictions might
dominate all of your life. Or you stay stuck in your pain body.

The 5STAM will avoid this and bring you a roadmap to get more aware of your feeling in the
moment. Whatever those feelings are. For this you need a structure and you need safety.

In the book, I’ll provide the tools for you to slowly open up to feeling deeper. I’ll be using a
structure. This, in its turn, creates safety for yourself to start exploring deeper feelings. Your
psyche will only open to feeling deeper or feeling your pain when you experience enough
safety to do so.

In this Ebook I’ll give you now a few teasers for how to create this structure

This is a structure exercise. In general, create fixed patterns throughout the day, and stick to
them as much as you can, for a week. This is the outside structure. Eat at regular times,
exercise, go to bed at the same time each night etc. You are now building a good riverbed to
contain feeling deeper. Or to contain your need for a sudden rush of dopamine, your
addiction.
Meditation: Envision this riverbed in a meditation before you go to bed. It can hold a steady
stream of water, that is maybe not spectacular, but will bring regularity and strenght. A silent
strenght that will bring you much further on the long run than the rapid streams and high and
low dopamine induced waves as a result of your addiction.

The result of this exercice, when done for a week, might be that you feel stronger to face
those situations that made you avoid feeling deeper, or even made you drink, gamble, watch
porn etc.

And just breathe through them. The awareness will grow that they won’t kill you, they’ll just
pass. Tomorrow is another beautiful day.

You know have a list of behavior patterns that do not allow you to feel deeper. Meanwhile,
you;re strenghtening the structure of your life, to create more safety. And, in fact, to let your
nervous system relax and build stamina.

With awareness comes letting go of things that don't serve you. When this is achieved, it is
time to step up and become your own father or mother, step 3.

What do I mean by that? First of all, be aware that the cycle brings you time and time again
past that internal age point where something went wrong. This is generally referred to as
being in your child part. Before, you were terrified and contracted to even go there. You
resisted to feel that very moment since of your survival mechanism. But hey, many parts of
you continued to grow in your life, became wiser, and now can take up the role of being the
primal caregiver, or father, or mother, or both, to yourself !

Addiction can be seen as the substitute for this father and mother part. As a substitute for
what you missed concerning primal bonding, safety and connection.

5STAM provides tools and wisdom to start providing this care for yourself, by yourself,
instead of substances or other addictions. In a way, when you grow strong enough to stand
up as an inner parent to be there for you when you move in these smaller, still vulnerable
parts, addictions will be less and less needed, to face the world and just be enough with all of
you.

Exercise: when you feel small, or weak, or life gets overwhelming, or you feel unsafe, talk to
yourself with the internal voice that is your inner father and/or mother. You can say things
like: Sun, it’s OK, I am at your side, you can do this. I love you. When this is completely new
to you, it will need practice.The tendency is to immediately slip into your child part and numb
out or fight or flight, since this is what you’re used to. This father/mother exercise is all about
holding yourself. Hey, you’re safe. Isnt that an amazing feeling. Built that muscle !
Step 4: Fix your dopamine factory
Fixing missing neural connections can take a lifetime. In my case it feels like a lifetime job.
But that shouldn’t stop you from starting this work right now, and remember, all healing has
its time.

Once you have the awareness how important the lack of these connections is in your daily
life and your ability to just feel enough, you know where to look for.

Compare the missing of these networks in your head with being handicapped. Let’s call this
the lack of feeling love & worthy handicap. It’s an invisible wheelchair. I have let this
wheelchair behind me know and I can walk again, and so can you. One great way to start
fixing your dopamine factory is to connect to nature, challenge yourself phsysically

One very important tool is challenging yourself on a physical level. I’ve found out that doing
the Wim Hof method naturally sparked more happy hormones, increased my health and
made me much more resilient for fallbacks. This is not surprising. WIm Hof himself started
challenging himself with the cold to deal with the intense pain and trauma of losing his wife.

In general, going back to and connecting to nature is the most natural way to get the factory
running again. I have made a rule for addiction. The less functional your Dopamine factory,
the bigger the challenge you might need. You don’t need to climb Kilamanjaro in shorts, find
the challenge that fits you.

Step 5 : Find your buddy and create your tribe

The 5STAM aims in facilitating ongoing support in the form of a tribe, community. The first
step, however, is finding one trusted friend, a buddy, to start sharing your unique story with, in
the framework of this method. In the introduction I’ve invited you to think about a trusted
person that you will share your addiction or behavior pattern with. This is your buddy. Maybe
you already have your buddy. This can be family member, a trusted friend, or a coach.

When you feel aligned with what's written here, and you like the exercises, and they work for
you, you can consider a coaching trajectory to implement the 5 steps further with me
accompanying you on your journey.

Don’t hesitate to request a free 20 minutes intake by sending me an email.

Lucien Lecarme tango@dds.nl

Sessions are $75 an hour, and I am open for payment plans.

Read more about addiction on www.lucienlecarme.medium.com and search for Addiction. I

will update about the release of my book on addiction that will include all the exercises, more
personal stories, and more wisdom around addiction and how to take full leadership over tour
life back again, in every aspect.