Traumaphor Associations
The abused substance is called a traumaphor, since its use suggests similarities with the archaic trauma. The second step in resolving the ingestive disorder consists of exploring the client's behavioral, affective, cognitive, sensate, and memorial associations to the drug(s) of choice, or traumaphor(s), placed in an "empty chair." ACT Treatment adapts Gestalt communication technique for an analytic purpose. The client is asked to visualize the drug of choice in a factually empty chair, and the therapist facilitates an exploration through a structured protocol. This protocol reveals what emotions the client is regulating by means of the abused substance and what emotions were directed against the client by the abuser in the past. The protocol assists the client in understanding the nature of his relationship to the abused substance and how it recreated some prior unresolved relationship. The traumaphor associations requires about one-half hour to complete and prepares the client for the third component of treatment, traumaphor focused processing.

Traumaphor Focused Processing
The traumaphor is the key that unlocks the neural network containing images, sensations, cognitions, and affects relating to the archaic, unresolved trauma. Traumaphor focused processing adapts the standard protocol of EMDR (Shapiro, 1995) to treatment of ingestive disorders. In this application, the client visualizes the traumaphor and identifies a negative belief about herself, an accompanying emotion, and physical sensations associated with the emotion. The client is asked to hold the image of the traumaphor, the emotion, the belief, and the sensation, and with TABS facilitation, the archaic, unresolved trauma is uncovered and resolved. Resolution, which is also known as abreaction, involves confronting the original traumatic situation, reexperiencing it, releasing the bound affect, and achieving cognitive meaning. The progress of resolution is tracked by client report through a measure called Subjective Units of Disturbance (SUD). As processing occurs, the level of disturbance of the traumaphor decreases. When processing is completed, a previously identified positive belief is installed using TABS while the client holds the image of the traumaphor. For example, one addict visualized a large bud of powerful marijuana. At the beginning of processing, his negative belief was "I am still fascinated by pot." This was highly disturbing; SUD = 7. Following processing the disturbance had decreased significantly. At this point the positive belief, "I am free of fascination with pot", was installed, using TABS to bring this to complete validity.