As therapists, we all feel the pressure of limited time. Clients rarely present with a single, neatly defined diagnosis. Instead, they arrive carrying a web of interconnected struggles: addiction intertwined with chronic pain, trauma fueling emotional reactivity and craving, depression draining motivation and hope. In a 50-minute hour, how do you decide which problem to treat first?

The truth is, you can’t—and if you try to tackle these issues separately, the untreated drivers of suffering will continue to fuel relapse.

Why Treating One Diagnosis at a Time Doesn’t Work

Addiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Emotional distress, trauma, and chronic pain are not just co-occurring, they are drivers of addictive behavior. When pain spikes or emotions surge, the brain naturally seeks relief. Without new regulatory skills, clients return to the fastest, most familiar form of relief: substances.

If we treat only the addiction but leave the pain and distress untouched, we leave the door wide open for relapse.
If we treat only the pain but not the trauma, clients remain vulnerable.
If we treat only the trauma but not the craving circuitry, the cycle continues.

And here’s a deeper problem: most conventional addiction treatments focus on reducing negative outcomes, not restoring positive ones. Typical substance use disorder interventions (e.g., CBT, MI, contingency management, and MAT) focus primarily on changing negative behaviors, avoiding triggers, and reducing craving with medication. While these approaches can reduce harm, they do not effectively reduce physical pain—one of the most potent drivers of relapse in individuals with opioid use disorder and chronic pain.

Even more importantly, these treatments do not rebuild the brain’s capacity to experience pleasure, meaning, or natural reward. A client can feel less distressed without feeling more alive. Dampening negative emotion does not automatically generate positive emotion.

This matters because anhedonia (i.e., the reduced ability to experience pleasure) is one of the strongest predictors of relapse. If clients cannot access natural sources of reward, substances remain the most efficient (and familiar) way to feel something good.

None of these conventional addiction therapies have been shown to reliably increase natural reward responsiveness. They help clients cope, but they do not restore the neural pathways that support joy, connection, and motivation.

A siloed approach is simply not enough.

The Need for a Transdiagnostic Therapy

Clinicians need a single, coherent treatment that addresses the shared mechanisms underlying these conditions—reward dysregulation, attentional bias toward threat or pain, emotional reactivity, and the loss of meaning and positive emotion.

A therapy that doesn’t force you to choose between treating addiction or pain or trauma, but instead targets the neurocognitive processes that drive all three.

That’s where Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) stands apart.

MORE: One Protocol, Broad Impact

MORE is one of the only evidence-based treatments shown to simultaneously reduce:

• Addictive behavior

• Craving and cue reactivity

• Chronic pain symptoms

• Depression

• Stress

• PTSD symptoms

• Emotion dysregulation

But MORE does something even more unique—and profoundly important.

MORE Restores the Brain’s Capacity for Joy, Meaning, and Natural Reward

Most therapies focus on reducing symptoms. MORE goes further by rebuilding the brain’s ability to experience pleasure, connection, and meaning, capacities that addiction, trauma, and chronic pain often erode.

Through its savoring practices, MORE has been shown to:

• Increase positive emotions

• Enhance meaning in life

• Restore responsiveness to natural healthy pleasure

• Rebuild the neural pathways that support joy and motivation

This is not just symptom reduction.

It’s restoration of the brain’s natural capacity to feel alive again.

When clients begin to experience genuine positive emotion—joy in a child’s smile, gratitude for a moment of peace, awe in nature—the need for substances diminishes. The reward system recalibrates. Craving loses its grip.

This is the missing piece in many treatments.

And it’s one of the reasons MORE produces such durable change.

Therapeutic Efficiency Meets Therapeutic Depth

In a world where clinicians are stretched thin and clients present with increasingly complex needs, therapeutic efficiency matters. MORE allows you to:

• Address multiple conditions at once

• Work at the level of underlying mechanisms

• Reduce relapse risk by treating the drivers of addictive behavior

• Restore positive emotion and meaning, not just reduce distress

• Offer clients a unified, coherent path to recovery

Instead of juggling multiple treatment manuals, you can rely on one integrative, neuroscience-informed approach that meets the moment.

A Future Where One Therapy Does More

Imagine a clinical workflow where you don’t have to choose which diagnosis to prioritize. Imagine a therapy that helps clients regulate pain, emotion, and craving in the same session. Imagine a treatment that not only reduces suffering, but restores joy, meaning, and the capacity to savor life.

That’s the promise of MORE.

For therapists seeking a transdiagnostic, mechanism-driven, evidence-based approach, MORE offers a way to help people heal more deeply, more efficiently, and more sustainably—while reconnecting them with the natural rewards that make life worth living.