Author: Diary of a Quitter

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 3:23 pm

Hey there InvisibleMovement – I don’t know why I hadn’t read your thread before now, but I just read through the whole thing. You’ve been on quite a ride these past few weeks for sure. Your honest desire to get through this Sub taper and to strengthen your recovery shines through in your writing and that is fantastic, but I also noticed some red flags that might be signaling potential stumbling blocks for you.

The most major red flag that I see is that you seem to be still taking your Sub at irregular times and in response to how you’re feeling. I understand that you’ve been trying to taper and trying to jump, and I don’t know what your dosing schedule was like before you started the tapering process, but I do know that dosing in response to feeling crappy is one of the first habits that we have to break in order to start the recovery process. That’s why the majority of Sub patients dose once a day, or in some cases once in the am and once in the pm, on a set schedule (this doesn’t include people who are using Sub to treat pain, they dose more often). The idea is to dose at a regular time and then just get on with your day. This helps break the addictive cycle of trigger-response-reward and helps us get out of the habit of turning to our medication in times of stress, etc.

On the positive side of this, you can look at when you’ve been taking your Sub dose and why and you can start to see some of your triggers. Once you can see your triggers, you can analyze them and start coming up with a plan for dealing with them. Otherwise, you’re just going to keep repeating this cycle that you’ve been putting yourself through and that just doesn’t seem pleasant or productive. Obviously, withdrawal symptoms are a big trigger for you – but mainly in combination with the need to work, go to school, do schoolwork, or be socially interactive.

I’m just basing this off what you’ve written here of course, so take what fits and leave the rest, but what I’m seeing is that you’re coping fairly well with the withdrawal until you have to function at work, school or socially. That’s totally understandable, being dopesick is a bitch and if you have to hide it from everyone and act normal that just makes it all the more difficult. So what can you do? One option would be to put off jumping until you have a block of time where you can minimize your school and work responsibilities. Another option would be to slow down your taper, making tiny reductions and giving yourself time to stabilize in between drops, hopefully getting low enough that you could quit without intense withdrawals.

So rather than putting yourself through the up-and-down of stopping for 2 days, dosing, stopping, repeat…maybe you could find the minimum dose that allows you to function for work and school, decide on a time of day to dose, and stick with that for a bit. At low doses like you’re on, dosing in the morning and evening is helpful because the effects of the medication will wear off sooner than 24 hours. Stick to your schedule and when anxiety, or cravings or whatever arise use the opportunity to find a new way to cope. This will be great practice for life without Sub later.

Anxiety and social anxiety seem to be big triggers for you as well. There are many non-drug methods for dealing with anxiety; meditation and exercise are two of my favorites but I totally encourage you to look into different methods and try stuff until you figure out what works for you. Getting your overall anxiety down will help with the social anxiety stuff, but you might have to get creative in dealing with social anxiety for a while. Honestly, I think most addicts deal with this to some extent. Give yourself permission to feel a little weird and awkward for a while; you are going through some major life changes. If there’s anyone in your social circle who can support you or just knows a bit about what you’re going through, that can help. And remember that it won’t last forever. As you become more comfortable with yourself sober, you will become more comfortable with other people too.

As you figure out what your other triggers are, you can continue coming up with ways to deal with them. Try different things, what works for me might not work for you…but there will be something that works for you. And have fun with it – this is part of the process of getting to know yourself. I started back to school soon after I completed my Sub taper and I found that when I was tired and lacked focus and motivation to do my homework, if I put on the stereo really loud and danced around my living room for 10 minutes like a fool I would work up the energy that I needed to get things done. Or sometimes just a quick phone call with a friend who knew what I was going through would get me through a rough patch.

The fact that you are just coming to terms with the fact that you’re addicted to opiates, right at the time that you’re trying to quit taking Sub, is also a red flag. I think it’s great that you’ve made this realization – that is truly an important breakthrough. Denial is very powerful in us addicts though and sometimes there’s a bit of back-and-forth that goes on before we really come to a place where we accept the seriousness of the problem and the difficulty of the solution. I know how strongly we can feel the desire to stop the madness, to be strong and healthy and yet still be done in by our own brains and end up using again.

Having some kind of strong recovery program in place will be crucial in supporting you as you move forward. I really encourage you to increase your knowledge about addiction, especially opiate addiction, and addiction treatment options. Maybe your school has some counseling resources that you can take advantage of – mine had a psychologist and there was no fee. Your school might also help you find resources for mental health care. You said that you’ve always felt you had a brain problem and difficulty with emotions – finding out if you do have an underlying mental health issue (many of us do, it’s why we self-medicate) might make a big difference in your ability to succeed.

There may be other support at school for students in recovery, if not there are likely other resources in your community. SMART Recovery was a big help to me, they have a really informative and helpful website and they also have meetings. When I first started Sub treatment I didn’t want to go to 12 step meetings, so my counselor had me agree to do three "recovery-oriented" activities per week. They could be anything that supported my recovery goals and didn’t involve drugs. I took yoga classes, dance classes, did social activities with sober or non-addict people, spent time with my kid, etc. I can’t tell you how much it helped improve the quality of my life and reinforced my desire to get well. What you’re going through is too much to carry all by yourself; try to find a way to let the people who love you help you through.

God, I know I’ve gone on and on here…I have a problem with that , I hope you didn’t mind too much. I just really see your desire to get through this, to get better, and you seem like you have so much going for you. I guess your situation just spoke to me. I’ll be rooting for you to find a way through!