Author: Romeo
Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 8:54 pm
Winningduhepic said, "Coming off suboxone/opiates and expecting to be normal soon after would be like loosing a loved one and expecting to be how you were before they passed soon after."
That comment reminded me of something my addiction counselor said to me when I first got off of Suboxone. He told me that I was going to grieve the loss of my drug. I didn’t quite understand him at first, but the more he talked about it, the more sense he made. For a lot of us, our drug use had consumed our lives. Our drug use was the first thing we thought about in the morning, the last thing we thought about before bed and it filled our thoughts during the day. Once that drug was taken away, we lost something that we had been deeply dependant on and it’s just plain normal to grieve that loss.
If you feel like it, you can look up the 5 stages of grief and see if any of it applies to you. I know I went through them all. BTW, you don’t necessarily go directly from stage 1 to stage 2, etc., you may bounce around, you skip some stages altogether.
Like DoaQ said, recovery is a process. The 5 stages of grief I went through were just part of the process for me. Once I got to the final stage, Acceptance, that’s when my recovery really started taking off. I believe recovery is a process that has some general similarities for all of us, but I also believe recovery to be quite individual. We all come into and through recovery in our own unique way, the important thing is to continue to strive to find what works for you, then apply it and make a habit of it until it becomes second nature.
FYI, I have found DoaQ’s attitude and words on recovery to be most inspirational in my own recovery. She’s my hero…..even though she called me a wise-ass!!!! Bee-aw-tch!! 
Also, I wanted to make sure I mentioned this to you again, when I got off of Suboxone, I was positive I had buggered myself up beyond repair. I was sure I had permanently damaged myself, but as time went by, I found that I just kept on getting better and better. Have faith that you WILL get better. If you don’t expect to get better, you probably won’t or it’ll take a lot longer to get better.