Has anyone healed their GABA receptors completely from benzos and can drink again?

[bakulaflare]

Question for fellow benzo-surviors

Has anyone gone through withdrawals from benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin or Ativan or any benzo) and healed completely to the point where they can enjoy an alcoholic drink without feeling sick or going back into withdrawals?

I am 3 years and 8 months clean of benzos and alcohol

I'm scared to try and drink again because 2 months after quitting cold turkey I had a beer and it made me feel sick and go into a mini-withdrawal.
8 months clean I had a minor surgery and was given Propofol as a sedative, which also sent me into withdrawal like symptoms waves for 3-4 days.

A little about me...

I went through two episodes of withdrawals and they were the most difficult parts of my life. I quit xanax cold turkey and went through hell for a week in a foreign country

My 6 months of benzo use culminated in a final weekend of partying in South America, after which I decided to flush all my xanax and ativan down the toilet and quit. (I had no idea what tapering was until later) .

This cold turkey detox was the most difficult thing in my life. I felt like I had died and was living like a zombie, not dead or alive, like time had stopped and the world went on with me only present as an observer. Almost like I was living in another evil dimension. I was shaking, having tremors, feeling extremely depressed and not eating for nearly a week and finally I saw the light shine through.

The next few months would be difficult but after about 2 months I stopped having waves.

It has now been 3 years and 8 months and I feel normal and I am tempted to have a drink even though I told myself I would not drink for 4 years.

There is no magic time for how long your body takes to fully recover (I have read 36 months in the worst cases) but there are people who's withdrawals last longer than that though rare.

Has anybody been able to drink without getting sick post benzo withdrawal? No one in the entire internet has discussed this topic for years!!There are no new stories or information. Please share your stories and ask me any questions you have!

Thanks a lot

 

[adder]

I don't think this thread belongs in this section as you won't get any definitive answer whether or not you will be able to ever drink again without flashbacks of withdrawal, but anyway, here's my experience with alcohol:

I quit benzodiazepines in December 2013 after 9 years of dependence. Since I quit, I drank alcohol just a few times, first time was like months after quitting to a year and that made me feel really bad for a few days and it was a very small quantity, so I didn't think to try again until last December or so when I drank ~100 mL of ~4.5% cider which had a very short-lasting (15 mins maybe at most) very mild disinhibiting effect followed by restlessness, lethargy, and hot flashes. A few days ago I drank ~125 mL of 4.5% cider again and basically had the same effect that did not linger onto the following day. This makes me completely uninterested in trying alcohol again and I may not do it for a long time now.

I had never enjoyed alcohol much to begin with. I never felt a desire to drink a can of beer after work etc. and that feeling people get is completely foreign to me. On the other hand a similar feeling I used to have with opioids, e.g. after coming back home from school, but then again at some point I regularly went to school high on opioids. I guess why I never enjoyed alcohol much might also be because first time I tried opioids and benzodiazepines was when I was 14 and when I craved something that would calm me down and let me forget, these were superior to alcohol for me, opioids were like superior to anything in this respect. First time I tried codeine, I immediately fell in love with it and then stronger ones followed. As relaxing and mood increasing drugs opioids feel very clean compared to alcohol, zero physical or mental side effects subjectively, and the calming effect is overwhelming, while alcohol always felt very dirty and toxic to me and even if it ever calmed me down a bit, there was certainly a hint of anxiety caused by it in the background as well, not to mention nausea and vertigo. As purely anxiolytic drugs benzodiazepines are also basically devoid of subjective negative effects unlike alcohol, well, at least before you get addicted and your anxiety gets over its usual level when you don't take a pill.

I'm not really angered that I can't have a drink because I took benzodiazepines for years because I never associated alcohol with being relaxed or sociable (on top of that my father was an alcoholic), but benzodiazepines caused me many other problems though (or prevented me from overcoming and learning how to deal with them). It does make me feel weird in certain "social" situations when people drink alcohol to socialize because alcohol does not have and never had the same effect for me, so I avoid events that include such socializing because when everyone had one or two beers, I can suddenly feel a moment when the atmosphere changes drastically, I can hear how there is a steep increase in talkativeness and loudness and then I have to leave as I'm in a completely different headspace than everyone else.

 

[Solipsis]

? How does not getting much effect from not much alcohol turn you away from alcohol?
I mean: good going because it sucks to like alcohol anyway, but it doesn't really make any sense to be frank.

I've personally been addicted to benzo's and had hard withdrawals from it (went to clinic because of all that) plus long PAWS but not any use/abuse that involved insane amounts of benzos implying crazy levels of tolerance and withdrawals. Just slight levels of tolerance and increased dosages.

The PAWS fucked everything up for about 1½ years but after that I slowly got back to normal again. I feared that after GHB - even before that - I was fucked as well, and also after the benzos... after a couple years though, things basically got back to normal more and more. At this point (about..6-7 years later?) I do not really know anymore whether any reaction I have right now is related to my benzo dependency but I do regularly drink a lot and I often don't feel so well, but I definitely don't have anything close to acute benzo withdrawals etc...

Am trying to stop drinking altogether though, it's not super serious right now but it is influencing my life enough and cannot go further.

I don't feel like I am incapable of using GABAergics any longer, but I do feel like I am more sensitive / on-edge than I was before and that I have much fewer tolerance for that anxiety to rise before I start feeling bad. Still not enough to catch me off-guard with withdrawals but on the other hand I don't have all that much wiggling room either and am more quickly caught in between a rock and a hard place, I guess I spent that wiggling room earlier.

I get pregabalin prescribed and this works and is a fair intermediate that does influence your GABA household but not directly, and the way it acts indirectly is quite different than from benzoids.

 

[Cotcha Yankinov]

^If AMPA antagonism (perampanel) is indeed intoxicating, and if AMPA is responsible for a lot of kindling, then I wonder just what the subjective experience is like. Maybe it's benzo/alcohol-ish?

I'm sure it's a mind eraser but I'd like to see perampanel tested for utility in GABA withdrawals.

 

[adder]

? How does not getting much effect from not much alcohol turn you away from alcohol?
I mean: good going because it sucks to like alcohol anyway, but it doesn't really make any sense to be frank.

How is feeling restless and lethargic not much effect? That is clearly a negative effect for me, however mild it might be now over 3 years after quitting benzos. If the negatives outweigh the positives or there are no positives, you are going to be put away. Before I got addicted to opioids and benzos, I did get moderately intoxicated as well as wasted drunk on alcohol, so it's not like I have never experienced alcohol intoxication, and how it had affected me before I got dependent on benzos and when I was already dependent on them compared to how it made me feel after quitting makes me think it negatively affects me in a way much different from how people feel sick on the day after moderate to heavy drinking from hangover, which is a sign for me my GABA/glutamatergic system is still quite sensitive and not working properly. An important factor is certainly also that I was a teenager when I got dependent on benzos and that I took them throughout my teenage years, and now I'm 27.

As for other drugs that affect GABA release or GABA receptors, I can drink coffee 2-3 times a day though without side effects other than some increase anxiety at times, but I stopped smoking cannabis for good after I quit benzos as it started making me feel paranoid and extremely anxious, and while I was still on benzos, I enjoyed it as a relaxant and sometimes psychedelic very much, also helped me immensely through methadone withdrawal.

So anyway, what I meant to answer to the original question is that you might not feel alcohol effects as you did before you got dependent on benzodiazepines even if it doesn't necessarily cause flashbacks of some withdrawal symptoms.