I dramatically cut down (I'd like to be able to say I quit completely.. but I haven't quite managed that) my kratom usage about a month ago, having been using it two or three times daily for three or four months beforehand (and two or three times a week for a few months before that). I started at about 4 grams per dose and had worked up to about 10 or so by the time I started to quit. To cut a long story short, the first two or three days were pretty grim but bearable, then symptoms rapidly reduced but then lingered for quite a while, partly because I came down with a nasty cold a week and a half into it which I used to rationalise three consecutive days of modest use (2-3 grams of a 50/50 blend of a red vein [cant really name the strain without being obvious about vendor] with stem and vein each day) which set me back a little.
About a week ago, having been seemingly free of withdrawal for a few days, I decided to test the waters with a 4 gram dose. Now, I don't use the same strains I did when I first started out, but that got me a lot higher than I'd expect with no tolerance, particularly with regard to the sense of reward and satisfaction which I can't say I've ever experienced before to quite that degree, be it with kratom or any other drug. The one thing it reminded me of most was the feeling of a cigarette after being nicotine deprived for too long, and that kind of concerned me as I've only ever got that sort of buzz from anything when addicted to it and/or craving pretty badly. It turns out I was right to be concerned as about 24 hours later I was kicked back into mild withdrawal for a day or two.
Yesterday, I decided to try 4 grams again, basically just because I was bored and had run out of weed. It didn't get me any higher than expected, if anything it didn't quite get me where I wanted to be so I re-dosed another couple of grams an hour later. Today, I woke up feeling really tired and shitty due to lack of sleep the previous night and the prospect of going in to work again having been off all last week with a load of shit to catch up on. So I took 3 grams to wake me up a bit and rolled a spliff to smoke on my walk to the bus stop. By the time I was half way through my spliff I was having that same distinctive rewarding rushy feeling again, so in retrospect the lesser high Yesterday was probably because I wasn't mixing it with weed like I usually do and had done the time before. The weird thing, though, is that this afternoon I was thrown back into withdrawal/rebound. The only symptoms besides a grim mood were the chills and chicken-skin, but they were almost comparable in severity to day one of cold turkey and, even weirder, it dissipated once I'd been home a while and smoked some weed. So it was more like a sort of comedown than proper withdrawal but almost as nasty.
I've read plenty of reports where people who have detoxed slip back into withdrawal far easier than before, but I don't think I've heard anything about this sort of short-term rebound effect. Has anyone had a similar a experience? and also, how much should I expect that sort of increased susceptibility to physical withdrawal to dissipate over time and over how long?
EDIT: Well, that rebound/WD wasn't quite as short-term as I thought. It started out surprisingly nastily and faded to a much more tolerable level within a few hours (so much so that I thought it had completely gone at first), but did continue to linger for a two or three days. I think I'm just going to have to abstain for at least another whole month before even testing a small dose again.. The nastiness and duration of these withdrawals completely outweigh the high.