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starting something today

udogg

Bluelighter
Joined
Dec 10, 2017
Messages
32
below is what i posted after reading Xorkoth post about his opiate story. He suggested i post here. I just had a 30+ minute conversation with my brother about what the true story is. He told me to tell the rest of my family but minimally be honest with him. I am going try and be honest with him to do that , but not tell my family yet. He says that means i am not ready to do it yet. lets see where we this goes. One day at a time right. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

U

  • for whatever it is worth that letter made me come clean to some of family who have no idea i have a problem. That is a start. I am at the 6th paragraph where i started doing the taking time off and struggling with it (ie my first withdrawals after years of using it "as needed" to "for fun" to "now daily" for past few months.) I hope i can do it without a program. Now that i told people
    in my family that should help hold me a little more accountable. Hopefully , that is enough. mine got worse when it became easier for me to get. I am sure that is the case for many on here. i suppose i have to stay away from my friends that do them? I assume these have all been disucssed numerous times here, but any advice wuold be appreciated. My biggest question is who has had success without a program and any advice with that, would be helpful. I think that that the 50mg ish (probably more if i am honest about the past few weeks with a pill here and a pill there) a day range that i am at and have been for 4 to 6 months is hopefully doeable.

    And Xorkoth thank you for being the one to hopefully start me on the path to an opiate free life. Like everyone here i cant believe I got to this point.

    Feel free to reach out and keeping me honest honest or i will hopefully post my progress.​












 
as long as we are being honest here i have been taking opiods since i hurt my back 4-5 years ago. I just have increased significantly due to "pain" and access to them over the past 6 months. honesty starts now ...for at least today.... and at least to you guys :)

being honest hear too
 
What were you taking 50mg of?

To be completely honest, it helps to have accountability from family and friends, but if you do not have the desire to quit in order to better your own personal life then I don't think that accountability will stop you alone. It is too easy to convince yourself that they won't find out, invent new ways to hide and lie about your habit, and tell yourself that you can control it this time around. Honesty can definitely help improve and mend relationships with people you really care about and people who really care about you, which can help for a number of reasons, but there needs to be a serious goal of getting clean to better yourself.

I would definitely encourage you to be open and honest with your family and friends. It can help ease tension and anxiety, remove personal guilt, and maybe offer an explanation for some of your behavior resulting from addiction. Any improvement to your life and living situation will help you reach your goal by reducing "triggers" and increasing motivation to stay sober, but as the saying goes "you have to do it for yourself". For better or worse, we can't let what others think dictate our actions.

Consider how opioid addiction has negatively impacted your life. Have you spent a lot of time and money on it? Have you lost friends? Have you given up goals for it? Surely it has impacted you on a very personal level as well as on a social level. It's good to understand and consider how your actions impact those who you are close to, but we shouldn't forget how our actions impact and shape ourselves as well.

As far as old friends go.. I think it depends on the nature of the relationship and your personal comfort level. For the first few months or even year, it's best to remove all risky situations, or trigger situations, from your life. That means if hanging out with certain friends gives you urges to get loaded.. it's best to not hang out with them. If they are going to encourage you to get high, offer you pills, or even if you know they can access pills then it is probably best avoided. If you only hang out to get high or have someone to get high with, probably best avoided. If hanging out with out getting high seems strange, probably best avoided.

That said, I don't believe that it is necessary to lose all friends just because they use drugs or have a substance use disorder. Isolation and boredom can be a trigger as well. If there is a deeper connection beyond or before drugs, it might be good to keep that friend- maybe you need to have some distance until you get your impulses under control, but for me, I got high with a lot of friends that I knew and hung out with before I started using drugs. I definitely dropped a lot of friends since getting clean, but I've hung onto to friends with whom I have a deeper connection. These are the people that I can still talk and relate to without using drugs. Right at first I kept my distance though. I still talked to them online or over the phone but avoided hanging out for the most part because I knew they were still using.

Also, it depends on how much and what they are using.. the friends I still talk to smoke weed and maybe take some pills, but they are not completely consumed and obsessed with drugs. They live relatively normal lives and they respect the fact that I'm in recovery. They don't bring up drugs or try to pressure me into using, which is important.

Don't be afraid to talk about your withdrawal symptoms here. A lot of people here are no stranger to them and some of us can give you some ideas and advice as how to deal with specific symptoms.
 
thank you so much for that detailed response. It is very helpful. the drugs were Roxy, perc, and ms contin sometimes (last month all together and often plugged at night in a large amount). i will answer in detail later but i need to go out. I assume you recommend cutting off cold turkey. i am leaning towards weening over a month or two, but i will see how that goes. As far as friends i meant i needed to get away from the people who give it to me. i actually preferred to do it alone so i have ostracized myself from my friends who have noticed as has my family. the few people i am friends with who do the pills would not do it around me. I actually gave it to them sometimes. I hope that my lack of everyday use for a longer period of time makes the wd period a little less bad. I wrote more but it got erased. I will write more later, Thank you so much for taking the time to write that, It means so much to me to have all of you with such valuable advice, I really appreciate you all and will take the help as I start this journey.
 
So does everyone think I am dumb for tappering? Should I just be going cold turkey? I get the family part Mafioso I just want to see how hard the whole thing is first and where i end up with it. I am aware that is already half ass committed on day 1 but I would rather not have her know especially if I fail. The lying i was ding to this point was hard enough. I want to try and do it for myself first and see how I do. I did tell my brother and a good friend at home who has addition issues himself and has been clean for 4 years. So that is some accountability.
 
Honestly it depends on your willpower. For me tapering never worked because I'd always try to get high. The idea when you taper is to take just enough to not feel too bad, and you basically have to feel sort of "meh" for quite a while. But if you can make it work and you'd prefer that, I'll just say do whatever is going to work for you. Cold turkey is what worked for me, cold turkey and comfort meds. If I recall from the other thread you haven't been on them too long? If you cold turkey, and you find yourself not being able to deal with it and giving in to opiates again, you can get some kratom (a plant that hits the opiate receptors but less intensely than oxy/morphine/etc) and take as little as is needed to not feel too bad. Take it as infrequently as you can stand, throughout the 5 days or so that you'll be experiencing acute withdrawals. Then STOP taking it, because it's addictive too (I was addicted to kratom for the first years of my opiate addiction). Using this method, people have gotten off opiates. You'll still experience post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS) most likely afterwards, but hopefully not for long since you haven't been on opiates for long. During this period after acute withdrawal, your body will be slowly readjusting to not having opiates so you'll likely have some difficulty sleeping and sort of feel just not quite right, but this will pass. During the PAWS phase, the best things for you are exercise (really, really important, it will cause your body to produce more endorphins which will repair your opiate receptors much faster and make you feel a lot better), good diet and staying occupied.

Lastly, it's important that you address the reasons you got addicted in the first place. If there are some things in your life that are causing you pain that you're trying to mask, you need to address those and try to make some changes. Equally important is discovering things that make you feel good and excited and inspired. Anything that you love doing, or used to love doing when you were younger... for me it's playing music. Being involved in music makes me excited to wake up every morning, without opiates. It fills my life up with purpose and gives me something to spend my time on. It could be anything for you, but my point is you need to find something to fill your time and give you something to put your energy into. Most of the time people abuse drugs to fill a void of some sort.
 
X, you hit the nail on the head! Find your "passion", that thing you love so much that if it was your job, you would do it for free. That thing in your life that actually moves you. IMO that is what helps the body and mind to heal. I wish you all the best!
 
Yeah that all makes sense. Finding the passion which has been opiates for awhile I need to figure that out. How long does PAWS last? Where do you get kratom? GNC? Online? What for does it come in and how do you take it? Pill? I am going to start going to see y psychitrist who I have not seen on a year and a half. She will be shocked at what I have become, but it will be a good thing to do. Thanks again Xorkoth. If I can do this I owe you. Your write up of your experiences is legit what pushed me over the hump (although just coming on here was a start.) Thanks all
 
Being open with people who care might make things easier. Even if they aren't fully supportive, at least you won't have to lie about going through WDs. It's hard to explain WDs without being honest about your situation. I've gone through WDs and tried to hide them from everyone.. makes it really hard and very isolating.

Oxycodone is the active ingredient in the drugs you mentioned. Tapering isn't a bad idea, but oxycodone isn't the best drug to taper with from what I have read. It has a relatively short half life meaning it will have a quicker onset but a shorter duration. Compared to something like methadone, you will have to dose much more frequently and will experience more up and down from the drug coming on and leaving.

I'm not opposed to the idea of tapering, I think it can be helpful if done correctly but if you are having trouble sticking to the schedule it may not be the best idea for you. In your particular case, I would think a relatively fast taper would be best. 50mg/day for 6 months isn't very much all things considered, to be completely honest. I would think that taking 5mg of oxycodone(if that's what you intend to taper with) only to minimize the WDs with a max daily dose of around 20mg for the first week, reducing by 5-10mg a week would be a decent pace. Even when a taper is done right you will still experience mild WDs and discomfort. Tapering might help minimize some of the more severe symptoms like insomnia, stomach problems and serve to help you eat.

PAWs can last a number of years but usually starts to go away and becomes manageable in a matter of months. Healthy and wholesome lifestyle helps keep the symptoms at bay.

Kratom is available online, some sources are better than others. No sourcing allowed, but I'd imagine using a search engine and reading through reviews should help you find a reliable source. It comes in a number of different forms, it can be taken as a pill or brewed into a tea.
 
Lastly, it's important that you address the reasons you got addicted in the first place. If there are some things in your life that are causing you pain that you're trying to mask, you need to address those and try to make some changes. Equally important is discovering things that make you feel good and excited and inspired. Anything that you love doing, or used to love doing when you were younger... for me it's playing music. Being involved in music makes me excited to wake up every morning, without opiates. It fills my life up with purpose and gives me something to spend my time on. It could be anything for you, but my point is you need to find something to fill your time and give you something to put your energy into. Most of the time people abuse drugs to fill a void of some sort.

I really feel this is the heart of addiction. What is hurting? What needs attention? What needs to change? Sometimes it takes lots of hard work to get to the real answers to those questions. It makes sense to be focused on the drug that you want to quit, to the trajectory of the WDs/PAWS etc--but sustained "recovery" is really getting to the authentic places in your own heart and mind that generally (initially anyway) tend to scare the shit out of us. :\ But the reward is that when you learn to not only not run from those places but to listen and interact and learn from them, life does tend to open up more effortlessly and the need to numb and mask diminishes organically.
 
I have not been on here probably since I wrote that in 2017. It is crazy to read. Boy was I in denial and a mess. I was for sure using more then than I even admitted on here most likely because I couldnt even be honest with myself. Long story short, not that anyone cares, is I was far from able to quit or tapper or whatever I thought I could do then. The next year turned into hell. I got up to around 150+mgs a day and it almost destroyed my life. Amazingly the only thing that got me into rehab was someone close to me ODing on my pills (he survived with narcan). I was so fucked up even that did not completely stop me but it was the beginning of the end. A month later December 2018 (almost 1 year to the day of my last post here) I ended up in rehab and I am happy to say I had success. It was brutal but with 3 weeks of subs, an insane amount of therapy, 3 months of outpatient and changing my whole way of living I have not taken a pill since December 9, 2018. It has been a long road but thank god I have made it this far. It is interesting to read where I was then. If anyone is questioning whether they can do it, if I can anyone can. And life is wayyyyyy better now. If anyone is looking for support or questioning anything, feel free to reach out.
 
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