I’ve been abstinent from opiates, stimulants, benzodiazepines, and alcohol since January 2013.
Between age of 14 and 27, I had multiple sub-habits within an overarching pattern of substance misuse and dependence. In my late teens I had a period of heavy ecstasy use (hundreds of pills). In my early twenties I was dependent on benzodiazepines (about a year, 3-10 mg Xanax daily) and in the past decade I've had several lengths of opioid dependence, two terms of low-dose Suboxone maintenance. Most recently complete dependence on prescription and street speed.
Today I have a Rube Goldberg-like “recovery” that draws on participation in self-help groups, psychiatry, and Buddhism.
lman_15, you mention experiencing “anxiety and a bit of depression at times.” If you asked me about my mood anytime during the first half-year without substances, you would have always gotten an answer that described mild depression. I was (and to a large degree still am) mourning the loss of my beloved substances.
The treatment program I participated had a rather fundamentalist attitude but after about four months I was able to gain approval to see a psychiatrist. While I knew I could never again use controlled substances, I wanted to try an SSRI, as I had never stuck out the induction period with any of them. So I saw a psychiatrist and I learned how utterly disconnected I actually was from what was going on inside of me. I have never had an answer to the common question “How do you feel?” I could tell you I liked or disliked how I felt, but that was the extent to which I was aware of my feelings. This psychiatrist impressed upon me the usefulness of simply labeling and becoming practiced at identifying my feelings. The doctor would use questions that provoked anxiety and discomfort in me and it wasn’t until she actually said, you look anxious, that I realized, wow, this is what anxiety is. According to her diagnosis, the true issue was not depression but anxiety and I was RX’d Zoloft and Inderal.
The SSRI and beta-blocker did some things I appreciate, and other things that concern me. It made a big different to be free of many of the most bothersome subjective physiological effects of anxiety like racing heart and sweating; just this caused my social anxiety to be significantly reduced. Every so often my mood was elevated enough for me to really note it, but the most perceptible difference was how the Zoloft attenuated negative feelings; what some people might describe as “numbness”--I prefer to call “equanimity.” And in the very painful first year of sobriety it was actually really helpful to be desensitized to the world.
I prefer the concept of dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder, to label what you’ve described. WHO describes it as “A chronic depression of mood, lasting at least several years, which is not sufficiently severe, or in which individual episodes are not sufficiently prolonged, to justify a diagnosis of severe, moderate, or mild recurrent depressive disorder.” I haven’t liked the blanket term PAWS.
I’ve found that I have to work for almost all my truly happy moments, i.e., they’re the result of deliberate effort that leads to accomplishing a goal or pushing myself in pursuit of some kind of willpower-related aim. If my mood is low I am unable to perform the kinds of effort I just described; those are the most frightening moments because they remind me of the truly incapacitating influence that depression has on me.
