• H&R Moderators: streaM Freak

Addiction ADDICTS!

Asante

Bluelighter
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
1,499
Location
Holland
Wow, all caps ADDICTS!, what the hell kinda post is this going to be?

It's not going to be a blame game. Society loves to guilt trip people with addiction. Some even say "they brought it on themselves, they should be withheld medical treatment or compassion."

Yeah, no.

When you are addicted to something, the balances in your life, your mind and your body are all askew. You are not on a level playing field with people who are healthy, just as for me, with my morbid obesity, my metabolism is definitely broken in a way that tends to result in me gaining back every pound i manage to lose, and more. That is a biological reality, the table is tilted to your disadvantage because your body broke because you overindulged in things relatively harmless in moderation.

I have had many kinds of drug addiction, not one or two or five, MANY. I know what it is. I have a good inkling of exactly how much worse it would have been if it had been heroin, crack, meth or sincere alcoholism. It would have dragged me down so much more deeply physically and mentally than the hard and soft drugs I was addicted to that didnt yet lead to the great damage that the Big 4 that create homeless addicts tend to create. It was really bad yes but, it couldve been so much worse,

Some of you reading this, into your third bottle of vodka of the day may say "well no shit dude, thanks, that is where I am now."

I have been very far gone in complex situations that included addiction, that combined, were very damn serious and very hard to get out of, taking years of struggle.

One of your companions is your enemy, for real. It is the self doubt, the self pity, the overwhelming sense of powerlessness that you cannot get it done, that is frying you so hard that it may take years before you even seriously try to quit and when you do, your mindset is a Swiss cheese full of holes that self-sabotage the robustness of your effort when you do muster the courage.

You can do something right now that is not very hard and not mumbo jumbo, well before you quit. Right now, in the frontline trench of your addiction, you can start talking courage into yourself, even when you screw another tin capsule off a bottle of booze and throw it across the room because you won't need to close that bottle, even when you cook up that shot of murky brown fluid, containing a drug that when pure is pristine white and dissolving crystal clear.

You gotta start small. Do not make the mistake of waiting until you quit, because then quitting is hardest. No matter how physically addicted you are, you are also full of psychological addiction mechanisms that greatly complicate the quitting effort. These psychological addiction mechanisms include things you say to yourself that sabotage your willpower and selfesteem and anchor your despair and depression. You know the ones if you pay attention to what goes on in you: "I can never quit, i don't have what it takes, I deserve this, there is nothing in the world but this drug for me" those kinds of thoughts you poison yourself with.

They are negative affirmations you fortify by repeating them and believing them.

That is something you can turn around. That you can't quit is pure BS, you can't say that at this point. So since you are already dishing out negative BS, how about positive BS to tip the balance?

One day soon I'm going to quit this like nobodies business, watch me!

If I am strong enough to bear with this habit I am way stronger than I think and way stronger than I need to quit!

It may seem like BS the first times you say it, but it will grow on you and you can put more and more conviction behind it, because repetition and belief invested in it will inevitably give it more traction than the negativity you are spamming out of your head, because guess what? Your mind, conscious and subconscious, is motivated to help you get out of this and you will get augmentation of parts of you you don't even realize you have. Your Higher Self and your body want you to live a good life and defeat this destructive trap.

Don't let addiction "experts" talk into your sense of powerless to try make you dependent on them and their quitting methods and products. You don't need all that, you don't need to enslave yourself to paid professionals and their artifices as a swap for the drug. You need to empower yourself. If others help you with that, wonderful, but they assist the inner journey you are going to get out of this. You are going to be your own Messiah, not some cult at a hundred bucks an hour.

You got this. If you start now by reprogramming your negative affirmations with positive ones, that is step one, and you WILL gain ground and that will trigger step two which gives you more momentum.

Invoke deliberate hypocricy! While you are cooking and injecting that fix, inbetween gulps of that cheap strong booze, affirm how you want to quit and dont need this drug and that its grip on you is slipping and how much rather you do mundane things you enjoy than dealing with the drug, and pow! follow up with the shot, the suck on the glass pipe the gulp from the bottle, to fortify the words with a wrongful drug reward. This will not make you an idiot, or pathetic, quite the contrary. You are presenting your brain with a contradiction: your desire not to use and the use right at the same time. This forces your brain to pick sides between the fantastically reasonable life affirming things you say, and the flash, the high, the comedown after, the hangover. Your brain has crazy survival instincts, your brain knows better than you realize that all this chemical euphoria or numbness is dragging you down. Your body and brain will stack more and more weight into your will to quit and less and less into your will to get high.

Seriously. And the side effects, the foul taste, the itch, the comedown, it will start bugging you more and more and will take more and more wind out of the sails of the using you do.

And you are letting er rip! You are not depriving yourself of drug on willpower! But.. out of your own free will, you will start taking slightly less high doses, pushing the moment to get high back a few minutes. Not because you are straining to fight yourself, but because the meh you have about using increases as the reenforcements for use go towards reenforcements not to use.

I have walked out of several kinds of addictions with relative ease with this methods, addictions I couldnt let go for the life of me if I tried to "just quit". Undermine that mental hypnosis that hooks you to something that does so much bad things for you in so many ways. Turn it in a mental hypnosis that empowers you, not one that weakens you, and deliberate invoke the seeming hypocricy of affirming against use while using, to challenge your mind to help you more in solving this disturbing contradiction.

It starts with you, inspiring yourself to better things. Not inspiring yourself to force yourself to cut back, but inspiring the good parts of you so that the eventual cutting back will be less difficult and not such a violation of your priorities.

Its still hard but, a lot less hard to make that change if you prior to that demolish your self sabotage with self love, self empowerment and a growing conviction that yes, you not just can but WILL quit.

If I can do it, so can you!

I believe in you.

Believe in yourself.

1-page printable handout
 
Last edited:
Agree completely. Which is why I despise the 12-step rehab culture with a passion. It teaches you helplessness. And once you swallow that BS about how you are 'powerless', or you will 'always be an addict' etc it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There isn't a 'disease' that somehow causes you to use drugs. The drugs themselves cannot cause you to use them. You have REASONS for using drugs. That was the biggest realization for me. That and noticing that when I thought I wanted to stop and wondering why I 'couldn't', I merely WANTED TO WANT to stop. And those are not the same motivations.
 
Honestly, it contradicts what others would tell me but I’ve always quit anything because I get so fed up with the side effects and get kinda scared straight

No Alcohol since 2021- the weight gain, liver pains, friends telling me I was going to drink myself to death, how much it was costing me, the black outs, hangovers etc

No Ketamine since 2019 deviated septum, bladder issues (going toilet every few minutes at 16/17 is no bueno), and my god the cost, sniffing a few grams of K back then still wasn’t that cheap.

No Benzos since 2019- waking up with losing days or even weeks, having people refuse to talk to you, finding out lots of stupid shit you’ve done, essentially burning money to not get high, but to black out and do really really bad shit.

Opioids- (not 100% this one as I use every 3 months or so) being constipated, not able to eat properly and so fucks up the gym, not being able to have sex properly at times, being a utter asshole as all I wish to do is just sit in a dark room scratching, the lying and silly stuff I’ll do to sneak in a dose of pills. The fact that no one knows I’m high but that’s not a good thing at all. How false the sense of security is, and how each time I’m rolling a dice to permanently alter my endorphins which are essential to feeling okay. If you break yourself from feeling okay your fucked.


2-3 weeks no Methylphenidate- I hate sleeping for 12 hours a day because of come downs, I hate feeling like everything doesn’t matter, I hate being frozen because I’m so jacked up that my body doesn’t need to move and my mind doesn’t need to speak, I won’t say nothing or do nothing. I have no emotional reactivity, I won’t eat and yes I get a six pack but the GF doesn’t even like it. Just some weirdo who writes weird poetry and plays guitar and sits blankly with shades on.

4 months no nicotine- nicotine gives me lovely chest pains, palpations, I vape so much I snore, I get blocked sinus, it makes me want to do nothing but lay in bed, binge eat, and be generally miserable and paranoid.
 
Last edited:
My father smoked a 50 gram tobacco pouch of heavy strong tobacco a day, the stuff most smokers can't stomach. Then one day in the early 1980 he learned that tobacco is bad for you, and why. He went: "oh." tossed his pouch out and never smoked again :ROFLMAO:

No patches, gums, coaching, hypnosis, acupuncture, thoughts of insufficiency or insecurities, he just tossed it and walked out of heavy smoking.

I nowhere near have that resolution, most people don't, but a lot of addiction "help" really helps you into dependency on their paid system.

"You are powerless"? No, you are the Universe incarnate. You are the primordial force of all things, you gotta remember that all the strength you need is inside of you, you have just forgotten and your head is full of self limiting excuses.

This is the spirit:



play it loud and feel it.
 
Great thread, just wanted to add some personal experience as well in the context of the original post's comments here:

It may seem like BS the first times you say it, but it will grow on you and you can put more and more conviction behind it, because repetition and belief invested in it will inevitably give it more traction than the negativity you are spamming out of your head

I think this is really important, and it's what i've been experiencing as well. The longer i live life without those drugs (meth, crack, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine), the less i am compulsively thinking about them. Honestly, even just anticipating getting good drugs is hard to deal with. The anticipation will hijack my brain; distract me from real life.

Your body and brain will stack more and more weight into your will to quit and less and less into your will to get high.

Yes definitely.

I think an important thing to "stack" is security, whether that's financial, relationship, self-care - the more of a positive force you are building for yourself, the more easily you are to recover from a relapse.

Let me tell you - this shit doesn't all magically go away. The mindset is key. And everyone has their own way to deal with life.
 
Another thing I'm allergic against is all this harping on about "willpower', and basically suggesting that the problem with those people we call addicts is they don't have enough of it or else they could 'resist temptation', and that what you need to do to get over your addiction is just acquire / apply more of this hypothetical willpower.

This misleading and self-defeating rhetoric comes from a fundamental misunderstanding which equates our 'will' with our better intention, or rational perspectives.
The fact is true will equates to desire. not the things we think / feel we OUGHT to be wanting or striving for, but the things we actually DO want.

Hence trying to force so-called recovery (from a non-existent disease) by telling the subject to just apply more 'willpower' with no further examination of your drives and motives for using drugs is doomed to failure, resulting in the depressingly predictable narrative of somebody white-knuckling it in obligatory self-denial until they inevitably 'fall off the wagon'. THEN tell themselves how this is proof positive they are somehow permanently 'sick' and that substances can 'control' them, because they have been taught and conditioned to interpret their own actions in this way, and the cycle starts all over again to guarantee a revolving door client and a fat revenue for all those rehab centres. 🤷🏻


Since changing my own habits (on my own entirely) I have gotten myself a couple relevant degrees (behavioural science and neuroscience), become a drug researcher and worked extensively in harm reduction. Of the many struggling individuals I have helped mentor (NOT to be confused with 'sponsor'), the thing that has come up over and over again is their confusion about their motivations to stop and why they can't seem to.

When I push them on why they think they want to stop the answer is pretty much always a laundry list of the NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES of their drug use : my wife will leave me if I carry on so I have to stop; my health is failing so I need to stop; my family will disown me if they find out; I'm going to lose my job if I don't quit; I can't afford to get caught and go to prison AGAIN; I spend all my grocery/rent money on drugs and this can't go on etc etc.
Literally NOTHING about any positive gains from not using, or not using to excess, just trying to avoid the negatives of extreme, habituated use.
If I ask the same people 'imagine there were no social, legal, financial or health implications to you from your drug use, would you still keep on doing your drug -?' and the answer is HELL YEAH.

... In other words you want the effects, you just don't want the cost.
Humans like any other living creature are motivated more strongly TOWARDS perceived benefits than they are motivated AWAY from perceived costs. So long as your drug gives you something nothing else can, so long as you think there is no greater pleasure or you need it to function or whatever else, and your only reason to stop is to avoid negative consequences, eventually you will ALWAYS return to the drug.

That is because you are not setting your 'willpower' against some outside force affecting you, you are setting your actual will against your better intentions, and in that contest there is only ever one outcome.

Given what I was prepared to go through for another hit of heroin, what I was prepared to lose and throw away for another hit of heroin, what material deprivations and degradation of the self I readily put up with, I could only come to the conclusion that not only did I not 'lack willpower', but instead that my absolute will to use heroin was exceptionally strong. Then I had to ask myself what was driving that.
Once you know the reasons for your own behaviour and stop ascribing them to some mysterious outside agency, but instead honestly attribute them to yourself, then you are in a position to challenge those reasonings and change those desires. Conventional rehabs not only DO NOT help you complete that thought process, but they do the exact opposite.

Nothing outside of yourself can 'make' you use drugs at the end of the day. You have to understand that the choice was always yours, no matter how driven or compelled you FELT. Subjective feeling does not equal objective reality.

And also let us not forget that we do not speak of the 'FORCE of habit' for nothing. Humans are powerfully driven by habit. It makes us feel secure. So even once you are no longer getting an immediate reward from the drug use, and it is just pure habituation, that habituation is one of the surest traps there is. At the height of my addiction I was mostly carrying on because despite being at that point miserable, my life was at least PREDICTABLE. I knew what I was going to do from sunrise to sundown; scrounge money to get heroin, score heroin, do heroin. I knew my place in society; I was a filthy junkie (a role I had by then internalised completely). No big life decisions to be made (even less so once I had been indoctrinated to see myself as 'powerless' to make them), no self-image crisis. Few people acknowledge just how being stuck in a technically intolerable situation can come to feel like home.


PS to quit or reduce a habit, firstly stop looking for something outside of yourself that supposedly can make you do it against your will. Start looking inside for why you want it and why YOU keep doing it, and be honest with yourself about the fact that this is, indeed, your own will; no matter how destructive the consequences.

Secondly stop listing only the bad things you are looking to avoid, and start conceiving of ways your life could actually be IMPROVED and more rewarding instead with reduced / no use, in order to motivate yourself. Every single person I've seen initiate successfui and long-term change did so in pursuit of something BETTER, not mere avoidance of something worse.

THE SOLUTION IS TO ACTIVELY CHANGE YOUR MINDSET, NOT PASSIVELY LOOKING FOR A CURE.
 
Last edited:
Once you know the reasons for your own behaviour and stop ascribing them to some mysterious outside agency, but instead honestly attribute them to yourself, then you are in a position to challenge those reasonings and change those
.... stop listing only the bad things you are looking to avoid, and start conceiving of ways your life could actually be IMPROVED and more rewarding instead with reduced / no use, in order to motivate yourself.

^ These two ways of approaching sobriety were really important in my recovery too.

It's easy to compare oneself to others in a room like an NA room. Especially if telling war stories at your meeting is common. Sometimes i'd catch a slight glimmer of a smile in someone's mouth curves at some point when they talk about how many drugs they did, and in that split second i realize that, to go off of what @TheUltimateFixx was saying, harping on the negatives and "strength of willpower" becomes meaningless.

I'd prefer one of them to say, "hey look i used to smoke crack every day but now i just do lines of coke on the holidays when we travel to Colombia for the winter holidays. The reason why i can do this isn't willpower - it is because i worked hard on creating a stable life, something i never had when i was a full blown addict"
 
Top