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February - Getting and staying clean/sober thread

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Using dreams the last tow nights for me.. so i better take notice and identify where I am in the cycle of addiction and get myself back to where I need to be.

Good job everyone!!

EDIT: in journaling I identified where this came from.. a friend of mine mentioned the other day that he had new connect of a strong substance of which is one of my DOC's.. so I have received an addictive push here.. so Im going to journel the big picture out of what will undoubtedly go down if use. Im already feeling better since I posted this.
 
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^^ Great job staying honest and sharing about that NSA, journaling about the big picture is what I like to do to - "Playing the tape through" so to speak. I hope the dreams and the cravings subside for you.


I'm doing alright today - Im 95% sure I found somewhere to live, and I also bought a membership to 24hr fitness today. :)
 
Doing better today, I'm starting to stick to the Fukin' plan.
You guys are a great support group! :thumbup:
My wife is more aware of my situation now too, and not having to keep everything a secret helps, too...
 
It's actually easier for me to stay clean from certain drugs when they are always available. It's that opportunistic "it's only around right now!" type of thinking that really creates the trouble. I still have a reliable connect for good H that I could hit up anytime I wanted to, but if he told me that he was planning to move out-of-state next week, only then would I get antsy. The other place that this can get a person into trouble is when you want to try RCs before they are made illegal.

I'll hear back from this company Monday on whether I passed the criminal background check. If I did and the offer is made, this will be HUGE for RL. But I'm trying to not get my hopes up, as I've failed more than I've passed this year. Going to be a long, neurotic weekend waiting on this. But at least the interview went well and they even told me that "I'd better pass the background check." Ugh.
 
“You never fail until you stop trying.”
― Albert Einstein;)

Very best wishes red and even if it doesn't come now it will and in a forum thats more suiting.

I did a really good job at working through this.. see I came from a market out west where I had access to very strong cocain and thus the stuff where Im at has little of no temptation for me.. but the purity that is needed to fire up the addiction has reared its ugly face so i needed to go back and implement the same things I have been using battling against the high quality of other drugs that are available here. It really just came down to working my way through the fantasy and being honest at what it would be.. the need to administer as close to an OD dose as possible for a few seconds of "pleasure" followed by instant insanity, paranoia, and awfulness. With firing up my addiction and all its bullshit to boot.

So i feal much better and have not been fantasizing, cause whats the point its a fantasy anyway once Im honest with myself..

Its amazing how it can try and play us.. fuck addiction and its nonsense.. I win again<3
 
I've actually being doing extremely well with not craving cocaine or heroin lately. What I do get cravings for is MDMA and the whole club scene. The hedonism. And now that I have a good body from all of this working out and some confidence in my appearance, I want to go to the nightclubs and party in the gardens of eden. Actually, almost everyday downtown when I walk from the gym to the bus, I pass an area for smokers. There are always a bunch of smokers huddled together smoking (mostly) menthols and chatting. This combined the industrial feel to everything gives me flashbacks of smoking patios at the rave clubs, and the anxiety makes my heart pound a bit. I know that I probably couldn't roll again without demanding a downer for the crash and subsequent days, and that would lead nowhere good at all. But some methylone, perhaps? ugh.

So ya, it's not easy. And it's not fun thinking about giving it up forever. But exercise helps. Getting up early helps. Mindfulness helps. Good music helps.
 
^^ I'm right there with you RedLeader - It's easy for me to tell myself that heroin or coke would be a HORRIBLE idea and I would lose everything - But MDMA, LSD, shrooms, RC's... It's more difficult for me to find reasons not to use those substances. Honestly I still have reservations about them. I haven't used anything in over 9 months but I guess I haven't committed to trying not to use any substance period yet. I like to tell myself I'll trip again one day, but who knows if that day will come. All I know right now is that I'm not using anything today, and probably not tomorrow. ;)
 
I agree with the never letting the addiction know its the end.. as case said its only really about today... and i actually give my adiction the plain simple fact that given the right advanced notice I will use at the very end. though I kinda know that when the end comes I wont want to.
 
Using dreams the last tow nights for me.. so i better take notice and identify where I am in the cycle of addiction and get myself back to where I need to be.

Good job everyone!!

EDIT: in journaling I identified where this came from.. a friend of mine mentioned the other day that he had new connect of a strong substance of which is one of my DOC's.. so I have received an addictive push here.. so Im going to journel the big picture out of what will undoubtedly go down if use. Im already feeling better since I posted this.

^^ Great job staying honest and sharing about that NSA, journaling about the big picture is what I like to do to - "Playing the tape through" so to speak. I hope the dreams and the cravings subside for you.


I'm doing alright today - Im 95% sure I found somewhere to live, and I also bought a membership to 24hr fitness today. :)

Wow, guys, that's a great proactive and strong way to deal with such thoughts. It's funny, because I play fast and easy with my addictions, which is dangerous as all hell. I know if I were to write it all out, think it through to the end, then I'd realize that my willful ignorance, (and ignorance can be bliss, eh?) is nothing more than fantasy.

It's actually easier for me to stay clean from certain drugs when they are always available. It's that opportunistic "it's only around right now!" type of thinking that really creates the trouble. I still have a reliable connect for good H that I could hit up anytime I wanted to, but if he told me that he was planning to move out-of-state next week, only then would I get antsy. The other place that this can get a person into trouble is when you want to try RCs before they are made illegal.

I'll hear back from this company Monday on whether I passed the criminal background check. If I did and the offer is made, this will be HUGE for RL. But I'm trying to not get my hopes up, as I've failed more than I've passed this year. Going to be a long, neurotic weekend waiting on this. But at least the interview went well and they even told me that "I'd better pass the background check." Ugh.

Good luck, man. Trying to send good vibes to you. Regardless of anything else, good on you for going after this. And yes, the "Window of Opportunity" temptation is always a nasty one. I get WOO'd even by cigarettes. I still have a pack somewhere in my garage with a few smokes in it...knowing it's there keeps me from going out and BUYING one sometime... Haven't had one since mid January!

“You never fail until you stop trying.”
― Albert Einstein;)

Very best wishes red and even if it doesn't come now it will and in a forum thats more suiting.

I did a really good job at working through this.. see I came from a market out west where I had access to very strong cocain and thus the stuff where Im at has little of no temptation for me.. but the purity that is needed to fire up the addiction has reared its ugly face so i needed to go back and implement the same things I have been using battling against the high quality of other drugs that are available here. It really just came down to working my way through the fantasy and being honest at what it would be.. the need to administer as close to an OD dose as possible for a few seconds of "pleasure" followed by instant insanity, paranoia, and awfulness. With firing up my addiction and all its bullshit to boot.

So i feal much better and have not been fantasizing, cause whats the point its a fantasy anyway once Im honest with myself..

Its amazing how it can try and play us.. fuck addiction and its nonsense.. I win again<3

Winning! ;)

I've actually being doing extremely well with not craving cocaine or heroin lately. What I do get cravings for is MDMA and the whole club scene. The hedonism. And now that I have a good body from all of this working out and some confidence in my appearance, I want to go to the nightclubs and party in the gardens of eden. Actually, almost everyday downtown when I walk from the gym to the bus, I pass an area for smokers. There are always a bunch of smokers huddled together smoking (mostly) menthols and chatting. This combined the industrial feel to everything gives me flashbacks of smoking patios at the rave clubs, and the anxiety makes my heart pound a bit. I know that I probably couldn't roll again without demanding a downer for the crash and subsequent days, and that would lead nowhere good at all. But some methylone, perhaps? ugh.

So ya, it's not easy. And it's not fun thinking about giving it up forever. But exercise helps. Getting up early helps. Mindfulness helps. Good music helps.

Much in common w/ you, bud.

24 more!
 
I fully intend to retire in SE Asia and use heroin to self-medicate on tropical beaches before death. I don't think that opium/morphine was put on Earth for young people to use recreationally, but I do think that Nature gave us strong painkillers for a few reasons, and a good argument could be made that they could help one fade into the darkness of death without the psychological hell. They do, after all, work just as well on psychological pain. Granted I am still young and may overcome my fear of death before that time comes, but if not, the drugs will always be there for me. So this comforts me that even if I don't use today, I don't have to give it up forever.

Regarding psychedelics and empathogens, well I acknowledge that my desires to take empathogens are not spiritually pure. I want to chase euphoria, and I want to chase it without the process necessarily having a spiritual reward. Empathogens are the most euphoric drugs in my opinion, and this is what I think about before I think about any human bonding, mindfulness benefits, and whatnot. I also know that after them, I would crave downers because most of them have crashes. Perhaps Ambien alone could take care of it and I could avoid reaching for benzos or opiates, but perhaps not. It's difficult to predict the severity of the crash, and because of this unknown, it's best to avoid them indefinitely. With certain psychedelics, there is no crash and the focus is on spiritual growth, so it's much more difficult to use rational recovery thinking to decide not to do them. If anything, rational thinking would make me want to use them, as (particularly) mushrooms reinforce a lot of the thing I use to keep me off of the hard stuff. Psychedelics are used a lot within my spiritual community. And I have a lot of post-traumatic stress from the hell I've been through in the heroin game, and I think that responsible use of them could help heal my mind. I am peeved to no end with how recovery communities and fellowships treat psychedelics as "drugs" and view then with such a narrow mind.
 
I fully intend to retire in SE Asia and use heroin to self-medicate on tropical beaches before death. I don't think that opium/morphine was put on Earth for young people to use recreationally, but I do think that Nature gave us strong painkillers for a few reasons, and a good argument could be made that they could help one fade into the darkness of death without the psychological hell. They do, after all, work just as well on psychological pain. Granted I am still young and may overcome my fear of death before that time comes, but if not, the drugs will always be there for me. So this comforts me that even if I don't use today, I don't have to give it up forever.

Regarding psychedelics and empathogens, well I acknowledge that my desires to take empathogens are not spiritually pure. I want to chase euphoria, and I want to chase it without the process necessarily having a spiritual reward. Empathogens are the most euphoric drugs in my opinion, and this is what I think about before I think about any human bonding, mindfulness benefits, and whatnot. I also know that after them, I would crave downers because most of them have crashes. Perhaps Ambien alone could take care of it and I could avoid reaching for benzos or opiates, but perhaps not. It's difficult to predict the severity of the crash, and because of this unknown, it's best to avoid them indefinitely. With certain psychedelics, there is no crash and the focus is on spiritual growth, so it's much more difficult to use rational recovery thinking to decide not to do them. If anything, rational thinking would make me want to use them, as (particularly) mushrooms reinforce a lot of the thing I use to keep me off of the hard stuff. Psychedelics are used a lot within my spiritual community. And I have a lot of post-traumatic stress from the hell I've been through in the heroin game, and I think that responsible use of them could help heal my mind. I am peeved to no end with how recovery communities and fellowships treat psychedelics as "drugs" and view then with such a narrow mind.

You make a lot of interesting points here Red.

First on the subject of death, I would think that for most the act of death itself is the easy part. The hard part is accepting that this is really it. However, aside from being really old or having a terminal disease, it's almost impossible to predict your own death. With that said, how would anyone know that it's time to "hit the beach" so to speak?

I spent most of my youth glorifying death (I was a bit of a goth). It wasn't until my friends started dying and making stupid decisions with drugs that I realized that death isn't as cool as I thought it was. I realized at some point that I'm not immortal. I'm just a regular human like everyone else. I also realized at this point that the act of death is easy. It's life that is difficult.

I'm currently on the fence with the subject of using psychedelics for recovery. I will say that it has WORKED for me before, but at the same time I have abused them as well (it took some time to do so). For example, I went into one powerful oral DMT trip thinking that alcohol is ruining my friend's life and possibly my own. I give A LOT of credit to that single trip for keeping me off ALL alcohol (not even a sip of wine!) for a full year. I drink responsibly now. I know most of that work is mine, but I do owe a lot of credit to the DMT trip as well.

However, as I developed a habit for etizolam (after kicking valium and xanax) I learned that I could smoke as much DMT as I wanted without getting any ill anxious effects. This was also during my heroin usage so my judgement was pretty far gone. I stopped caring about the spiritual guidance I once received from DMT because I did abuse it. I smoked it for the shear fun of it. It became a recreation. It became something flat and boring. I smoked DMT to get a different feeling. I did it a few times a day, most days of the week. I got to the point that I was bored with just plain old etizolam and heroin and I had to kick it up a notch to feel anything.

I still have DMT in my possession because I don't feel it harms my recovery. I have absolutely no desire to use it. Unfortunately this also means I have no desire to attempt to use it in my recovery again, even though it has helped me in the past.

It's a complicated subject for sure.
 
I agree that it's the fear of impending death that is scary, not the actual death itself. I think that the common themes of deathbed confessions are about not chasing dreams nearly enough and compromising for other people, society, status-quo, and so on. So my fear of death would be suddenly finding my health deteriorating and not having done what I truly wanted to in life. I could not even imagine how traumatic that would be, being stuck in a hospital bed and left to think about everything you wished you would have done. Addiction to drugs makes this difficult because it can leave you in a very bad situation financially/legally and your dreams seem like they are forever going to remain dreams. I am dealing with this now, and consequently my fear of aging has really kicked back up.

But in terms of setting oneself up for the beach, I think that it's probably not that different from making the choice to quit hard drugs. It sounds the opposite, but really it's linked by the whole idea of surrendering, throwing in the proverbial towel. Trading a stressful, hectic life of uncertainty for something a bit more simple and comforting with respect to life's circumstances. Obviously I would only put this plan into practice if I had the money to sustain the nod to the very end (which is another thing to gauge, sure, but decades of saving and the low cost of H in that area would make it possible. But you'd also have to figure out which money was to be dedicated to chasing dreams in life and which to dealing with abandoned dreams in retirement....this actually would get rather philosophical).

For what it's worth, I think that the DMT would forgive you for misusing it and grant you the second chance needed to reap its benefits. Nature itself is very forgiving. It is the deviated "human nature" that isn't. You've probably let yourself be influenced by society (unconsciously...I have been too) into not completely being able to forgive yourself for your addictions. So maybe you're not forgiving yourself for the way you've mistreated DMT even through DMT holds no ill-will toward you.
 
I like the comparison between the choice to quit hard drugs and the choice to "move on". I made a similar comparison that isn't so obvious when I quit 5 months or so ago. I remember thinking, "If I have all this motivation to go out and use drugs, why can't I use this same SOURCE of motivation to get clean?" Even in my haze, I recognized that there is a source for that motivation and I can use it to my advantage. And I am.

And you are also right that I (and many addicts) have tremendous guilt associated with addictions. Self forgiveness is powerful!

So, maybe I'll take cue here and say "I forgive you w01fg4ng"....just writing that does help. Thanks Red!
 
It's hard. I can forgive myself for everything except for transgressions against family/friends where people suffered due to my choices. And I don't actually know if I will ever find this self-forgiveness, even if those people verbally forgive me (hypothetically, some never will). The only thing that somewhat works is staying busy and not thinking about it. Which is about as effective as Advil would be for heroin withdrawal. Hardest part about recovery, in my opinion.
 
^^ That's great NSA I'm glad things are looking up for you today.

I had an great night last night, hanging out with some friends. I'm still not used to saying that, "hanging out with friends". It still feels foreign to me, although slowly but surely I'm becoming more and more social.

I got some kava extract yesterday to try out as an anxiolytic and it actually worked pretty damn well without altering my mental state at all - anxiety relief without sedation or mental fog basically. So I think I'm going to keep it around to use in times of heavier stress/anxiety. Better then a benzo scrip thats for damn sure...

I also bought an herbal sleep aid tincture that contains Ashwaganda, Damiana, Passionflower, Ginkgo Biloba, Rhodiola, Lemon Balm, Chamomile, Skullcap, and Liquorice. I was up super late hanging out with people and didn't take any till like 4am, but it seemed to work well. I'll take some again tonight at a reasonable time and see how it goes. I'd be thrilled to use an herbal remedy for sleep that works since the only prescriptions that have worked for me in the past are either anti psych meds that make you feel like a zombie, or addictive narcotics - either way not something I want to take.

290 Days.
 
Thanks man, I went and looked at a place today that looks like it's the one. It's in a different city then I wanted but still close by, also a city known for drugs and violence but like any city with bad areas it has good areas too and this place is actually in a nicer/safer area then I've been living in. AND ITS A HOUSE, it's a 4 bedroom house, not an apartment. We expanded our search radius because right where we live is a pretty expensive area, it's amazing how much cheaper things got when we went one more city in the other direction. The owner is going to use the ground floor bedroom as storage, so it will only be 1600 for a 3 bedrooms/3 story townhouse style house. It has a two car garage which is perfect cause I just got a car and my roommate has one too, so we're gonna get it and then sublet the third room to another friend of ours in AA. It's perfect, dropping off the lease applications tomorrow so with any luck the place is ours. :)

Otherwise, still sober. 24 more down. =D

Let me guess...you got a place in Oakland?

Sure, it's known for violence and drugs. So are most of the big cities in America, right? Some of the wealthiest people on the planet live in the Oakland hills. I lived in Oakland for 5 years and still spend a lot of time there. It is incredibly diverse, and has a lot of beautiful areas and tons to do--great parks, great restaurants, an amazing music scene, and a huge art scene. It's a historic city too.

I hope you get to experience all of the great things that the city has to offer. You'll soon discover how many Berkeley students live in Oakland. This weekend, go walk around the lake, go to a meeting at Rockridge, eat dinner at Mua, and then go see a show at the Fox Theatre. Before you buy in to the stereotypes you've heard, go explore a little bit. Pretty soon you'll just describe it as "an awesome city that I love."

(ps:huge congrats on all your sober time.)
 
Got snitched on...now I have no choice but to stay clean...I'll miss doing benzos with opiates <3

"ill and high from smoking up on superman's Kryptonite"
 
^^ That's great NSA I'm glad things are looking up for you today.
thank you case<3

Im kicking off a little early tonight.. so yet another 24 you all!!!!=D

beautiful-night-scene-view-30.jpg
 
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