I just wonder how i could have made life so much harder for myself using drugs all these years. its like im living in a night mare and cant wake up ffrom it ................fear and guilt eaat me up
You are where you are now... I'm in the same boat. Guilt sucks but if you can somehow say - okay, I've made my mistakes. What can I do to make myself content for today? Or if I can't be content today, make some goals - like getting off subs altogether - and then try to appreciate what you've accomplished just by having a plan to be more content. Reward yourself. I mean look, you've already stopped doing dope! That's HUGE. Suboxone is next to get off of. Once you get over this hurdle, sure there will always be problems in life (that's life), but you can wake up from the night mare. But you have to wake yourself up, no one's going to be able to do it for you. Being stuck in the past keeps you, well, stuck. You did the best you could with the situation you were in and the skills you had at the time. Now it's time to learn and use some new skills.
Fear is part of life for EVERYBODY. The key is to feel it and do what you need to do anyway. Taking risks is hard, but good risks are healthy. What have you got to lose? Talk to your fear... like for example, "I'm afraid of going back to school? Why - because I'm afraid I'll get overwhelmed with new people and a new routine. Next fear - keeping up with school work. But in reality, I've always been able to do it. And then what if I do? I'll flunk out and have to go back to what I was doing before." When I let my fear run all the way through in my head - like in NA when they say run the tape through - I usually find that, at some point, it is unrealistic. The key is realize what an unrealistic fear is, and then walking through it, even though the fear is there.
Here's a crappy version of a story on a worksheet I have from my IOP group therapy (spliced from a few different websites - I really wish I had the original with me right now):
Suppose we are walking down the country road at night. We look down at the ground and suddenly we see a snake and become frightened. Then we turn our flashlight on it. We look again and we see that there is only a rope, no snake. The rope was there all along, never a snake, but the rope appeared to us to be a snake because our sight was obscured by the darkness, because we did not focus our light on it. As a result of seeing a snake we became filled with fear and worry. When we found that it was only a rope, the appearance of the snake dissolved.
We come across and step on snakes of various colors and stripes everyday. Almost all of them are silly old pieces of rope. For instance, how often have we assumed someone is guilty before we know the facts? How many of us suffer from a fear of an illness than from the illness itself? More of us suffer from the fear of an event than the event itself! Do we behave like this out of fear, paranoia, an inferiority complex or a lack of trust and insecurity? Or do we behave like this out of ignorance and misunderstanding?
The key is to learn to differentiate between the rope or what is real and the snake, or what is our imagination. The key is to find ways to change fear into curiosity.
Is fear necessary? A person who has no fear at all or one who has too much fear has a serious problem. A balance is needed. No one takes FEAR seriously. Most want to believe it is a good thing to help keep us safe. But, in reality, we fail to realize that it seriously hinders the realization of our full innate potential which prevents us from doing many new things.
There are as many people in the world that can turn a snake into a rope as there are people who can routinely turn a rope into a snake. How we confront a problem is up to us because every problem can be turned into a disaster, a bigger more venomous cobra, or seen as a challenge or opportunity to be faced head-on and dealt with.
Hope some of this made sense and maybe helped a bit.
