Recovery Without Meetings

[Jabberwocky]

In my opinion everyone gets high. Caffeine is a strong stimulant, nicotine kills more people each year than most all drugs combined.

to me there is a clear cut line between addictive substances that have the capacity to drag you right down into the gutter and turn you into basically an animal, and addictive substances that while bad for you both mentally and physically, do not routinely make people lose their jobs, families, homes and lives.

i found having no caffeine or sugar in rehab so so difficult, and joked at the time that they were more addictive than crack and smack, i don't dispute that they are addictive. i do dispute that the nature of addiction to those substances is sufficiently comparable to the substances dealt with in NA as to make NA members hypocritical if they continue to partake.

 

[G_Chem]

to me there is a clear cut line between addictive substances that have the capacity to drag you right down into the gutter and turn you into basically an animal, and addictive substances that while bad for you both mentally and physically, do not routinely make people lose their jobs, families, homes and lives.

i found having no caffeine or sugar in rehab so so difficult, and joked at the time that they were more addictive than crack and smack, i don't dispute that they are addictive. i do dispute that the nature of addiction to those substances is sufficiently comparable to the substances dealt with in NA as to make NA members hypocritical if they continue to partake.

They don’t drag you into the gutter for one simple reason, they are legal. Tobacco is the number one illicit substance found in prisons that don’t allow it, inmates risk it all just to smoke the stuff.

If they weren’t easily accessible, cheap, legal, and socially accepted; they’d likely see the same fate as the rest. I personally have been able to stop my heroin, crack and alcohol addiction but caffeine is an ever going struggle for me.

-GC

 

[goaskalex]

I might be in the minority, but honestly, showing up to those NA meetings just hindered any chance I had at recovery instead of helping it.

Their whole "all drugs are bad, full stop" mentality does a lot more harm than good. I wasn't doing any hard drugs at the time, but I was still constantly made to feel weak and dirty and unable to participate or claim any "clean time" because I still smoked weed. It didn't matter to them that I was safer and healthier than when I was using; as far as they were concerned, weed = drug and drug = dirty. If I didn't have weed and the occasion psychedelic trip? I would go right back to living on the streets and begging for heroin money every morning. But my recovery mattered less to the people who attended these meetings than their own personal opinions about drugs.

The day I finally quit meetings was the day I watched a room full of people congratulate a man on refusing medical treatment after he was injured in a bad car wreck. As a few of them pointed out, if he had accepted painkillers in a medically appropriate setting to treat severe pain as they were intended to do, then it would have constituted a "relapse." If the whole point of recovery is to come out of it healthier than you went in, then I absolutely cannot attend meetings or recommend other recovering drug users attend meetings wherein they are expected to not only disregard but sometimes jeopardize their health in the name of "sobriety."

 

[THECATINTHEHAT]

to me there is a clear cut line between addictive substances that have the capacity to drag you right down into the gutter and turn you into basically an animal, and addictive substances that while bad for you both mentally and physically, do not routinely make people lose their jobs, families, homes and lives.

i found having no caffeine or sugar in rehab so so difficult, and joked at the time that they were more addictive than crack and smack, i don't dispute that they are addictive. i do dispute that the nature of addiction to those substances is sufficiently comparable to the substances dealt with in NA as to make NA members hypocritical if they continue to partake.

Tobacco and sugar 100% drag people through the gutter. How many deaths do they cause each year? How many people have severe health issues (diabetes etc) because of sugar?

Both of these things destroy people's lives.

 

[Jabberwocky]

My recovery is a lifelong process that involves long periods of sobriety and occasional relapses of several weeks or months. I don’t think many people ‘recover’ on their very first go - especially if they believe recovery means total abstinence. Over the years I’ve done several rehabs as well as stints in AA and NA. I hated all three at the time, but in retrospect I see that there were lifelong benefits in each that I continue to rely upon to be psychologically healthy — even in the midst of a temporary relapse. So my advice is take whatever seems valuable or useful from meetings or rehab and leave the rest behind when you stop attending.

That said, I do think that the 90 meetings in 90 days practice for people coming straight of a period of substance AND feeling close to rock bottom is a really effective tool to transition from drug user in practice to drug user in recovery. If I ever felt totally out of control again, I reckon that is where I would head to short circuit my drug taking long enough to figure out a more viable long term strategy not involving cult-like practices built on shame and regret with a heavy dose of intolerance.

 

[burn out]

They don’t drag you into the gutter for one simple reason, they are legal. Tobacco is the number one illicit substance found in prisons that don’t allow it, inmates risk it all just to smoke the stuff.

Risk it all? Tobacco may not be allowed in many prisons but it's not like you get 10 years added to your sentence if you're caught with it.

 

[nuttynutskin]

I personally have been able to stop my heroin, crack and alcohol addiction but caffeine is an ever going struggle for me.

I'm thinking that that might be out of the norm for a lot of users. And I don't think there's a lot of people who's lives have been destroyed from too much coffee. I don't think the same can be said for the other substances.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Tobacco and sugar 100% drag people through the gutter. How many deaths do they cause each year? How many people have severe health issues (diabetes etc) because of sugar?

Both of these things destroy people's lives.

i don't deny that they cause disease and death. but they don't take you into this hinterland existence where you can do literally nothing but feed your habit, and are unable to care about yourself or other people to even a basic extent any more. until a smoker gets ill (or doesn't) they are able to carry on a normal life, to me that's a vastly different addiction to the sorts that plagued me. my impact on society as a smoker was vastly different to my impact on society as a crack/smackhead.

i have met many people in recovery who are able to quit tobacco, refined sugar, etc off their own bat, but who were not able to quit drugs.

 

[Phenpsycho]

My issue with local NA meetings where I currently live, is they have an unwritten rule to pill-shame anyone on psychiatric medication.

I can it ignore the hyper-religious vibes, the chain smoking, the caffeine guzzling...but I cannot get behind pill-shaming. I may eventually be getting back on Concerta, and I need to take propranolol sometimes for controlling myself when I feel I might be in danger of having a PTSD related flashback. Never have I abused Concerta or beta-blockers, yet I've had people ask for a 1 on 1 after the meetings, and they seem to all call bullshit on needing psychiatric help.

I do realize I'm an addict, I've had that elucidated over the past couple years from judging my own use of street/research chemicals, and my experience with Kratom dependancy, yet I literally cannot function or be around other people without knowing I have a beta-blocker with me in case something triggers a flashback.

I have benzos which I very rarely touch anymore, so to me propanolol as-needed is as clean as I'm willing to get...at least until I make more progress in therapy, and through meditation. I also have social phobia and GAD, so sometimes taking a beta-blocker is the difference between me even attempting to attend a meeting or staying holed up at home(obviously can't do shit about it ATM lol).

I was thinking the other day of starting a virtual out-patient centre in a virtual world, just to get through the quarantines. I mean it wouldn't be based on 12-step though...just basically a drop-in 24/7 for people to voice/video chat, and host meetings solely based on sobriety, not the cultish woo. I guess they have Skype type meetings already though.

Edit: I've also had people tell me that some supplements/noots are just drugs wrapped in fancy marketing...I wish I was kidding. I get that some nootropics can be psychoactive, it's those types of blanket statements that irk me though to no end. If I had a lifetime supply of picamilon(niacin+gaba bonded to cross bbb), I could quit using propanolol, and wouldn't have to think of getting on a prescribed stimulant.

It was just starting to build in my system when I ran out, and in my country it's illegal to sell, so I have to import from RUnet sites. It was easing my anxiety and helping my focus just enough to function without feeling like I took anything.