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Positive The Tapering Supportive/Social Thread

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papercuts said:
It feels so much better to be in control of it, not controlled by it. It's hard to keep it that way when depression creeps in. I just keep reminding myself...
Before I quit, I started writing notes to myself. Sober me in the morning would make a list of what I couldn't forget about today, then I'd hand over to opiate brain who would write notes back about how things looked from there. It was all getting a bit crazy, it was time to find
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I saw that happening back when I used to drink. It was like having a split personality. I was generally a nice guy either way but my sober brain couldn’t always remember what happened when I was drunk. Strange was that my drunk mind knew everything, even the stuff my drunk brain couldn’t remember.
 
@Squeaky thanks for all your posts and information here on getting off pain meds! I want to be off!, I am starting to feel that they have taken over my brain ?
Do you do any 12 step work or other program to help with this addiction?
I have been sober a long time with AA, but now in a fight with Norco prescription
 
Iceman1216 said:
@Squeaky thanks for all your posts and information here on getting off pain meds! I want to be off!, I am starting to feel that they have taken over my brain ?
Do you do any 12 step work or other program to help with this addiction?
I have been sober a long time with AA, but now in a fight with Norco prescription
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Nope. I struggled through with no help other than advice here on BL.
If you have about a week to read, I posted absolutely everything since the beginning. About 5 years of my struggle.

My advice..... get someone you can trust to keep you honest. And the only way to win the battle is to quit completely. The closer you get to zero (if you’re tapering), the more your whole body screams in wd. Whatever you choose, it will take 5x as long as you’d expect to pass the physical wd’s and 50x as long as you expect to pass the psychological wd’s. It took me more than 2 years to get here and I’m still not done with the mindfuck.
 
So far this is my favorite!! I love @Squeaky , thank you for all the effort you have put in to this. I see that the only way to talk with you is in public?? I am seeing the Virtue in that/
I have a very similar path as you, pain that will be with me for ever, and opiates are not a good life time choice for it. I have been struggling with the Dependent / Addiction deal?
I know Addiction very well ( I am Alcoholic, can not STOP after a sip of alcohol) . Now I have been on my Norco 10-30mgs everyday for a few years, and withdrawals are All present. The physical do suck, but the mental is what I can not take!! I am on two antidepressants, which I wonder if it was PAWS that had me so down that I went on them?
There has been a lot of death in my family, the last two years?
I was put on one 12 years ago after Cancer , I got off for 4-5 years , then Sister inlaw Lung Cancer, inlaws die of COVID 1 week apart, now wife has breast cancer ( truley a Fuck Me year)
But you are off and happy,
So thank you :)
 
hylite said:
Me again. I feel like I am actually addicted to energy drinks and now hard core to Monsters. I feel like drinking one to relax, a monster, so that I can fall asleep. ? Whaaat !
Had one for breakfast, one for lunch and it was so lovely. Hmmm. ♡
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I had a bad Rockstar addiction for about 8 years. Not a day went by that I didn't drink at least one can. But 3 a day was the average. It's the first thing I would put on my body in the morning before food or water. Original flavor only, I couldn't stand any other flavors and mostly just the normal sized cans but occasionally is get the tall ones with the lid. I got so bad with drinking them that for one summer for about 3 weeks straight I hadn't drank a single drop of water. All of my fluid intake came from Rockstars. I had become severely dehydrated and I had thrown off the salt balance of my blood. I almost died and it took about 4 months to get back to feeling normal. For some reason this year Rockstar changed the flavor of their original. It was nothing like the one I was hooked too. It was so gross and it instantly turned me off and I found myself becoming addicted to drinking carbonated water. I did hit some pretty serious caffeine withdraw but it wasn't terrible and wasn't long.

You should try to give them up or at least cut back a lot. They're terrible for your body.
 
Iceman1216 said:
So far this is my favorite!! I love @Squeaky , thank you for all the effort you have put in to this. I see that the only way to talk with you is in public?? I am seeing the Virtue in that/
I have a very similar path as you, pain that will be with me for ever, and opiates are not a good life time choice for it. I have been struggling with the Dependent / Addiction deal?
I know Addiction very well ( I am Alcoholic, can not STOP after a sip of alcohol) . Now I have been on my Norco 10-30mgs everyday for a few years, and withdrawals are All present. The physical do suck, but the mental is what I can not take!! I am on two antidepressants, which I wonder if it was PAWS that had me so down that I went on them?
There has been a lot of death in my family, the last two years?
I was put on one 12 years ago after Cancer , I got off for 4-5 years , then Sister inlaw Lung Cancer, inlaws die of COVID 1 week apart, now wife has breast cancer ( truley a Fuck Me year)
But you are off and happy,
So thank you :)
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All that and you're still not drinking? I think you're a lot stronger than you think. My husband had one operation then was all done. Five days in hospital and I only visited the first three days then drank for two days, then panicked because they were letting him out and I couldnt fucking drive there to collect him, but it had to be me, next of kin, so they could talk me through the supervision of his drugs (until he was off the "higher doses" of morphine). What a fucked up situation. Luckily they found a reason to keep him one more day while I straightened myself out to look after him for the next week or two.
He could have died and I went to pieces. I felt so ashamed of myself. It happens.
Sounds like you've gone through similar so many times recently and now your wife has cancer? The difference is you're not relapsing messily like I did. Shit, you are doing really well.
 
Fucksake, so I thought I'd buy a strip of 10 1mg xanax as had things to do, people to see this weekend and didn't want to waste the last of my valium I'm tapering with, and they look fucking fake and make my anxiety worse, they look nothing like the normal alko 1 xanax I've bought a few times before, no marking and slightly grey instead of white, just wrote out a wedinos form and sending in a sample

Had to ruin my taper by eating a 10mg valium, I read that there's fake alko 1 going around mostly containing antihistamine and maybe some xanax, this was my usual vendor too

And the fucking CBD gives me nightmares, I don't know if it's because I'm doing it with the valium or what, it's not done that before
 
deficiT said:
This is basically the Squeaky thread.

Congrats on your progress btw
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That’s hilarious.
Yeah..... PokeMama started it because she was going through it first. Then she quit her prescription and moved on. Somewhere in the middle of all that I moved in like a swarm of locusts and took it over.
 
There’s a component of addiction that most people don’t really acknowledge. I think with smoking it’s referenced to as an “oral fixation”. It’s really just a habitual ritual. If you’re used to opening a beer or a RockStar energy drink at lunch it can be really hard to quit just because that’s what you do at noon. Generally you can tell if your addiction is to the action or to the drug when what you’re used to gets changed. So if your favorite beer isn’t available and you go for a Coke, your addiction is to the can. If your favorite beer isn’t available and you desperately drink Jagermeister(even though it’s disgusting) because it’s all there us, then you’re an alcoholic.

My most difficult addictions have not been drugs or alcohol. They have all been bad for me because of what’s inside the can but they have almost always been an addiction to the holding of the can. The pills hit that sweet spot where I had become physically addicted to the opiates, but also habitually addicted to the whole process of popping a pill in the morning to feel normal. They became my go-to-solution for stress, anger, insomnia, etc. In the 5 years I was dependent on them I had basically forgotten how to deal with the pain of life.

My biggest struggle has been relearning how to be a human being and live around other human beings without a solution in a pill bottle. I don’t crave the drugs anymore but I desperately crave anything to make time move faster, particularly during the morning when I wake up too sore to really do much and at bedtime when I have trouble falling asleep.

I know what it means to quit an addiction to a substance, also how to quit an addiction to an action. This is f’ed up because it’s both and the latter is dragging on for ever.
 
papercuts said:
All that and you're still not drinking? I think you're a lot stronger than you think. My husband had one operation then was all done. Five days in hospital and I only visited the first three days then drank for two days, then panicked because they were letting him out and I couldnt fucking drive there to collect him, but it had to be me, next of kin, so they could talk me through the supervision of his drugs (until he was off the "higher doses" of morphine). What a fucked up situation. Luckily they found a reason to keep him one more day while I straightened myself out to look after him for the next week or two.
He could have died and I went to pieces. I felt so ashamed of myself. It happens.
Sounds like you've gone through similar so many times recently and now your wife has cancer? The difference is you're not relapsing messily like I did. Shit, you are doing really well.
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Thank you!
That is what I told him too.
If he is staying away from alcohol and if a few hydrocodone a day help then good job!
He has chronic pain from Cancer treatment.
 
I am doing pretty good.
As well as can be expected considering the chronic pain situation I have going on.
I am back down to using prescribed amounts of all medications.
I went a bit off the deep end on using way too much MS Contin .
It was not pleasant getting my tolerance back down.

I have a family member giving me my MS Contin every day.
It is embarrassing but seems to be the best way for me not to go through extreme torture.

Keeping stable and managing the pain is really the best I can do.
I have tried every way and this is really the best I can do.

Nice to be stable and fairly comfortable again.

Hope everyone is alright today.
Love you guys!
❤️
 
Painful One said:
I am doing pretty good.
As well as can be expected considering the chronic pain situation I have going on.
I am back down to using prescribed amounts of all medications.
I went a bit off the deep end on using way too much MS Contin .
It was not pleasant getting my tolerance back down.

I have a family member giving me my MS Contin every day.
It is embarrassing but seems to be the best way for me not to go through extreme torture.

Keeping stable and managing the pain is really the best I can do.
I have tried every way and this is really the best I can do.

Nice to be stable and fairly comfortable again.

Hope everyone is alright today.
Love you guys!
❤️
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Asking for help felt worse than withdrawals. You’re smart to have asked, and blessed to have someone you can count on.
 
hylite said:
Not good. In pain. And the cluster headache situ. again. Of course not handling stress well. Need strength and encouragement for proper react. And . . . just slow. I guess that's it. For now.
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Any chance your pain situation is closer to mine than you realize. I still hurt of course, to the point that I have to keep reminding myself what I have been through or I’ll be back on the pills, but it’s a lot less ‘everything’ and ‘everywhere’. Wd’s for me really started about two hours after taking my pills, and lasted about 2 months when I finally quit. Now I feel my surgery and it hurts, but that’s all that hurts. Before, as soon as my pills wore off, I would have every possible ache and pain a body could have. I couldn’t see the forest through the trees back then, that my “pain-killers” were really good at keeping me hooked.

I’m not suggesting your troubles aren’t real, just questioning if the solution is causing some of the problem. It hurts me a little to hear you suffering if you have been tricked by the drugs like I was.
 
Well I am not actively or proactively tapering still yet, the situation isn't nearly right and it would simply be dangerous mentally managing stress and anxiety.

I did drop months ago, I target the illusory really, 10 mg's Etiz daily, but really I'm permitting myself mentally a guilt free(ish) 12 mg's.

Was high yesterday though, over 16. Long day, sleep was never poss before and nerves were going through the roof.

I did sleep an okay amount finally. To make up for going way over yesterday I was goong to ignore any benzo long as poss, I went over 16 hours actually but since an LSD overdose by miscalculation 13 days ago, my panic state is ultra high and a daily Everest I'm topping most days but can never camp at the top for a day.

Anyway, hour ago still after vaping some good weed, and before even, was in such a panic state. Feeling the Acid really, identical to an in trip panic attack, pretty identical to an in trip too still very strangely.

Feeling crazy with no thought of consolation.

So I took first Etiz dose today. Half hour later...CALMER. Moreso now. Except it's like the intense panic fight/flight is still there underneath, not just swapped out for chill like it always has been just before but still a major smooth.

For the moment, permitting myself as free an amount of benzo daily is more in my own interests right now than the debilitating extreme anxiety states which Etiz makes manageable, just until hopefully the nerves settle physically again.

So I'm not tapering, yet, just seeking to hold with hopes to taper when situation paves it's way better.
 
AutoTripper said:
Well I am not actively or proactively tapering still yet, the situation isn't nearly right and it would simply be dangerous mentally managing stress and anxiety.

I did drop months ago, I target the illusory really, 10 mg's Etiz daily, but really I'm permitting myself mentally a guilt free(ish) 12 mg's.

Was high yesterday though, over 16. Long day, sleep was never poss before and nerves were going through the roof.

I did sleep an okay amount finally. To make up for going way over yesterday I was goong to ignore any benzo long as poss, I went over 16 hours actually but since an LSD overdose by miscalculation 13 days ago, my panic state is ultra high and a daily Everest I'm topping most days but can never camp at the top for a day.

Anyway, hour ago still after vaping some good weed, and before even, was in such a panic state. Feeling the Acid really, identical to an in trip panic attack, pretty identical to an in trip too still very strangely.

Feeling crazy with no thought of consolation.

So I took first Etiz dose today. Half hour later...CALMER. Moreso now. Except it's like the intense panic fight/flight is still there underneath, not just swapped out for chill like it always has been just before but still a major smooth.

For the moment, permitting myself as free an amount of benzo daily is more in my own interests right now than the debilitating extreme anxiety states which Etiz makes manageable, just until hopefully the nerves settle physically again.

So I'm not tapering, yet, just seeking to hold with hopes to taper when situation paves it's way better.
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I did the little game of “treating” myself a lot. Do a little math and figured I would get back on track the next day. NOPE! Wake up tomorrow feeling worse than ever. Take a little extra in the morning, just to feel OK. Then need a little extra in the afternoon, then a little extra in the evening. Next thing I know my tolerance is way too high and I’m running out.
It sounds like a solid plan, until it isn’t. I did that for at least two years, every month starting over and swearing this time will be different/better. But I was just suffering. Counting pills. Counting days until my next refill. Basically in withdrawal all of the time except for the two hours after I took my ‘extra’ dose. And always feeling like a failure. (Ironically that feeling of failure usually led me to take even more because I deserved to be happy for a while)

It just sucks. Life anyway. Meds make it good in the short term but make is worse in the long run. Almost 4 months since I quit and I’m still going through basically everything you said. It just gets a little better now. Not every day better, more like a little better every month.
 
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Squeaky said:
I did the little game of “treating” myself a lot. Do a little math and figured I would get back on track the next day. NOPE! Wake up tomorrow feeling worse than ever. Take a little extra in the morning, just to feel OK. Then need a little extra in the afternoon, then a little extra in the evening. Next thing I know my tolerance is way too high and I’m running out.
It sounds like a solid plan, until it isn’t. I did that for at least two years, every month starting over and swearing this time will be different/better. But I was just suffering. Counting pills. Counting days until my next refill. Basically in withdrawal all of the time except for the two hours after I took my ‘extra’ dose. And always feeling like a failure. (Ironically that feeling of failure usually led me to take even more because I deserved to be happy for a while)

It just sucks. Life anyway. Meds make it good in the short term but make is worse in the long run. Almost 4 months since I quit and I’m still going through basically everything you said. It just gets a little better now. Not every day better, mire like a little better every month.
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:cheer:
 
Squeaky said:
I did the little game of “treating” myself a lot. Do a little math and figured I would get back on track the next day. NOPE! Wake up tomorrow feeling worse than ever. Take a little extra in the morning, just to feel OK. Then need a little extra in the afternoon, then a little extra in the evening. Next thing I know my tolerance is way too high and I’m running out.
It sounds like a solid plan, until it isn’t. I did that for at least two years, every month starting over and swearing this time will be different/better. But I was just suffering. Counting pills. Counting days until my next refill. Basically in withdrawal all of the time except for the two hours after I took my ‘extra’ dose. And always feeling like a failure. (Ironically that feeling of failure usually led me to take even more because I deserved to be happy for a while)

It just sucks. Life anyway. Meds make it good in the short term but make is worse in the long run. Almost 4 months since I quit and I’m still going through basically everything you said. It just gets a little better now. Not every day better, mire like a little better every month.
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Yes, agreed. I really don't see it as being a treat. Because I observed long ago- 10 mg's plus sufficient sleep, really feeling okay. 12 mg's more outweighing next day side effects/unease.

16 mg's and feeling actually unwell next day, anxiety, panic up While also knowing that you cannot really allow yourself to seek relief from that for your usual mechanism a.k.a. more benzos, Until you have paid back some of that crime the only currency of which is suffering and endurance.

So my own approach recently has been to simply say there is nothing in it for me for now I just would be best to put up with this and pleasant period of feeling restless and uncomfortable in order to equalise and then simply treat myself with a sensible but not insufficient level of relief when I have decided no more endurance is beneficial in the long one eventually and then try to take it from there with a firm intention to balance out, Even if only over the next 3 to 7 days for example I think in the long run it's not ultimately going to matter when it finally comes to a commitment which I have not made yet until I'm ready to controlled regimented tapering.
 
Squeaky said:
I did the little game of “treating” myself a lot. Do a little math and figured I would get back on track the next day. NOPE! Wake up tomorrow feeling worse than ever. Take a little extra in the morning, just to feel OK. Then need a little extra in the afternoon, then a little extra in the evening. Next thing I know my tolerance is way too high and I’m running out
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Story of my life, I could of wrote your post, it's so similar to mine, I've had to take extra during a taper as I've stuff to do this past couple of days and family today, they will be hear soon, I don't want to entertain I'm in fibro flair and in bed, I don't mind just one or two of my family down but there's going to be 5 of them, and I have social anxiety and they was all meant to meet me down the beach as my dad knows about my anxiety but my sister guilt tripped me into letting them stay for a tea and stuff, 5 extra people in my house all in kne room I'm getting claustrophobic thinking about it, I can't do it, I'm taking another valium the first ones taking to long to kick in and they'll be here soon lol
 
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