• H&R Moderators: VerbalTruist | cdin | Lil'LinaptkSix

progress/things i?ve learned so far in recovery

The nightmares never went away for me but that's because it's a major symptom of PTSD which I have.

I'm sincerely hoping they'll go away for everyone. Nightmares are no fun.
 
The drug dreams can be crazy. When I quit OxyContin, I dreamnt that my room was filled with them, they were up to my knees. I was wading through them.

Another time I dreamnt I had those huge, instution sized pickle jars full of them. All neatly lined up on shelves.

It was torture. I think I cried when I woke up. They will most likely stop. Even though it feels like a year since you used, it's only been a few months. That's normal.

Your trip sounds wonderful. Wish I was there with you. It really sounds peaceful.
 
argh fuck well i was ok, tired, then went to a meeting the night before last and my mood plummeted. for 10 days i was not a drug addict, in the eyes of the people i was around, i was just a person. now i’m back into my recovery schedule and i feel about as good about myself as i did when i was a crack whore. its relative i guess. i’m exhausted which doesn’t help, journey on tuesday was 3am to 10pm UK time, and i keep waking up stupidly early.

10 that sounds like the sort of dream that would at some point have been quite a fantasy.

its weird i never usually remember dreams but i remember a lot of my drug dreams. i nearly extended my stay in rehab after dreaming that, having gone to every pharmacy i could and not got any pins, and it getting past late night pharmacy closing time, i picked up a visibly dirty and bent pin off the street. before i went on holiday i dreamed i had a saline solution drip type thing, but full of speedballs. usually i only dream about heroin, before that i’d not dreamed about crack since a few weeks after rehab. i often get to use in dreams but its always shit.

if i don't feel better in a few weeks i'm going to a doctor. i'm 6 months clean tomorrow i just don't understand how my brain chemistry is still so fucked and i find it difficult to accept when i know i can just make it go away, i feel like i've been patient for a long time.
 
Chinup,

I'm sorry you're feeling down. You should be so proud of yourself.

Try to imagine, if someone else, that you love and care about, had a raging drug problem. And they checked into rehab and got clean. What would you think of them? What would you say to that person if they were feeling low about themselves?

Girl!! SIX MONTHS! You've almost got six MONTHS clean! Chinup, remember when you couldn't even get 6 hours clean?

You still are just a person trying to make their way in this world. Your journey includes drug abuse. That's all. You've accomplished/are accomplishing something incredible. Worthy of admiration and respect. Just as you are.

Seeing a Dr. isn't a bad idea. It's worth getting whatever you need to help. I personally think you're pretty damn amazing. I'd be proud to have you as a friend. Keep your chin up, Chinup. xoxo
 
Arrrgghhh 10 sorry I missed your reply. thanks, yes I do remember when I couldn't get 6 hours clean. Trying to force myself to go 10 mins between pipes. i would never treat anyone the way I do myself and I really don't think it acceptable. I can rein myself in a bit when I'm aware but usually I'm not aware until someone points it out. I've been doing metta bhavana meditation and I think I need to up it a bit.

I was popping by to post a link to where I posted some of my holiday pictures, for those interested.

I am feeling a bit better and am now over the 6 months mark. I burst into tears when I got my keyring and i had not idea why. I never ever thought I'd get here. If I'd have known it was going to be this hard I'd probably have bottled it. I never thought a life where every day wasn't a battle was available to me. Since I've come into recovery, some days have genuinely not been battles.

I'm starting to think I need to see a doctor, about my mental and physical health. Its hard cos I'll need to be totally honest, which I've never done with a dr. I've been looking up effects of long term crack use on the lungs (newsflash, its bad!!) cos I'm still coughing up black shit occasionally. Apparently that's dried blood so I'm a bit scared.

Even before the crack I've been battering my lungs for years. Smoked weed all day every day for 5 years, every evening and weekend for another 5. 6 years smoking heroin. cigs for nearly 20 years. its useless thinking/regretting now but i'm trying to stop smoking so i can give myself a chance to heal.
 
gah feeling kinda heartbroken.

does anybody know anything about state dependent learning and how you can access information you did know?

i have to apply for jobs soon and i'm shitting myself. i was blas? about the state dependent learning thing cos i was fucking good at my job and on a very good team. the other day i started thinking about my cv. i had to look up the names of tools i used every fucking day for 2.5 years. this is not good.

i thought my saviour would be my old hard drive. i saved loads of amazing bash scripts and c++ code to it. the drive was corrupted, my dad took the drive out its case and hooked it up to a machine and i got some stuff off. thankfully my entire phd was ok, but everything i will be expected to know on day 1 when i get a job is gone, so i have to learn it from scratch. given how fucked up i was when i transferred everything, i don't even know if i actually did save my old code.
 
I'm sure the skills you have will return once you start needing them a little. It's usually like riding a bike. Once you start triggering that part of your memory it will all come back.
 
You have accomplished something amazing. That involves every single part of who you are-mind, soul, body. Indeed you're going to cry. You're alot more, and alot less than you thought. Or ever gave yourself the time to know.

It's probably why you're encouraged to put your sobriety before anything else, and protect it fiercely. It's hard af. These past months, you've worked constantly to get here. I'm so proud of you for being so brave, when you were so scared. That is the true definition of courage.❤️

I understand the fears about getting your health in order. I have to do the same thing, and I'm worried. The only thing I can do, is get it done, and handle what I need to. Hopefully, we can make healthier decisions, and get in the best health possible for us. My mental health had me do alot of unhealthy things, while I was hanging off a ledge by my fingernails.

It's natural to be scared when getting back to your career. Even if you don't, I have faith that you'll be better than ever.
 
i really hope it is like riding a bike. i don't really want to add 'relearn everything i ever knew' to my massive workload.

its still hard for me to acknoweledge that i've really accomplished anything, i've just done what a normal human being would do. but i'm being kinder to myself. i know that circumstances lead me to have experiences that would shake anyone to their core, and it would have been impossible for theres not to have been some reaction. getting so sick has actually meant i might get a cure rather than suffer forever so i don't beat myself up. and looking back over the past 6 months and how hard it been, but how gradually i've seen progress in my thought patterns, does actually make me proud.

10 lets hope we both manage to look after our bodies better, and be thankful to them for not dying on us given how badly we've abused them.
 
I'm so happy to hear you can feel proud of yourself. I know you feel anyone would've and could've accomplished what you did, but in reality, that's not true. Sadly, some don't or won't or can't recover.

Chinup, at one time, even with the threat of going to jail, I wasn't able to stop.

It's my fondest hope,prayer and wish that you and I can fix whatever issues arise with our health, and finally learn what life is like when you care enough to make Healthy choices.
 
Chinup, I've met a lot of smart people in AA rooms, disbarred attorneys, physicians who have had their medical license yanked, you name it. This condition doesn't discriminate on intelligence. You are not defined by this condition. You are a brilliant person fighting a very difficult battle - just like those others I've met. As CH likes to say, stay strong.
 
Ha!! Yep I know it doesn’t discriminate on intelligence. One of the things i love about 12 step groups is the anonymity means i don’t get people telling me i shouldn’t be this way just cos i’m intelligent, had a good job, managed to buy a house, etc.

argh feeling super torn about my future. i’ve applied for another job in research. i was planning to leave research for good this time cos my track record is so poor- i started my phd addicted to benzos and week and by the end had added alcohol and heroin. started my post doc on heroin, lost the job cos i’d added an extreme crack addiction. maybe i just can’t hack science. i’m just gonna see what comes, i’m not in a rush to get a job.

its amazing that i can even think about getting a job tbh. last year i felt like that all felt very much behind me, another me that i’d never get back to. just completely unobtainable.
 
argh fuck fuck fuck i want to go back to february when this seemed like it might be doable.

i had my ptsd triggered on thursday. i feel guilty calling it ptsd cos the trauma therapy i had did stop all the main symptoms. but i don't know what else to call it. the therapy didn't get rid of all of the pain. i ended up genuinely the most afraid and the closest to using that i have since i left rehab. i was on my own in a city centre hysterical. if i'd known any dealers up here i probably would have scored without thinking twice. instead i went to a girl from NAs house, the only person nearby whose address I know, and she knows what happened to me. she helped calm me down and was super nice.

its massive massive progress that i was able to do what i did. i was petrified of what was gonna happen if she didn't answer, literally my only other option felt like going to a hospital and i don't really wanna get sectioned. realistically, acute mental health care is so bad in the uk that actually i'd have waited a long time for no help and hopefully calmed down and left before that.

i'm starting to doubt my commitment to this whole thing. i caught myself thinking the other night 'loads of people said they learnt a lot from relapses, maybe that's what i need' but i don't want to do that. i need my quality of life to improve and i don't know what i can do. i read this book about addiction being a choice, and fundamentally, you can get to a point where your circumstances are so bad that drug use is a rational choice. since i got back off holiday, and in fact before i went on holiday, my quality of life has been worse than a lot of the time i spent on heroin. the problem is when if i take that route i don't get to pick and chose whether it ends up the horrorshow it was before i went to rehab.
 
I don't know any wonderful advice. I am kind of going through a similar situation myself. Stress is getting really heavy and if I knew where to score in my new city I would of relapsed already. Sorry not about me.

I think the fact you didn't relapse says alot about your commitment to getting better. Your smart and resourceful if you had made the decision you would of found drugs. I think you/we are going through the transition from short term a sobriety to long term sobriety. Like at first you feel like the world has opened up and all things are possible. Then the reality of the difficulty starts to set in. I've heard it called the pink cloud experience of early sobriety.

Are you in therapy? I find that to be helpful but not a solution. I think all we can do is push through and hope we feel better later
 
sorry you're struggling so much, and feel free to vent whatever you have to its actually useful to know were not alone at this point. moving to a new city is super stressful, you came for a new start, unfortunately that means you have to make a new start. you're not with your mum anymore which must be a massive plus and hopefully the people in your house are ok.

The reality is certainly setting in. it does sound like we're in a transition period, i can totally see now why loads of people relapse at this point. but i don't want to cos then all this hard work will be wasted.

i am having therapy but i feel like my progress has stalled. i want more emdr but am also really scared of getting that outside the protective rehab environment.

i'm feeling a bit better today. i was feeling a bit demoralised about my progress on my bass, cos i want to be in a band with my ex/best friend. we've been talking about making music together since 2016. he lived with me when i was using and i feel like part of my amends to him will be to do the stuff we said we'd do together, we've already finished the new zelda, but being good enough to be in a band is a bit harder. we played together yesterday and he's got the message that i'm not like him, i've not been playing 20 years, i can't just play something the first time i hear it, and i need easy stuff to build my confidence. so we played easy stuff and had fun, and its helped me reframe recovery a bit- its not not being allowed heroin, its being able to do things i enjoy with people i love.

it was sunny yesterday and people were drinking in the sunshine and its the first time since christmas that i've wanted a drink. i fucked my stomach drinking so more than 2 drinks is painful but its just one other nice aspect of life that i've abused to the extent i can't have it anymore. it wouldn't go well, if i use anything that messes with my judgement i'll be scoring a dark in no time.

i've been totally exhausted and demotivated since thursday when i flipped out. in my anorexia IP they diagnosed me as possibly bipolar 2, i think they're wrong, they were just cunts all the time and i have a perpetually short fuse, they never listened they just dosed me with clonazepam when i lost it. but i can see it, that mixture of sheer despair but massive energy is scary because it is so destructive. i've had no motivation or energy since.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I can relate to the not agreeing with a diagnosis. I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder during one of my hospital stays last year. I was coming off benzos and being rapid tapered off methadone. I was an asshole and they like slapping that diagnosis on hard to deal with patients. But I've come to realize a diagnosis is just a way for them to catagorize the things going on in my brain. I don't care what they call it I just want help in fixing it. So try not to take it personally.
 
i think they make a lot of diagnoses in IP that don't take into account the fact that its a really stressful situation, not business as usual. anorexics are being forced to eat, drug addicts are being denied drugs. not really a valid representation of your brain chemistry.

i've booked myself a drs appointment and now don't even know why. all they can do is prescribe drugs. maybe this time they'll prescribe something that helps. i'm relieved i'm not in the US, when guys post on here about their million psychoactive prescriptions i always think thank fuck our health system isn't profit driven, there is no way to guess about all the interactions between those things in a complex and sensitive system.

argh there was an ambulance outside the drugs services today. i was jealous cos whoever they called it for obviously had some good dark. my brain is fucked, they might die, they might be permanently brain damaged. it turns out there's been 2 ODs there today, my mate gave someone naloxone, saved someones life. really didn't need to know there's good shit about today. i hope both make a full recovery.
 
ffuuuuck. well i was gonna let this thread die cos i thought i didn't need it anymore but i have too much to write to put in the recovery thread.

the past few weeks has been the hardest and most awful of my recovery. twice i have come the closes i've come to using since i got clean. i've ended up planning to use as soon as i get my own place. i've seriously contemplated suicide. i have cried so fucking much.

i have realised i need specialist help for my ptsd. according to the doctor i do actually still have ptsd. i'd thought cos i wasn't being haunted by specific images and sounds anymore, i was cured. i've started sertraline which is supposed to get good results for ptsd in about 52% of sufferers. i've booked a phone assessment for specialist counselling around sexual violence. just having taken some action makes me feel so much less hopeless.

the other night i needed my mum to stop shouting at me. so i told her what happened. i was just desperate for her not to be angry with me anymore. it worked. i feel kinda resentful cos i did say i'd got cptsd in rehab, that should be enough, i shouldn't have had to give any detail. she said she'd never shout at me again. i don't believe that but i appreciate the sentiment. i realised it must be a relief to her, she's probably not blaming herself as much anymore.

i got massive resentments over NA but i think i've gained some perspective. they promise freedom from active addiction. i have that. they don't promise a cure for mental illness. i still think its irresponsible to completely write off psychiatry when a lot of people in the rooms probably suffer mental health problems. some people just aren't in a state where they can do the steps without extra help around their issues and shifting the blame onto them for 'not working the steps properly' if they relapse cos their mental health was making their life unbearable is fucking unfair.
 
i thought i'd finished going batshit crazy but clearly not. sertraline is giving me mad insomnia. but i'm also a bit wired. my mood is ok. but its like when you've been awake too long on stimulants, your brain is slow, your coordination is fucked. the doctor today prescribed me some sleeping pills. i was surprised by that but relieved as well.

i actually found myself looking up the effects of snorting sertraline. like what sort of desperate bullshit is this?

i'm on the verge of fucking recovery off. or at least total abstinence from all drugs. only problem is i do genuinely believe that if i do anything that compromises my judgement i'll just go and buy heroin. like surely nearly 7 months abstinence even if i did get sick off it, i wouldn't get that sick now. but its a music festival this weekend and it would be so fucking nice to just have a few beers and maybe some coke. even typing this is fucking ridiculous. more than 2 drinks sets my stomach off painfully and i don't really like powdered coke.

arrrrgghhh i need to get my own place asap so i can just get fucked up and have some fucking RELEIF. like its weird i'm acting cheerful and feel it when at the time somehow but if i actually think about how i feel, i'm a zombie, going through the motions, with no idea of even why. i'm not abstaining for me right now. i'm not hysterical half the time anymore so that's a plus but i feel like i'm just a fucking gaping abyss.


--------------------

more ramblings probably don't deserve another post.

i've just realised, this is exactly what i thought being clean would be like when i didn't want to even try to get clean. constantly wanting drugs. i do get some distraction, a lot more than in my full on crack addiction, but several times a day.

negative ways of thinking are creeping back in. like planning to just lie in NA and to my parents and stuff. and i don't even feel guilty. i just want to use and minimise the consequences of doing so.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hey Chinup!

I'm glad you're here. I've been thinking of you.

Addiction is a motherfucker. No doubt about it. I was really angry because I wanted to get high and didn't the other day. I get really sick and tired of being the voice of reason sometimes. I feel like walking out the fucking door, and not looking back sometimes.

I have saved my husband's life -well over 20 times. Honestly. Last week he OD'd, to the point I had to use 2 4mg ampoules of Narcan. My nerves were/are shot.

His OD's are from amateur moves. What long-term, IV dope addict doesn't know not to mix benzos with heroin. And forgets they took 4mgs of Klonopin?! Uuggh. If I drank, I'd do a couple shots of Jack Daniels.

He came out of the bathroom, mumbled something, and collapsed to the floor. Then, quickly started turning death white with his lips purple.

I jump up, grab Narcan, kneeling next to him, saying , "WHAT did you do?!" Start trying to bring him around, calling his name,slapping his cheeks. Threw water on him. Nothing. Start CPR. Clocks ticking. We're going on 3mins of not breathing. Im waiting for that sudden gasp. Didn't happen. I said, "I'm sorry!". Administer Narcan. Nothing. HOLY FUCK. Repeat the above. Run and grab a bucket for him to vomit in, and a blanket to cover him. He's yelling "Why?! Why?!". It was a nightmare.

As I said, I've gone through that many times. It never gets less terrifying. Or less stressful. There's never a "thanks for saving my life. Again. ".

What pisses me off is when I'm having cravings, he has the audacity to lecture me. Seriously?!

Yes, I'm the voice of reason. But, I never said I was perfect.

I understand your feelings chinup. I'm feeling the same way today.

Maybe relapses are part of it. Sometimes. But, I promise, they get harder and harder to come back from. There's no using without consequences. Think it through. A thru Z. What would the consequences be if you relapse.

You definitely, definitely need support. So do I. I feel like I'm drowning right now. But, one thing I know for certain, if I go full-time again, it will be an even worse situation.

I do know how difficult dealing w trauma, past and present is. We can't do this alone.
 
Top