Feel Trapped?

I’m sitting in my house in Austin and wondering if it can get any hotter here. 103, 105…110. What’s the difference? It makes me feel a bit claustrophobic. It’s not dissimilar to a feeling that pervaded my thoughts when on pills.

“Oh my God, I can’t get outta here, I’m stuck here for life! What am I gonna do? What if my brain turns to mush and I can’t get back to normal? What if there’s permanent damage? What have I done? I want to go back to the way it was…the way I was.”

Well as it turns out, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before the pills and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to now. But there are so many of you I’m sure that have this feeling as though you’re trapped by your addiction and that you’ve somehow made a permanent mess of things. Well there is a permanence to your predicament right now but not necessarily the one that you’re worried about. I’ve gotten a lot of panicked emails regarding this topic and I want to -hopefully- ease your minds and re-direct your thoughts a bit.

First of all lets get the big elephant in the room out of the way ok? Regardless of what you have taken or how many you have taken of your particular drug of choice, for the vast majority of you, it’s highly, highly unlikely that you’ve done permanent major damage to your brain or your body that can’t be either stopped or healed if you stop taking drugs now.

Have you killed a few brain cells along the way? Sure.

Have you momentarily altered the chemical processes and reward pathways in your brain by taking so many drugs? It’s very possible.

Have you given your liver a bit of a rough time and potentially disrupted your liver functions with some of the narcotics and other intoxicants that you’ve been taking over the years. That could be true.

However, for most of you, if you quit, you will heal. Of course I’m not a doctor and I’m speaking in generalities but what I’m trying to say here is that there are so many of you out there who are worried that you’ve done some sort of permanent damage to yourself and that makes you feel trapped. It makes you feel claustrophobic and it also obliterates HOPE.

I don’t care if you’ve been on suboxone for 2 years or Vicodin for 10 years; you need to stop worrying about being trapped and start worrying about how you’re going to get out. All of these drugs will leave your body and your brain if you stop taking them. Yes, that includes Suboxone.

The withdrawal process is the physical manifestation of these drugs leaving your brain and you’re body. Suboxone takes longer because it has a longer half life. That’s all it is. Yes, there is Post Acute Withdrawal (PAWS) associated with Suboxone which is why I have written several posts about why I think Suboxone is NOT a good long-term solution. However, eventually the PAWS will end too. Some people with PAWS feel like the withdrawal may never end; but I myself have not heard of one case where it didn’t eventually go away completely.

So regardless of what you have taken and how many pills you’ve ingested, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ve somehow permanently altered your mind or how your brain functions. Just like any other organ, your brain will need time to heal once you quit. It might take therapy and it might not fully heal for a few weeks or even a few months but again, in all likelihood it WILL heal if you give it the right treatment and you have the patience.

Of course there are exceptions out there just like anything else. But I’m talking to the masses here. I’m talking to the people who spend way too much time worrying about what they’ve done to themselves and not nearly enough time worrying about what they are going to do with themselves.

The true permanence involved with your addiction is the addiction itself. The real damage is the damage that you may have done to your relationships, your, career, your family and your self-esteem. You NEED to worry about that right now. You need to feel a sense of urgency to get that fixed and to repair those issues because they are important and they are real.

Your healing is going to take patience and persistence just like treating any other injury. You are going to go through withdrawal, you are going to feel like crap for a while, you are going to have to put great effort into getting the help that you need to stay sober. It’s not going to be fun or easy. But neither is being in a full body cast after a car accident or having one of those orthopedic “halo” things screwed into your skull after breaking your neck. It’s going to suck!

Whew…I would HATE to have one of those halo things screwed into my brain for months on end. If you gave me the choice, I rather go through withdrawals. Wouldn’t you?

So stop worrying about the unlikely and the things you can’t change and start worrying about what you can change and what is real. Recovering from an addiction is like recovering from an accident. You need care, you will be uncomfortable and its going to take time to fully heal. But, with patience you CAN heal…and oh boy is it worth it in the end.

And you can do it without one of those halo things screwed into your skull!!!

-George