Who Am I, REALLY?

There is a great line in an old Paul Simon song ("The Boxer") that says "...a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

We codependents take that one or two steps further. We "do what we want to do and call it by what sounds best."

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I'm bipolar and life for me is not easy....My depression and manic episodes are so extreme that at times I am not able to manage my life.  When I get depressed I am not able to function; I feel  as if there are a thousand pounds of bricks on my chest, I am not able to get out of bed and all I do is sleep.  There is no way to get myself out of the depression.  When I am in this awful state, my fiance waits patiently to see a sign of a little light in my eyes, that is when he knows he has the opportunity to make me feel better (he never pushes me to feel better or I fall into a deeper depression).  I have not yet figured out how to help myself but as long as I have him to help me through it I will be OK.

Withdrawal from narcotic addiction resembles severe and very prolonged case of flu.  I don't mean a cold; I mean the kind of flu that killed millions of people in a pandemic of 1918.  The symptoms include malaise, confusion, diarrhea and vomiting, fever, body aches and muscle cramping, severe anxiety, mood swings and irritability, rapid heart rate and breathing, sweating, runny nose, shivering and tremors, anorexia and weight loss. Shall I go on?  Whereas the flu lasts 7-10 days, this can continue for as long as 4 to 6 weeks.   Unfortunately some people cannot tolerate it and go back to the narcotic use. 

So what are the options?  Long term detox programs are very costly, but sometimes are partially covered by insurance.  They use some medications to make withdrawal more tolerable, but not by much.  They also utilize a lot of group therapy which may be very helpful.  However this is an environment that is a temporary and a foreign one to the addict and cannot be sustained once he/she leaves.

Suboxone is another valid option. It is an opioid agonist/antagonist medication that is widely advertised and widely used by many physicians as a detox option. Substituting narcotics for Suboxone and then slowly tapering it off allows the body to adjust slowly and not to have to go through the agony of withdrawals.  The problem with Suboxone that we see in our clinic is that a subset of patients gets addicted to Suboxone as well and then we have to detox them off of it.  So you can often end up substituting one addiction for another.

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Just A Little Willingness

Despair is the basic "affect" of the newcomer to recovery. Affect is what psychologists and psychiatrists call the basic emotion projected by a person. By the time we finally "hit our bottom" as a result of the ravages of addiction we have truly surrendered. We have given up on other people, on ourselves, and even on a God of any kind!

Recovery, from day one, becomes a matter of possibility. Possibility is just a glimmer of light flickering through the ink-like darkness of our soul. During our first meeting we experience other people demonstrating that they too walked through that door at some point in the past, that they stayed and began their own recovery process, and that IT WORKED!

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