Addicted to pain pills and desperately want to quit? Pain pill addiction can absolutely ruin your life faster than a roller-coaster spinning out of control.
Chances are the standard response you're going to get from friends, doctors, counselors, is "Are you going to 12-step meetings?" Now, I have nothing against 12-step meetings as a tool for dealing with addictions to many things, pain pills included.
I've been to more than a handful myself.
I always felt very welcomed and supported at these meetings -- even though I raised my hand every single time when asked if there was anyone there within their first 30 days of sobriety.
I must have gotten ten 24-hour coins (you get a coin if you have gone 24 hours without using drugs).
Then I just quit announcing that I was constantly "always just starting to quit.
" My problem was, in spite of the support and fellowship of the 12-step meetings, when I left the meeting, I was still at a loss as far as nitty-gritty, Okay, what do I do now with those white-hot desires to take pain pills that would come roaring up out of nowhere and knock me to the ground? The list of phone numbers I got at every meeting didn't help me - I am not a phone person.
Besides, if I were at the point of calling someone about wanting to use Vicodin, I'd already somewhere inside myself made a decision that I was going to use, and no phone call was going to stop that.
At a certain point, I realized I had to take this problem into my own hands.
I had to craft my own program of getting off these seductive little pills, a program that worked for me, a non-phone, kind of reclusive person.
Can you relate to this? I know I'm not the only person for whom 12-step meetings aren't the final answer as far as overcoming pain pill addiction! And what I discovered was that there IS a world of recovery from addiction beyond 12-step meetings, that they are NOT the only way to recover for all people.
I guess you could say I followed that Chinese saying, "Fall down seven times, get up eight.
"Though in my case, trying to overcome addiction to Vicodin, it was more like, "Fall down 1,000 times, get up 1,001"! Through this exhausting process, I found there were certain strategies that I could use to (1) deaden cravings to take pills so they wouldn't be so deadly in the first place and (2) talk back to any cravings that did come up forcefully and confidently and not be swept away by those "cunning and baffling" desires.
(I found that a particular way of doing acupressure was a killer strategy for flattening desires to use pills).
If you want to quit taking pain pills, you really need to now what you are dealing with before you set out to quit.
Getting over an addiction to painkillers can be a very, very tricky thing.
Desires to use will rise up so fast you won't know what hit you, the desire is so strong.
You may feel like there is absolutely nothing you can do about it except take pills to satisfy the beast.
But there are things that can be done, and done consistently to make it through one desire to use after another.
(The acupressure I mentioned above is one such thing.
) And if you get through enough of them consistently, you're on the other side - the clean and sober side! This is how anyone overcomes a bad habit, losing weight, quitting smoking, anything like that: consistent effort and knowing exactly what to do when desires to use (or smoke or overeat) come up, kind of like following a road map that you've sketched out ahead of time so you don't get lost.
This knowledge about what to do to make it through one desire after another ultimately will put you in the driver's seat.
It will allow you to become the clean and sober person you deserve to be.