my blog hates me

is it just me......... i wrote in my blog hit publish and then went to view it and it wasnt there so then i typed a mean blog declaring my madness and my hate for my blog at the moment n thats not there ...anyone else...??

I quote:

"We faced three disturbing realizations:

1. We are powerless over addiction and our lives are unmanageable;

2. Although we are not responsible for our disease, we are responsible for our recovery;

3. We can no longer blame people, places, and things for our addictions. We must face our problems and our feelings."

pg. 13 Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, Third Edition.

For me, responsibility is the operative point. And as long I try and shift the blame and not become accountable for my actions the longer I stay at the mercy of the powers that be. Inevitably, jails, institutions and death. And addiction is only mentioned in the first step of the twelve steps. The rest is all about profound change I must make in myself on every level.

The best "help" that has been given to me has been that of the tough love variety. Where I fess up and pay the consequences of my actions. Instead of suing the drug companies for prescribing a drug I used my best conniving to get or blaming the judicial system for locking me up when I got caught, I have found it more beneficial to look at myself instead. Make the necessary changes and I am released from the self inflicted shackles that have bound me for years.

A tall order I must admit.

My take on addiction as a disease.

Please forgive me for blowing off all the posts about whether or not addiction is a disease and then dropping my own...I have my own arrangement in my head about this, and I find it to be unhelpful to battle it out now that I"ve gotten my position settled. So here's my thing:

In life, you get to choose which narrative you want to explain what's happening to you. I can choose to think, "My husband is a criminal, a liar, a son of a bitch, a damn fool, a sociopath with no redeeming qualities." These thoughts would then lead to, "What the fuck is wrong with me? Why don't I drop this sorry son of a bitch on his ass and move on? When will I ever learn my lesson? Why am I so broken? Fuck?" and et cetera.

Or, I can work with the idea that addiction is a disease. It might only be a metaphor, but it sure is a powerful one. It transforms those thoughts about my husband into, "He is very, very sick," and my thoughts about myself into, "I am strong for supporting my sick husband."

There is a danger, though, in that line of thinking in that I might start to feel like I should give him things that I don't want to give or accept behavior that I don't want to accept. I have to be vigilant against that tendency to "help."

But in the end, if I'm just going to stay with this man anyway, and I am, at least for now, it's the only way to justify our lives and our behaviors.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Confrused

Again with that rollercoaster of emotions. In a way i like just having me time and not talkin to him all the time.. i mean dont get me wrong i love talking to him i guess i dont miss talking to him when he is high. cuz thats when i hate it. but a part of me misses it n a part doesnt its like tug o war im being pulled in both directions. I told him to just call 2 times a day once in the late morning n once b4 bed. but he cant wait so he calls at 9 am n then i gatta wait all day to talk to him...its weird cuz like it bothers me but it doesnt.. i just dont no how to feel anymore. He is so sweet and just amazing when he is clean which makes me fall deeper and deeper in love with him. I swear this better be the last relapse...for a loooooong time no... forever.. but will it be? im gunna have to live with this for the rest of my life. does it get better? is there a time when someone is clean so long you stop worrying about it? Im just so torn. i often ask myself do i want to live with this my whole life? or do i want to be with someone where i dont have to worry about drugs and all this.. of course id rather not deal with it.. but its too late to depate i think.. i mean i no im still young but he is my other half...ughhhhh i dont no life is confusing and you only live once i dont want it to be miserable and its pretty much in his hands. well its in my hands cuz i make my own choices but i feel its in his hands cuz if HE stays clean i stay if HE f's up i go or do i?.. idk even when i write i go back n forth. i need some kind of encouragement that things WILL get better if he stays clean and i mean stays clean. for more then a month 3 months a year.

Do You Know Who I Am?

So I was reading over at The Discovering Alcoholic about the increased rates of prescription for painkillers in Montana, and I remembered something I'd wanted to write about here.

So this weekend, I had to go to the emergency room because half my face was swollen and nasty and crusty and gross. I had pink eye, and it was a mess...not a painful mess, just an uncomfortable, ugly, unfortunate mess.

The nurse who did the intake asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 0-10. I told her it was about a 2...I was a little uncomfortable, but mostly I was concerned that my eye was festering and I'd hoped to catch the infection before my eyeball rotted out.

So she sent me back into a room, and the doctor came and poked and prodded me a bit before prescribing a dose of antibiotics. As he was walking out the door, he turned back and said, with a half smile, "Want a pain pill?"

I was appalled! HELLS NO I don't want a fucking pain pill. What about 2 on a scale of 0-10 makes you think I want to battle with the demon opiate? In the religion I'm rapidly constructing through scraps of recovery and yoga and vegetarianism, the Grand Dame Demon Of Hell is covered in ex-girlfriend hair and opium poppies...FUCK NO I don't want a pain pill.

And furthermore, how DARE he ask that, with that little shit-eating grin? Does he get kickbacks for every pill script he writes? Does he have any idea what kind of a mess he could be inciting? Say, for instance, that had been my husband in the chair...he'd OF COURSE have needed a pain pill. Desperately, he would have needed one. Granted, he would have been thinking ahead from the beginning, and he would have said "9" for his pain scale measurement...goddamn junky-thinking fool...but really, what the hell was wrong with that doctor? I'm pretty sure that my husband isn't the only person with a problem with opiates, and I bet the doctor has heard of this phenomenon called "addiction" before...

This is a Dope

This is a Dope.

” The propaganda, assiduously spread for many years now, is that heroin addiction is an "illness". This view serves the interests both of the addicts who wish to continue their habit while placing the blame for their behaviour elsewhere, and the bureaucracy that wishes to continue in employment, preferably for ever and at higher rates of pay.”

The dope is Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, he is the author of this article entitled Heroin addiction isn't an illness... and a book on the same subject. Other than to say his findings are based or casual observations and figures he has derived from Mao’s revolution (I’m not kidding), I will withhold my comments and let someone far more qualified than myself debunk his baseless findings.

This is your brain on dope. ------->

Let me introduce you to Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse whose brain imaging research (see picture at right) has broke new ground in the science of addiction illness. I found a great NPR Fresh Air interview courtesy of WHYY with Dr. Volkow in which she explains her research. It’s thirty minutes long, but its both informative and entertaining. I would suggest that maybe Dr. Dalrpimple should listen, but I have a feeling he is more interested in garnering media attention to sell books than he is in discussing facts.

The Write Thought: disease?

Re: disease?

Heroin has a strange effect on the brain. This is my layman’s understanding: Normally your brain produces a chemical called endorphins; this chemical is what gives us that euphoric feeling after a great work out, or after really good sex. It also happens to help with pain, and it can affect your mood, etc, etc. The chemical is transmitted to receptor sites (think of a baseball glove, and endorphins are the ball). When you introduce opiates into your body (i.e. heroin, oxy’s, even prescription pain killers) for an extended period of time, these “foreign” chemicals fill the same receptor sites that your body normally fills with endorphins. After an extended period of use, the brain stops or extremely reduces producing endorphins, the brain thinks there is an excess of endorphins since the receptor sites are being filled artificially. So when you stop using there is nothing to fill these receptor sites, and your body freaks out.

Someone correct me if I am wrong.

Regarding addiction as a disease; I am of a mind that addiction is in fact a disease. The drug addiction is a symptom of the disease (including alcohol). I believe that once a person who has this disease takes that first drug, it then triggers a reaction within the user, and the disease then progresses. It progresses at different rates for different people. But it is the one thing that separates us (addicts) from normal people who can drink socially, use recreationally without ever reaching skimming the depths an addict does. I do not know if there is a genetic link regarding the disease. I suppose that it is like any other disease, some are genetic, some aren’t. But the fact that it is a disease gives me hope (and I suppose that here is where I will get flack from other addicts), but if it is a disease, that means one day they will be able to isolate the gene which causes the disease, and once they are able to do that, they will be able to find a cure.

Ha, how is that for optimism? This doesn’t mean that I think that I or any other addict suffering from the disease of addiction should sit back and wait for the cure. We have to use what we have at our disposal. In fact there is a way to recover from the disease. It says so right in the AA Big Book, people have and do recover from the disease of addiction. It’s a matter of what you want for yourself once the drugs are removed from your system. If you are content with simply not using, that’s fine. If you are like me, and the wreckage of your disease causes you great amounts of pain and guilt. If you are left with not really knowing how to live or feel without the use of drugs, then you will probably reach a point where that pain is no longer tolerable and you will seek out some kind of help. My experience in the past, my only experience with extended sobriety, and 3 years out of an adult life time is not a real extended amount of time, but after working a 12 step program, I lived more in those 3 years than I have my entire adult lifetime.

Eventually I will reach that threshold again. The one where sitting on my ass suffering from a disease that I no longer have the luxury of supporting through the use of drugs, when it gets to be too painful, too annoying, too much to handle, that eventually I will return to the 12 step program, and I mean more than hitting a meeting once in a while.

disease?

This is bothering me for some reason i just keep hearing her voice repeat in my head "you are born with it" i dont nec. think addiction is a disease...but i think it's and illness that takes over your mind, body, and soul and theres two things that can happen.... you overcome it ...or....you die. I don't think you are born with it like i said unless your mother or father were addicts or using during a pregnancy. A drug addiction as apposed to say an eating disorder are similar in ways the difference is that drugs alter you body and mind chemically...food not so much. I guess what I'm getting at is that i think it does become an illness just like someone with an addiction to food. It makes you sick and if you don't stop putting the toxins in your body you will eventually die. I don't think you are born with a disease that will make you go out and use drugs but i do believe some people are more pron to getting addicted to things where as other wont. Maybe it can turn into some sorta disease.....idk but i do know that I'm repeating my self so i'll stop now just had to get it out once more time.

Differences

Mantra and JW have me thinking about differences between Junkies and Codies. Mantra described it poignantly as her willingness to jump in front of a moving train over and over and his unwillingness to put himself out there to risk feeling any pain. I know that my partner (and many addicts who share their stories here) talked about using as a way of avoiding feelings. I also know that I use my partner by focusing on her feelings as a way of avoiding my own. Ultimately, it doesn't work for either of us, though.

Recently, I noticed just before a live meeting that one of my partner's friends was hugging and being hugged by many of my naranon friends. It interested me, and I pointed it out to my partner. Her response took me aback. She said, that of course her friend had relationships with many of my naranon friends. She continued, "she's a user, and you all are willing to be used." It really bothered me, but in the way that something that I don't like but rings true tends to really bother me. It points out this symbiotic relationship that's not very flattering for any of us.

Yuck!

anybody out there

geeeez its been almost 3 days since the last post.. i was starting to worry.

i have a question... i went to visit F today ( i will be writing about that in my blog when I'm finished here) he is in jail for anyone who missed that. a bunch of us were talking b4 we went in and this girl was saying how she believes people are born addicts.. not nec. to drugs or alcohol but they are born i guess with the "gene" or w/e that makes their body...brain become addicted more easily i guess than others w/o it. im not sure if i completly agree with that i mean yea if ur mother gave birth to you while using or maybe if she was addicted or your father... but what if you are the only one... i dont know...

what are your thoughts on this topic.......