Quote:
quote:Originally posted by More2Life
Can taking opiates long-term cause anxiety?
I use to take a shower once a week when I used. I'm actually blessed to be a good looking guy too, but you would never know it if you saw me in my apt. alone blocked off from the world, cell phone off, laying in bed playing video games and watching movies
My green friend I think has saved me from picking up MORE than once. Still fighting
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Thanks for being here.
This is my experience. Taking opioids long-term caused tremendous anxiety. In fact it wasn't just the opiates that caused the anxiety, it was my dependence on anything outside myself to make me happy and take away my feelings. As long as I'm depending on some pill, weed, drink, person, circumstance, cause, condition, whatever, I'm setting myself up for disappointment because all these things are things I cannot control, and they always let me down if I expect them to relieve me.
I used because I didn't want to feel. It's not rocket science.
Today I was complaining to my son that I'd like to lose about 3 or 4 pounds. "I come from a long line of fat women, and I refuse to get fat in middle age," I said.
"Your mom wasn't overweight, was she?" he said.
"Not until she stopped using her drug," I said. "She stopped using nicotine, and instead of having her feelings, she started using food to quit feeling. Anything to stop feeling her feelings." She had gained 35 or 40 pounds after quitting smoking and died of lung cancer at 58. My mother was very "anxious."
"'Anxiety' is another word for 'fear,'" a recovering addict once told me. "I can medicate anxiety. I can tell my doctor I'm 'anxious' and get a pill. When I call it fear, it changes. We don't take a pill or a substance for fear."
It was only when I quit everything that I could be free enough to have my feelings. When I was "taking something" I was just giving myself an excuse to not-feel.
Whenever I want to use/drink/take something, I know I just don't want to feel.
If I take something, even if it's not the thing I used to ideally choose (opiates), I know it will eventually lead me back to the thing I'd choose.
Tonight I went out to supper with my family and it was a beautiful night and people were sitting out in front of restaurants drinking beer. It was a perfect night to have a beer and watch the sun go down. I could taste the beer in my mouth. I could feel the warmth in my belly. ... Beer never excited me the way it excited my father, whose alcoholism killed him in 2007. But I knew tonight when I wanted just a "little something," I was not wanting to give in, stop fighting, surrender, and say "I can't be like them." ... It was fleeting. It left me.
But I'm a stubborn chick, quite often.
Best of luck. --G
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