Appreciate the wise words. My therapist has backed of off the bp dx. Right now she's just getting to know me and what makes me tick. On day #13 of tram w'd and I get anxious as my emotions are all over the place. Hopefully I'll even out soon.
Gerty
Wow! That is so great to hear. I have been diagnosed everything in the book over about 40 years, And believed too much of it. It took years to undo some of that damage. I truly believe anyone can get a license to call themselves a therapist without any sense of how easy it is to do damage to people who are so desperate to find help they will accept almost anything that is given.
ZJ I think U hit the nail right on the head the in diagnosis is "bi polor".They did this to me
after I had my son and had a serious case of post partmum .They put me all sorts of crap there are part of my sons first year I dont remeber at all except from what I see in pictures .It was not until after a year that I realized I was not bi polor .I got a theripist that helped come off all of the meds and guess what I was fine that was about 10 years ago . I have never had any mania or deep depression since they got me all the junk.
While working at the Healing Place For Women in North Carolina I was amazed @ the women being medicated for Bi-Polar.
Hell, not to be crude....we all look a little BP when we are first getting clean.
Addiction is 3 fold Mental, Physical and Emotional and all three have to be addressed before real recovery begins.
I believe it takes a min. of 30 days or more to get the Junk out of our system.
Take your time with jumping on board with this...give yourself some time.
I'm not emplying that you are not BP but you were BP when you were using and waiting a few more weeks or month won;t hurt anything.
Ask your therapist for a MOOD chart so you can chart your feelings for the next few weeks and see how much of what you are feeling and the way you are acting is more WITHDRAWAL or BP....................You and check me on this but I believe in order to meet the crit. of BP you would have had to had at least 1 mania eposide. Good Luck and I'm glad you asked this question....it was a good one because a lot of new commers run into this same problem.
Actually I want to say a little more about the mental illness thing. I believe that there are many many many things in a person's life that could push someone into an addiction. Most often it is more than one thing that leads to the addiction: family history, underlying vulnerability to drugs/alcohol (look what alcohol did to the Native Americans), immaturity, intolerable circumstances without the option to change anything, influence of friends and social group, self-medicating an underlying mental illness etc.
Diagnostic labels are fads just as much as anything else in society. Currently it is "bi-polar". People feel the need to explain things. It makes us less anxious. So we give it a name and we feel somewhat reassured. It is better to stay puzzled and curious.
I really agree with avisg above. Be very careful about therapists giving you a diagnosis since you are way too early in recovery to even know what you will look like. Tell him/her to slow down and give you time to recover.
Be very careful with therapist sometimes they are way to quick to jump to the gun with diagnosis of bi polor disorder .Its possible but it should take a therapist a few months to come to that conclusion .Having aggressive coming off of tram is normal .tram works like seration anti depressant so not only do u have to deal with opiate like wds its like your coming off an AD at the same time.
I really myself consider addiction to be a mental illness.You will find alot of people with underlying mental illness that are addicted but then there are others that have not other mental illness get hooked on drugs .