Aa
Tramadol withdrawl again, scared, need support please
I have started a very quick taper not by choice and will be out in a day or so. I have been down this road before and that is why I am so scared. I need support, I will be doing this alone and know what to expect. Is there anyone out there that can help me through this when it gets really dark?
Cosette
Cosette
Nice analogies bubby. Thanks for giving me something to read so early in the morn. Lol.
It will be bud. Life is what it is and eveyone copes with it in different ways. In my opinion there are not many people who have true peace except for those who live meekly. I have a huge theory about simplicity but I will put in this one about stress as it likely fits the topic we are discussing better:
I have heard and I believe that stress is the number one killer today. Stress cause depression, feeds addiction, causes heart and blood pressure problems, causes migraines, and fights your spiritual connection with your higher power (which in turn pushes you further away from faith and cause the behavior of trying to control your life, which adds more stress), just to name a few. Think about this situation...
A man falls asleep and forgot to turn the alarm clock on. He wakes up the next morning, look at the clock, and realize you have 30 minutes to get ready do you can make it to work on time (stress 2 of 10). He quickly grabs some clothes and rush to the shower. After the shower he starts to get dressed and realize that in his panic he forgot to grab a shirt which means he has to go back to the room and find one(stress 3 of 10). He gets ready and rushes out the door to jump in his car. When he gets to the car he realizes that he forgot his keys so he has to run back inside (stress 5 of 10). He sits out on the road driving excessively to make it to work on time. He has tunnel vision and notices nothing around him. Suddenly a car pulls out in front of him. He cuts the wheel, and crash into a tree. To make this a happy story, he doesn't die. But you can see how stress could have killed him.
The lymbic system in the brain can have a dramatic impact on stress. Let's say that you just came back from a deployment from a war zone. Over there you had experienced daily bombings that shook the ground and got your heart racing. Now you are back home. Using the baseline of a person who has never been to war, let's call him Mark, I will compare their physical and mental reactions certain things. The soldier and Mark are lying in bed and hear a clap of thunder. Mark reacts but because he has never experienced combat he has no memories that are intensified by the lymbic system making his stress 2 of 10. The soldier hears it and what starts out as 2 of 10 becomes a 9 of 10 quickly because he hears a mortar not thunder. The lymbic his memories triggered the lymbic system to make his symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) arise. His mental reaction is fear and his physical reaction is an elevated heart rate and sweating. A lot of people define PTSD as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. It was normal for the soldier to act this way because of the abnormal situation he was in.
Obviously I can relate to that story because I am a combat vet who has PTSD. A story that most people can relate to is getting cut off in traffic. The baseline for this is someone who has never been cutoff (Steve again). Steve gets cut off and he gets a little bit aggravated but lets it go, stress 1 of 10. When it happens to someone that has been cutoff several times may start off at 1 of 10 but by the time it passes through the lymnic system it becomes a 7 of 10. His mental reaction is anger and his physical reaction is elevated heart rate and behaviors such as flipping of the cutter and flipping him off.
Unresolved issues do not go away, they worsen. The fear that the soldier had will not likely go away but through therapy he can lessen the intensity of his physical reaction. That takes me into fear.
Fear:
I talked earlier about the voice in your head earlier.
One of my favorite things to say about fear is that it is actually love going in the wrong direction.
Imagine that you are a man shopping in a mall. You turn the corner and see a man screaming at his girlfriend. The man is much bigger than you and would definitely mess you up. You turn around and walk away. You wanted to do something because you wanted to protect the girl (love) but didn't because you thought you were gonna get beat (fear). If you don't love yourself and the values that you have, you will always be afraid to stand up for them.
I don't quote the Bible much but in this case the story of David and Goliath fits pretty good:
David was not even an adult yet. He had heard of the bully Goliath and volunteered to fight him. He was dismissed because of his age until there were no more volunteers to fight Goliath. David truly loved himself because he knew that he was carrying out his God's work and it gave him the courage to stand up and fight. Could he have slung that stone and hit perfectly if he was doing it because he was afraid of getting beat up if he missed? Could he have done it if he was doing it for praise or a reward? The answer to these is no. He did it because he listened to the voice in his head which in this situation and my situation is God, it can be different for those who have a different higher power but you get the idea. He knew that it was his purpose to fight the Giant and because his faith was so strong there was no way he could have missed. Faith is love and fear is love going in the wrong direction.
What did that child have that you cannot?
You don't have to wait until you are strong or wise to start standing up for your morals and values. Don't do it for yourself or the person you may be defending. Do it for your higher power if you have one or just do it to combat evil. I do it with a pen and paper but I am not afraid to take the fight to evil in wherever it presents itself. If you do it for love you cannot lose no matter the outcome.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Summary:
Impatient behavior causes you to try to control your life and moves you further away from your higher power and your faith in it. If you try to control your life you will live a life of fear. If you live a life of fear you are most likely doomed to die from stress. This poem should sum it up better than making this a long summary.
If you feel poor then you want wealth
If you feel sick then you want health
If you feel cold then you want a cover
If you feel lonely then you want a lover
If you hate the day then you want the night
If you fear the dark then you want the light
If you feel like a dunce then perhaps you want school
If you feel like a dork then you want to be cool
If you're in pain then you want it to heal
If you feel insane you may need a pill
If you want to be saved then you need to pray
If you want what I have I'll tell you the way
Don't brood on the past live in the present
Don't try to be king be happy as a peasant
Don't fear the future it could be better tomorrow
Don't force love it will just bring you sorrow
Don't hold grudges learn to forgive
Be ready to die so you can live
Love everyone there is no need to hate
If they are in a hurry be patient and wait
Do something selfless and expect no credit
Find peace in yourself and learn how to spread it
One cycle begins when you take your first breath
That cycle will end on the day of your death
Perhaps an endless cycle is that of the soul
It uses life cycles to allow it to grow
Notice the cycles and let them flow
Try to find faith and give up control
I have heard and I believe that stress is the number one killer today. Stress cause depression, feeds addiction, causes heart and blood pressure problems, causes migraines, and fights your spiritual connection with your higher power (which in turn pushes you further away from faith and cause the behavior of trying to control your life, which adds more stress), just to name a few. Think about this situation...
A man falls asleep and forgot to turn the alarm clock on. He wakes up the next morning, look at the clock, and realize you have 30 minutes to get ready do you can make it to work on time (stress 2 of 10). He quickly grabs some clothes and rush to the shower. After the shower he starts to get dressed and realize that in his panic he forgot to grab a shirt which means he has to go back to the room and find one(stress 3 of 10). He gets ready and rushes out the door to jump in his car. When he gets to the car he realizes that he forgot his keys so he has to run back inside (stress 5 of 10). He sits out on the road driving excessively to make it to work on time. He has tunnel vision and notices nothing around him. Suddenly a car pulls out in front of him. He cuts the wheel, and crash into a tree. To make this a happy story, he doesn't die. But you can see how stress could have killed him.
The lymbic system in the brain can have a dramatic impact on stress. Let's say that you just came back from a deployment from a war zone. Over there you had experienced daily bombings that shook the ground and got your heart racing. Now you are back home. Using the baseline of a person who has never been to war, let's call him Mark, I will compare their physical and mental reactions certain things. The soldier and Mark are lying in bed and hear a clap of thunder. Mark reacts but because he has never experienced combat he has no memories that are intensified by the lymbic system making his stress 2 of 10. The soldier hears it and what starts out as 2 of 10 becomes a 9 of 10 quickly because he hears a mortar not thunder. The lymbic his memories triggered the lymbic system to make his symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) arise. His mental reaction is fear and his physical reaction is an elevated heart rate and sweating. A lot of people define PTSD as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. It was normal for the soldier to act this way because of the abnormal situation he was in.
Obviously I can relate to that story because I am a combat vet who has PTSD. A story that most people can relate to is getting cut off in traffic. The baseline for this is someone who has never been cutoff (Steve again). Steve gets cut off and he gets a little bit aggravated but lets it go, stress 1 of 10. When it happens to someone that has been cutoff several times may start off at 1 of 10 but by the time it passes through the lymnic system it becomes a 7 of 10. His mental reaction is anger and his physical reaction is elevated heart rate and behaviors such as flipping of the cutter and flipping him off.
Unresolved issues do not go away, they worsen. The fear that the soldier had will not likely go away but through therapy he can lessen the intensity of his physical reaction. That takes me into fear.
Fear:
I talked earlier about the voice in your head earlier.
One of my favorite things to say about fear is that it is actually love going in the wrong direction.
Imagine that you are a man shopping in a mall. You turn the corner and see a man screaming at his girlfriend. The man is much bigger than you and would definitely mess you up. You turn around and walk away. You wanted to do something because you wanted to protect the girl (love) but didn't because you thought you were gonna get beat (fear). If you don't love yourself and the values that you have, you will always be afraid to stand up for them.
I don't quote the Bible much but in this case the story of David and Goliath fits pretty good:
David was not even an adult yet. He had heard of the bully Goliath and volunteered to fight him. He was dismissed because of his age until there were no more volunteers to fight Goliath. David truly loved himself because he knew that he was carrying out his God's work and it gave him the courage to stand up and fight. Could he have slung that stone and hit perfectly if he was doing it because he was afraid of getting beat up if he missed? Could he have done it if he was doing it for praise or a reward? The answer to these is no. He did it because he listened to the voice in his head which in this situation and my situation is God, it can be different for those who have a different higher power but you get the idea. He knew that it was his purpose to fight the Giant and because his faith was so strong there was no way he could have missed. Faith is love and fear is love going in the wrong direction.
What did that child have that you cannot?
You don't have to wait until you are strong or wise to start standing up for your morals and values. Don't do it for yourself or the person you may be defending. Do it for your higher power if you have one or just do it to combat evil. I do it with a pen and paper but I am not afraid to take the fight to evil in wherever it presents itself. If you do it for love you cannot lose no matter the outcome.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Summary:
Impatient behavior causes you to try to control your life and moves you further away from your higher power and your faith in it. If you try to control your life you will live a life of fear. If you live a life of fear you are most likely doomed to die from stress. This poem should sum it up better than making this a long summary.
If you feel poor then you want wealth
If you feel sick then you want health
If you feel cold then you want a cover
If you feel lonely then you want a lover
If you hate the day then you want the night
If you fear the dark then you want the light
If you feel like a dunce then perhaps you want school
If you feel like a dork then you want to be cool
If you're in pain then you want it to heal
If you feel insane you may need a pill
If you want to be saved then you need to pray
If you want what I have I'll tell you the way
Don't brood on the past live in the present
Don't try to be king be happy as a peasant
Don't fear the future it could be better tomorrow
Don't force love it will just bring you sorrow
Don't hold grudges learn to forgive
Be ready to die so you can live
Love everyone there is no need to hate
If they are in a hurry be patient and wait
Do something selfless and expect no credit
Find peace in yourself and learn how to spread it
One cycle begins when you take your first breath
That cycle will end on the day of your death
Perhaps an endless cycle is that of the soul
It uses life cycles to allow it to grow
Notice the cycles and let them flow
Try to find faith and give up control
You are right. I need to look at each day as if it were my last. I will have to give the care of my kids over to God as well as my employer who is very mad I missed today and who knows how many more? I have to see the Dr. Thursday about the possibility of Leukemia or what ever has been going on to cause me to be so sick. That is what ultimately led me back on. I have health issues and can't keep up so I use to get the energy. Every relapse was over something coming up and of coarse I'm an addict. I want life to be what it once was again.
I know it is hard and if you think about all of the things that you could lise it makes it harder because it puts a lot of pressure on you. If there is a counntdown clockk to when you have to stop, this one being when you run out, it causes stress and anxiety.
There is an aspect to treatment that I like. Every time I go in treatment the physical and mental withdrawals are greatly reduced sometimes to the point where they are absent in a day. The reason being is that I know once I get there I have no option to get more and I know that for the next however many days I don't have any stressers.
The point is that those are just thoughts and those thougths cause the anxiety and obsession to be manageable. You are having a lot of obsessive thoughts and worries and that is going to make this time more difficult than it has to be. Don't get me wrong it is difficult and I know that but if you can just look at this process as one day at a time and not look at tomorrow or the next day or when you go back to work than you may be able to find the piece of mind that could greatly benefit you through this. I will give you a scenario. You have to live everyday like it is your last. Every moment like it could be your last.
Anyway the scenario...
If you knew for a fact that you were going to die tomorrow what would you do today? That is how you have to think while you are going through this and actually even after you find your sobriety. It would be nice if we could just sleep until it was over but we can't. What we can do is change the way we see the world. Alter our thoughts so that we don't brood on the past nor worry about the future. It is a state of mind that I like to think of as being on the inside looking out instead of the outside looking in. Good luck friend.
There is an aspect to treatment that I like. Every time I go in treatment the physical and mental withdrawals are greatly reduced sometimes to the point where they are absent in a day. The reason being is that I know once I get there I have no option to get more and I know that for the next however many days I don't have any stressers.
The point is that those are just thoughts and those thougths cause the anxiety and obsession to be manageable. You are having a lot of obsessive thoughts and worries and that is going to make this time more difficult than it has to be. Don't get me wrong it is difficult and I know that but if you can just look at this process as one day at a time and not look at tomorrow or the next day or when you go back to work than you may be able to find the piece of mind that could greatly benefit you through this. I will give you a scenario. You have to live everyday like it is your last. Every moment like it could be your last.
Anyway the scenario...
If you knew for a fact that you were going to die tomorrow what would you do today? That is how you have to think while you are going through this and actually even after you find your sobriety. It would be nice if we could just sleep until it was over but we can't. What we can do is change the way we see the world. Alter our thoughts so that we don't brood on the past nor worry about the future. It is a state of mind that I like to think of as being on the inside looking out instead of the outside looking in. Good luck friend.
Thank you Bubulous,
I have not checked out the Thomas recipe but will. I have anti nausea meds, emergency, Gatorade, Valerian, and some old but not expired Neurontin for the restless legs. I started the cut back 2 days ago and the nights have been hell. I am afraid I will lose my job that I desperately need, I have 2 children. I don't feel I can put them through this again.
I have not checked out the Thomas recipe but will. I have anti nausea meds, emergency, Gatorade, Valerian, and some old but not expired Neurontin for the restless legs. I started the cut back 2 days ago and the nights have been hell. I am afraid I will lose my job that I desperately need, I have 2 children. I don't feel I can put them through this again.
Hello and welcome to the forum,
You will find a lot of support here from various addicts at different stages of withdrawal and recovery.
What are you going to do to make it through the physical withdrawals? A lot of people check out the Thomas Recipe fo an easier detox. If you have never checked it out here is a link:
http://www.medhelp.org/user_journals/show/1250/The-Thomas-Recipe
Stick around and let us know how you are doing as you go through this and you will find a lot of caring people to support you.
You will find a lot of support here from various addicts at different stages of withdrawal and recovery.
What are you going to do to make it through the physical withdrawals? A lot of people check out the Thomas Recipe fo an easier detox. If you have never checked it out here is a link:
http://www.medhelp.org/user_journals/show/1250/The-Thomas-Recipe
Stick around and let us know how you are doing as you go through this and you will find a lot of caring people to support you.
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