Addiction and Mental Health my Story.

Chapter 6- Treatment: trying to find a way out of the Hole.

  I ended up talking to the physiatrist there before I was admitted  and she said she would admit me and I agreed to go into a treatment program without knowing how long I would be there for.  What I did not realize is it would be another 6 month stint in the psych hospital. My combined psych ward and eating disorder treatment last time I was in was about 6 months as well.  This was my first time doing anything addiction related so it was different. When I got in they searched my stuff, pretty normal procedure but I was a little taken aback.  Then they did the infamous pee test.  At this particular  center they would keep the door open  while you were doing the test so you could not cheat. Talk about degrading and  anxiety provoking.  I have bad social anxiety as it is but someone watching you pee is incredibly hard. I always had a hard time peeing in those circumstances. I spent a lot of time in my room during this time and they encouraged me to get out. I did groups like horticulture, art group, Wellness which was on Assertiveness, Self - Esteem and Anger, a coping with Anxiety group, A therapy type group with only women , and some addiction related groups. 

I learned a lot about addiction during that time and how it basically hijacks your system and  creates a path to a point where you need the drug to survive.  It takes over the part of the brain that  gets pleasure from the release of dopamine  from eating, exercise and sex  and than the drug becomes what the body wants, and can even be more important than food itself. Talking about food once I got off the drug I was using I gained a ton of weight.  It was really embarrassing, I still had body image issues and I was put on a medication called Seroquel which  has a side effect of weight gain.... Yep just what I needed... not.  My eating disorder symptoms started popping up again. That's  the one issue with multiple issues its like a game  where you hit the goffers with a hammer and another one pops back up, that's seems to be my life with Addiction, various eating disorder behaviour and self harm, and sometimes they pop up all at once and make it even harder to survive.   I started to experience using dreams, which at first I really did not understand. I thought I was going crazy, but than realized it was a normal part of your body getting used to not using drugs anymore. It was really  hard though because the dreams were so realistic I would wake up and think I had used and than find out I had not. 

I was having a hard time with it because at that stage I still wanted to use to some extent so I would enjoy the dreams and than get frustrated in the morning because I was not high.  Sometimes I would get dreams where I was searching for the substance and wake up right before I was going to get high. That used to drive me crazy.  I learned that using dreams are the brains way of working through what is going on.  

During this time period anxiety and depression were high. I was showing some PTSD and dissociation symptoms. I believe that PTSD as very common among people with Addiction. The world of addiction is not fun and not pleasant. When I was using getting myself in dangerous situations seemed to be the norm.   At the beginning I was really naïve and got myself into a lot of situations I did not know how to deal with.   There was also a lot of situations I escaped that could have been a lot worse. Years later I was reading a book about sex trafficking in Canada and realized that one of the situations I was in was very likely a sex trafficking situation, but I was fortunate that a woman stood up for me told the guy who was hurting me to let me go because I did not want to do this.  Though it was definitely traumatic, for the longest time afterwards I had a hard time showering because I associate that with traumatic event.   

Unfortunately traumatic events would make me want to use to numb the pain which would in turn lead to more traumatic events, so when I got clean, a lot of that came to the surface.   I do not get visual flashbacks like some people but in a sense I do because I feel like I am back in the situation all over again and I am terrified. I get body memories and I have the physical feelings of it happening all over again. It was brutal.  I had a hard time coping and ended up leaving the center to go get high a few times.  Unfortunately, the psych ward was a 10 minute walk from where I used to pick up.  Though I always ended up coming back because I got back into it and hated it. Addiction is not fun. It makes you do stuff that you do not want to do. Sometimes it feels like I am watching myself  doing stuff I do not want to do but feeling powerless to stop it.