Addiction Recovery

12-Step Meetings – Okay, That Takes Care of an Hour and a Half – Then What?

“Hi, I’m Brooke. I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Brooke.”

All the faces at the 12-step meeting for drug addicts were welcoming and supportive of me being there — even though I raised my hand every single time when asked if there was anyone there within their first 30 days of sobriety. I raised my hands on into six months. I just couldn’t seem to get going.

At the meeting I’d be given a list of phone numbers to call, told to get a sponsor, work the steps, call people if I was having a rough day of it.

But I knew me better: I hated talking to people on the phone. Besides, if I were at the point of calling someone about wanting to use Vicodin, I’d already somewhere inside myself made a decision that I was going to use, and no phone call was going to stop that.

So 12-Step meetings, though I loved them and still occasionally go to them, left me cold as far as when I left the meeting, Okay, what do I do now? I’m still scared, I still want to use, I still have to make it through the rest of the day white-knuckling it and not using. I very rarely made it through the day without using. Then I’d go to the meeting the next day or the day after, announce that I was in my first 30 days of sobriety, and feel like a loser.

At a certain point, I realized I had to take this problem into my own hands. I had to craft my own program of getting off Vicodin that worked for me, a non-phone, kind of reclusive person.

So I decided to keep going to the 12-step meetings, but went about my business discovering what worked for me as far as getting clean and sober.

I started doing EFT on myself, a tapping kind of acupressure that made my cravings handlable. I did this regularly throughout the day, and after I was done with that, I felt that I had a fortress around myself, that I could take or leave the drugs; that’s how uninterested I was in them. That was my first major breakthrough.

I also paid attention to the ebb and flow of desires to use. I could be slammed with a desire to score some Vicodin at 9:30 in the morning, and if I waited and did nothing, by 9:35 it was gone and I couldn’t even understand how it had almost gotten ahold of me.

I learned to walk past each craving that slammed me in the way I described in the preceding paragraph. I more or less just waited for it to pass. Sometimes it felt like a mighty serpent had picked me up and was twirling me about and I felt my resolve weakening, but somehow (maybe the EFT I was doing on myself) I’d manage to make it to the other side. Which only bolstered my confidence that I could lick this thing, that it was a matter of persistence over time.

Each day got a little better, a little easier.

Even now, I constantly have to be on guard. If I get an injured ankle, say, I have to be very careful about romanticizing the idea of going to the hospital ER and asking for some painkillers, since I am entitled. I have to force myself to say to the doctor up front that I’m an addict and that Ibuprofin (Advil Liquid Gel caps) will work okay for pain. That usually hurts to see those go by, the opportunity to take legitimate Vicodin, but it only lasts a few minutes.

I must never forget I am an addict, and that if I let loose and take “one pill,” it won’t be enough for me and I’ll be plunged into the darkness of addiction again, and have to keep on using and using and using until I can finally get my wits about me, gather my strength and my will and quit again. I don’t know if I have that in me or not, so I choose to stay clean and sober one day at a time, never taking “that first pill.”

Brooke Collinson spent many miserable years addicted to Vicodin, has been clean and sober for the last three years, and loves to share her discoveries about how to walk out of addiction by using techniques that FLATTEN cravings to use drugs! Brooke teaches a powerful form of acupressure that make desires to use COMPLETELY GO AWAY.

To read more about her journey out of addiction into the light, visit her blog here: http://getoffvicodin.wordpress.com