Boo! There you go! Today we are providing two noteworthy take-homes for this month’s Halloween News Brief. They may incite new levels of comprehension while considering addiction remission, relapse prevention, and our communities’ frightful fears of homeless addiction disordered people. As we celebrate life, please pray for our recent homeless couple: one who’s lost his life and the other who may live with the tragedy of being homeless and inconspicuously asleep when suddenly traumatized. An unaware trash collection vehicle passed over their bodies, while they snuggled under a blanket. We count four victims: the traumatized driver, their deceased pet cat, the surviving young lady, and her beloved boyfriend no longer with us.
First take-home is debunking the connotation, or perspective, that self-medication is due to poor judgement – a bad idea. Well, if you’ve lived long enough to heal, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all! The second is how cues and triggers are scary and frightening. They must be avoided at all costs for dread of lapsing into a full-blown relapse. That type of stressful perspective distracts us from learning how best to deal with them. Of course, avoidance, initially, helps our rationale and approach to glean comprehension during early remission. Next, though, is to actively make them powerless – unable to influence previous acting-out behaviors or engage in anything self-defeating. Turning them into cues and triggers of resilience is what we do!
Is hindsight great or what? Doc claims that attempting to self-medicate a screaming bipolar condition during late adolescence led, indirectly, to his acquisition of an addiction disorder or two. He also claims that self-medication saved his life, prior to it becoming self-defeating. More about all that another time, today’s point is how self-medication can go either way, a trick or a treat. During the Intermediate Phase of ARMOR Programs, one must transform previously harmful cues or triggers into tripwires that automatically signal defensive counterattacks: an opposing perspective and/or action that is habituated via disciplined cognitive training. Developing cues and triggers that reenforce your sobriety is the idea; it’s how we transform scary into comfortably numb. Behaviorists might identify this as an aspect of desensitizing. We trick our minds to a treat, boo!
If you’ve been following us, you may have noticed that each of the twelve months covers a specific topic area concerning addiction remission. Last October, we looked at subliminal cues and triggers, the type that can occur at your subconscious level. That News Brief shared an actual example too. Thank you, Mr. Tell, for structuring our monthly outline! As much as we’d love to share a bit more about how transforming scary to comfortable is achieved during our Intermediate Phase of Addiction Remission, Doc fears that algorithms engage in copyright infringement, so we remain guarded and protect our intellectual property! Hope they can’t hijack his brain, yet!
Let’s share another lesson from clients, our masters of addiction. A concept currently unavailable in our world of academia involves how a traumatic experience led to a cross addiction from heroin to tropane alkaloids. The first time this client lived through intense withdrawals from a severe opioid use disorder was an acute traumatic experience, which triggered fear of ever allowing homeostasis to rebalance her human process to a healthy baseline. You know that place between pain and bliss, some call normal. Stranded and unable to re-up on a dose of heroin generated extremely painful withdrawals for a day or so. The episode traumatized this individual; and then, via cued association, it automated a fear of ever coming down from being high. In other words, the hijacked brain believed leaving a euphoric state of mind meant acute opioid withdrawals follow or living through hell again. This cross addiction, a human condition of constantly needing to feel euphoric, was now perceived as a necessary. A state of ecstasy was the new delusional means of survival. Risky behaviors, promiscuity, and lots of yayo were sought out to sustain this new lifestyle. Well folks, it’s ok to be you and it’s ok to be human! Thank God, this young adult is now on the other side of her addictions, safe and loved, enjoying the freedom of remission.
In closing, sorry for your loss Brittney!
Truly a tragic accident. Great Post!