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Pain Pill Addiction: How Did This Happen?

If you’re suffering from pain pill addiction (Vicodin or OxyContin), your life probably isn’t going the way you imagined. Maybe you dreamed of a specific career, or you hoped you would marry the perfect husband or wife. So it’s got to be a shock when you look around and realize what road you’ve walked down. Who knew that your life would turn out like this? How did you get here?

The Road to Pain Pill Addiction

The person suffering from pain pill addiction has a rough row to hoe. Many people wandered unwittingly down the road to addiction because they’ve always had a rough life. How did your parents treat you? Did you even have parents in your home? There are horrible stories about teens fending for themselves because their parents didn’t want them around, stories of hunger and abuse and poverty.

Or perhaps you reached this road by accident. You’ll find the story of a woman who became addicted as a teenage girl. Her OxyContin addiction developed after a painful dental procedure, when her dentist kept telling her to just take more pills.

Nobody knew this could happen. But now that you’ve arrived at this crossroads in your life, what can you do next?

The Stages of Grief

When you suffer from pain pill addiction, you will react emotionally like a person whose doctor just told him he will soon die. You are undoubtedly going through the traditional stages of grief: Denying, Isolating, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.  First you’ll simply deny that you’re an addict, and then you’ll get angry about it and keep to yourself. Then you’ll make promises to God, bargaining with him that if He helps you resolve this predicament you’ll certainly stop using. Next it’s natural to experience waves of depression that feel like a tsunami, and finally you will, at last, reach a stage of acceptance.

You should know that it’s natural to be in denial and also to isolate yourself, because you think that’s the only way you can stop your OxyContin addiction and you don’t want to see anyone—those that will judge you as well as those who will tempt you to use. Anger comes because you will fail to stay sober on your own. You will also want to lash out at the people around you—your spouse, your family and friends, your drug counselor, your doctor, and your legal counsel if you have one—because you hate the feeling that they are judging you.

In the bargaining stage, you’ll tell yourself that you will definitely stop the OxyContin, so it will be okay to smoke some weed or take some benzos—but it’s not. And then the cloud of depression will descend over you, because you don’t know how your life came to this. And that’s when you will finally be able to get to work on your recovery.

Better Times Ahead

You never expected to end up with an OxyContin addiction. But now that you’re here, you are gaining knowledge about ways to control the addiction and get into recovery. Have an open conversation with your methadone counselor about your feelings at this time so that you can stay focused on recovery. Better times are coming.

 

 

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