When you started using drugs, what do you remember about your emotions?  Did you really just wish you could forget about them?  Did they seem exaggerated or fuzzed out?  Chances are, that’s a key reason you started using drugs in the first place.  You didn’t want to be there inside yourself, and drugs offered you an escape.  Now that this has become your life, you know that sobriety is on your horizon.  You have no choice - you may die if you keep going like this.  You’ll need to understand that when you go through recovery, you’ll be expanding your numb feelings to more open feelings.  Are you ready?

Living With Numb Feelings

At first, it may seem like numbing your feelings will bring you relief.  Much needed relief from the reminders of your misery.  Your difficult childhood, your difficulties with relationships, your difficulties with money - whatever your problems are, they have become to much to push out of your mind.  They overwhelm you, they consume you, and they push you to the edge.  Relief?  You’ll take it however you can get it, and drugs have been the answer.

But numbing your painful feelings has a price - you numb your positive ones as well.  You lack the experience of true joy, of anticipation for a happy event, of pride in a challenging accomplishment.  You cancel those out emotions in favor of manufactured highs and lows.

You also miss out on important emotional clues that help you make decisions and judgments.  Little feelings of stress that cause you to rethink a risky choice, a small buzz of anxiety to give you energy when you face a challenge, a hint of guilt when you speak too harshly - these emotions give you valuable information about your actions.  But if you fuzz them out with drugs, you lose the opportunity to learn about yourself.

Opening Your Emotions With Courage

It takes a lot of courage to reverse your course of action once you have lived this way for a while.  You have removed yourself from the responsibility of your feelings and reactions.  But you can learn how to live with your emotions again, with patience and courage.

Courage is simply doing something while having fear about it.  It doesn’t mean waiting to take action only when you have no more fear.  By moving forward and opening up your feelings in drug rehab, you learn how to live with the uncomfortable emotions instead of hiding from them.  You learn to acknowledge them instead of blurring them.  By letting them have some freedom inside you, they actually has less power over your life.  The more you try to erase or forget them, the more destructive they can be.  They’ll pop up somewhere whether you like it or not. Better to know how to cope with them instead of trying to wipe them out.

Drug Addiction Recovery - Living With Emotions

Living with your feelings honestly can be very difficult.  You may not have faced some of these feelings for a very long time.  Ironically, once you face them and keep going forward, you can actually gain more peace in your life.  With the help of drug rehab professionals, you can learn to go from numb feelings to open feelings.

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Your loved one been told to go to drug rehab, even though day think it’s pointless.  In the end, they have been bribed and bargained with just to set foot in the drug rehab center. Will it work? Will they even stay? These are questions that float through your mind all day long. But when it comes right down to it, you need to know where the rubber hits the road. Who is really working harder during their addiction recovery, them or everyone else?

You Do Your Part In Addiction Recovery

You’ve now done an intervention, gone through some counseling, and even gone to a few Al-Anon meetings. You have a better idea of what you can do to help support your loved one through their addiction recovery. But you’ve also been hearing stories about people frustrated with their role.

The support people and family members seem to be doing their part, but the addict it’s going back to their old ways. No matter what the family does, no matter how far they bend backwards to do their part, the addict seems to resist or change their mind. How much more can they put up with?

Rubber Meets The Road In Addiction Recovery

Here is where the rubber meets the road with with addiction recovery - the big question. Who is working harder during an addict recovery? The addict or the people around them? If the answer is not be addict, you can expect relapse to be a real possibility.  While support from others is important, it will not make a person stay sober.

The addict has to make the largest effort because it is an investment in themselves. They are the ones that will be sober or not, no matter who else is around them. No one can force this on an addict. While an addict can be made to go to treatment, it’s like the horse being brought to water. You cannot make them drink, no matter how thirsty they might be.

Is Recovery Hopeless For Reluctant Drug Addicts?

All hope may not be loss, even when an addict doesn’t seem terribly motivated to stay sober at the time. If you and other family members are working harder than the addict, then recognize this reality. Do your part and be there, but stop bending over backwards. The addict may need to fall again to get the perspective they need. They may not yet see how much they need sobriety, and no amount of family activity will make up for their lack of vision.

When people with addiction are truly ready to take in the experience of drug rehab, you can be ready to take a more active role in. They will need your help to get drug rehab started again. Hopefully, it won’t take long for them to be ready to really give up their drug addiction lifestyle.

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Feelings are important for human beings, there’s no doubt about it. they are interwoven in our daily human experience from birth to death. But the thing that sets us apart from other animals is our use of higher-level thinking. Our feelings and thinking work together in unique advanced ways. But the key for success is keeping them in balance with each other. Unfortunately, people with drug addiction have a lot of trouble with this balance. Emotions often take over their lives, creating a chaotic and stressful existence.

Feelings Are Not Necessarily Factual

When a person makes decisions, emotions and logic may both play a role.  Emotions are considered, but practical matters are also examined.  Sometimes the decisions may be more heavily influenced by logic and factual information.  For example, a person needing a job may feel desperate for money but would not allow that feeling to take over and make them steal something.

When someone uses more emotion, they may intentionally throw most of their logic out the window and hope for the best.  While these decisions can certainly work, sometimes they aren’t well thought out.  Feelings can be so strong and hard to ignore that they may be seen as absolute truth. If there is little good sense to go along with strong feelings, people can really pay a price for decisions made in this state of mind.

Emotions Justify Everything With Drug Addiction

Let’s take a look at how this blend of emotion and logic changes when a person is addicted to drugs. Drug addiction causes emotions to drive a person’s life. They have most likely misused drugs or alcohol to cope with painful feelings.  Drugs and alcohol stimulate emotions and make it difficult to think clearly.  When a person is addicted, they are like this all the time day and night. Whether they are down, up, or indifferent, it seems their emotions are always out of whack.  They become used to instant gratification and twisting logic to fit their addiction needs. Therefore, emotions become as important as facts to someone with a drug addiction.

When a person with drug addiction becomes angry, this feeling justifies and explains everything they do. If they feel disrespected or cheated by someone, their feelings will trump the facts in this situation. It matters less what the other person really did and more how the addicted person reacts emotionally.  Since their internal balance is tipped toward emotions, they have great difficulty accepting facts that contradict their reality. If they feel they need drugs to get through each day, the facts about how drugs affect their life are not given much importance.  This is why it is often so frustrating when a person refuses to go to drug rehab, even when they obviously need the help.

Drug Rehab Helps Clarify Feelings And Facts

When someone goes through drug rehab, they begin to understand how off-balance their feelings and logic have been for so long. They can start to see how their emotional decisions have added to their destructive lifestyle.  Finally with the clarity they get at drug rehab, they can start to put emotions and clear thinking back in the proper balance.

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Addiction has a lot of ups and downs - plenty of drama to go around for all.  As miserable as this can be for everyone involved, it does provide for a lot of excitement and intrigue.  So now that you have been to drug treatment and have been sober for a while, you have noticed your mood dipping somewhat.  Things just seem to drag on, you wonder what the point is half the time.  You are wondering if you’ve traded one form of misery for another.

Drama With Drug Addiction Fills Time

Let’s face it - drama creates activity, and activity helps the time pass.  Actively using drug addicts and alcoholics aren’t fond of being patient or delayed gratification.  The very act of rolling a joint, mixing up the drugs, getting the alcohol ready and poured, physically drinking it all day long, and running around town getting drugs creates quite a schedule of activity all day long.  If you lived that life and all that activity was removed from your schedule, you’d be faced with a pretty large void to fill.

Is It Depression Or Boredom

So is this truly a desperate time for you, facing the abyss of unfilled time before you?  Do you truly feel yourself slipping down the slope towards an aching depression with sleep problems, low self worth, increased sadness, appetite changes, and some suicidal thoughts?  Or could you simply be bored during your recovery?  Let me tell you, it is certainly possible to be depressed and have an addiction.  If that wasn’t addressed during your drug treatment period, contact someone from that facility immediately and tell them of your depression symptoms.

But also consider that you may have a very reasonable byproduct of dramatically removing the drama from your life - boredom.  In fact, occasional feelings of boredom would be far more common than true depression among people in addiction recovery.  Boredom and a somewhat letdown feeling can easily come after even joyous events such as weddings, graduations, and so on.  Drama is replaced by consistency and much fewer blips on the radar.

Add Fun And Healthy Activity Into Your Schedule

In order to adjust to the distinct lack of negative drama, you need to focus on putting some new healthy things in your schedule.  Put some fun things in there, too.  You need something to look forward to.  Positive anticipation and even some excitement is good to have.  Much better for you than all the drama.  When you start putting a few enjoyable things into your daily life, the clock will start to tick more quickly again.  Life will move forward, and you may just feel that gray cloud of boredom lift.

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You know all you need to know about staying sober, and really - those people at meetings annoy you.  You don’t really need to keep going to those anymore since you’ve got it handled.  And why should you stop seeing your old friends?  They know you can handle it when they drink in front of you.  Your drinking wasn’t that much of a problem in the first place.  You could probably even drink one or two and it wouldn’t make any difference.  You know who that is in your mind speaking to you?  Arrogance, and he doesn’t care a bit about your sobriety.

Arrogance Doesn’t Care About You

You may not think you are arrogant about your drinking.  You’re smart, you have made some changes already - you just wish people would stop treating you like you are some kind of dimwit.  Well, stop and think about that for a moment.  When you tell a preteen to start cleaning their room and they yell, “I know!” with a mad look on their face, then they really didn’t know.  They just didn’t want to look like they caught off guard not doing what they were supposed to (which is keeping their room decent on an every day basis).

Arrogance Is A Personal Defense With Addiction

Arrogance is a common defense mechanism for someone who’s annoyed at being  expected to do something they don’t want to do (because it’s hard, boring, requires consistent effort).  That preteen is scoffing at authority, believing that they really know what’s their priorities are.  They would rather text their friends, loaf on the couch, and stay out late instead of doing family chores, keeping their room decent, and coming home on time.

That may not be a perfect analogy, but it does illustrate how arrogance is just an attitude.  Anyone can have arrogance about anything, even sobriety. When you haven’t been to a meeting or seen your sponsor for a long time, you might have some arrogance.  When you skipped your aftercare because you already “got everything” you needed from your alcohol or drug treatment, you might have some arrogance.  When you start convincing yourself that you may not even be an alcoholic, you might have some arrogance.  That arrogance can blind you so much that you feel “surprised” when you relapse and find yourself in another hole.  And that’s precisely what you want to avoid, why arrogance can lead you right down a path to relapse.

Let Go Of Arrogance Get Back On Track With Sobriety

You really may not want to admit that you really do need help staying sober.  Nobody really likes to realize that they don’t have much control over something within themselves.  That can be a scary thought.  But when you can face that thought with honesty and take the next step to get help, you can get through it.  Maybe you need to go back to an alcohol treatment aftercare session.  Perhaps you need to see your alcohol treatment counselor for a few individual sessions so you can get a clear vision for your sobriety again.  Reach out, get back on track, and let some of the arrogance go.

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