Food addiction among women is a common occurrence; in drug rehab, it is almost ubiquitous: women who struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol very often also have co-occurring food disorders. These disorders look different in different women, but some of the most common include bulimia, anorexia, binging, yo-yo dieting and weight loss. Living with co-occurring disorders of drug addiction and food addiction can make the experience of drug rehab doubly difficult for women. The only solution is a drug addiction treatment program that addresses both disorders simultaneously.

Food Addiction in Women Addicts

For most female food addicts, eating is emotional. Just like with drugs and alcohol, the tendency is to hide the amount of food eaten, lie about what was eaten or how much, and eat differently alone as opposed to in front of other people. For drug addicts who are also addicted to food, food may be used in an attempt to ease withdrawal symptoms or to replace drugs or alcohol when trying to quit alone. Unfortunately, when drug addiction and food addiction exist simultaneously, food often compounds the problem of drug addiction: female addicts tend to eat inappropriately despite emotional and physical consequences, organize their lives and choices based on food, or trying to control the addiction by making severe choices and placing rigid and arbitrary limitations upon their eating.

Food addiction and drug addiction can manifest so similarly that it is extremely helpful to apply the coping skills learned at drug rehab to recovery from food addiction at the same time.

Why Do Women Addicted to Drugs Have Food Addictions?

Just like drugs, food serves to provide some women with a means of escape. Bad self esteem, trauma, problems in relationships or at work, and chronic depression are all primary reasons that many women first turn to drugs and food. The “happy” chemicals released by eating comfort foods or sweets are similar in some ways to those released by using drugs, though on a smaller scale and for a shorter period. Unfortunately, the resulting health issues and the compulsive behavior as well as the constant cravings make it almost impossible to stop effectively and safely without professional help at an addiction treatment center.

Developing a New Food Addiction During Drug Rehab

Another phenomenon is the woman who begins drug rehab addicted to heroin, cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or some combination thereof, and finds that she replaces her drug of choice with compulsive behavior with food. Replacing drugs with another obsession-food, a new relationship, gambling, sex, et cetera-is extremely unhealthy as the focus should be on finding a healthful balance in your life that allows you to feel free rather than tethered to any one thing or activity. Notice how you are feeling as you progress through recovery and share your concerns about developing food addictions and other co-occurring disorders with your therapist and counselors to make sure that you get the treatment you need.

If you would like more information about co-occurring disorders, food addiction or how drug and alcohol addiction affects women, contact The Orchid and start your healing process today.

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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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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Have you been draining the spirit out of your life with drugs and alcohol?  Do you wonder if you have any real purpose anymore to your life?  Many drug addicts and alcoholics feel this way after a while.  They just do what they need to do to survive every day. At some point, it may feel like they can’t turn back from their addiction.  They’ve lived that way too long to just stop. Without their addiction, they don’t know what they would do with their life.  They would feel directionless, helpless, and powerless against their own demons.

Addiction and Low Self Worth Common Partners

A person’s self worth is usually pretty low when they are addicted to drugs.  They live with an illusion of control, when really they are completely dependent on their drug of choice.  This can feel demoralizing and shallow, even as they defend their drug use to their loved ones.  They may sense that others see them as a washed up loser, not contributing anything to society.  This is why many addicts and alcoholics feel suicidal at times.  If this is their life, what’s the point of going on anymore?  Wouldn’t it cause everyone less pain if they just ended it?

Drug Treatment Helps Self Worth Come Through

It can take some time for a recovering drug addict to see their self worth shine through the shadows of their addiction.  When they can sense their genuine emotions and think more clearly, drug treatment can help them make sense of everything. Counselors will listen with patience and understanding, working with each addict to understand their personal voice.

Each person in drug treatment is given opportunities to support others and do things to help themselves.  When a person sees how their actions have value, their own sense of self worth can start to grow.  When they recognize their courage and affirm others for being courageous, they can more clearly see purpose in their life.

Drug Treatment Just First Step Of Building Self Worth

Of course, self worth is something that needs nurturing each and every day.  Everyone has days when they feel like they don’t matter, or that they do everything wrong, or that no one would miss them if they disappeared.  But drug treatment can help the truly wounded souls of drug addicts and alcoholics.  Drug treatment can help people put their shattered spirits back together so they can claim their place in the world again.

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