FEATURE STORY: Opioid addicts are people just like you, and they need your help

FEATURE STORY:
Opioid addicts are people just like you, and they need your help

By “A person in long-term recovery from a substance use disorder, and a valued member of the Lakes Region Substance Abuse Coalition”

I am an addict. Many feel the term “addict” carries a negative image. Other descriptions are more kind. Some may say opioid dependence disorder, or substance use disorder or chronic relapsing brain disease.

“Addict” frequently conjures up images of homeless people hiding in dark rooms with needles in their arms, thanks to Hollywood. But the truth is, 90 percent of us are students, lawyers, teachers, doctors, plumbers, clergy, carpenters, office workers, clerks and more. Only 10 percent pf us are the homeless street junkies you may think we are.

Why am I different from you? I have acquired childhood trauma. So what? Many of you grew up similarly and didn’t wind up addicted to a chemical. But I had a predisposition to become an addict from birth. If you shake my family tree, many addicts hit the ground. We have about a 60 percent chance of having that genetic glitch. This means from the get-go my brain processed disquieting events and feelings differently than you.

Some of us are walking wounded, racked with post-traumatic stress disorder issues. Sooner or later we got a prescription for hydrocodone, or some other essentially synthetic heroin drug. Maybe we broke a leg or something. Most of you would get halfway through the pill bottle, finish up with ibuprofen, and then move on with a healed leg. Period. Not us.

Human brains are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and our neurotransmitters work to communicate both to our bodies.As the traumatized child grows, or the combat veteran copes, he or she develops the need to stuff, bury, deny and/or avoid disquieting feelings. That’s why some call addiction a “feeling disease.”

The brains of addiction-prone people embrace the drug, which imitates neurotransmitters and hijack the brain to stop making its own. This can happen to seemingly healthy people as well. It doesn’t take much abuse of an opioid 2 prescription to set up the brain’s dependent chemistry. And the cost of black-market pills (up to $50 a pill) can drive us to heroin.

Heroin is like a rocket that explodes rapture in the center of the brain, like drops of ink in a swirling glass of water, and leaves you corkscrewed into the ground up to your neck with eyes glazed, under the veil of anesthesia. In any case, the brain’s been compromised and even if interrupted, it can take months for the brain to heal and begin the restoration process back to some semblance of normalcy without the drug.

You’d think that getting detoxed would be the end of it, but getting rid of the drug is only 10 percent of what’s needed. The other 90 percent of the disease still rests in my now detoxed brain.

Why is recovery so difficult during the first year? I’m walking around without my solution (which has been the drug), and every cell in my body is filled with physical, emotional and spiritual bankruptcy and pain. I’m still amazed I navigated recovery, all while feeling hounded by a junkyard dog, every cell in my body screaming “You know what it is that will take away this pain.” And also while the four horseman of addiction — bewilderment, frustration, terror and despair — are pounding me into the ground with their steel-shod hooves.

Did you know that emotional pain registers in the same part of the brain as physical pain? That’s why we have such a physical vocabulary for it — a broken heart, a crushing feeling in the chest or my head is going to explode. I am grateful to have stayed clean long enough for my brain to remember how to use all those neurotransmitters once hijacked by heroin.

I have surrounded myself with like-minded people in recovery and a service network of helpers: counselors, physicians, and long-term recovering people. In recovery I stripped everything that was me, one layer at a time, and rebuilt a new person with a complete shift in thinking, upheaval of core values, new box of characteristics and traits of personhood — all which allowed me to react differently to living life on life’s terms, not my terms.

I continue some version of this to this day. If I don’t, I can relapse, I can die. For some of us, medical intervention (e.g. suboxone), can help quiet the maelstrom in our head while we work on the stuff of rebuilding a new person. For many with opioid dependency, integrated recovery services — mixing the medical with the social/behavioral — this may be the path, maybe the only path. Recovery is possible. No one has ever done it alone. There is hope, help and healing. I know because I am living it.

If you, or someone you know, wants more information about treatment and recovery options, I hope you will reach out and join with others in the Lakes Region Substance Abuse Coalition. LRSAC also seeks community volunteers with time and talent to help. Recovery experience is valued. Financial contributions are also being sought. Any amount is graciously accepted, and LRSAC is planning to engage hundreds of members willing to get involved in specific ways while contributing membership dues of $20 annually. Donations may be sent to LRSAC in care of Rick Stillman, LRSAC Treasurer, 8 Iredale St., Bridgton, ME 04009.

Join with others at the next LRSAC general meeting, always held from 4:30 to 6 p.m. the second Thursday of each month at the Bridgton Municipal Complex, 3 Chase St., in the downstairs meeting room.

Bring your questions, ideas and a willingness to become community change agents. Lakes Region Substance Abuse Coalition brings people, information and ideas together to end opiate abuse; removes barriers that prevent people from receiving treatment for opiate abuse; and strengthens our community by promoting understanding of opiate abuse and treatment.