Addiction is a chronic disease – not a moral failing.
There’s always shame and guilt attached to addiction.
According to Tish Marsh, advocate for mental health and addiction treatment and support, you need to be able to separate yourself from the addiction and not take it personally.
The Life of an Addict
When you’re an addict, if you don’t have those medications or whatever you’re addicted to, you basically go back to being a caveman because you’re in survival mode. You can’t think straight.
Everything is tunnel vision. Everything is to be about not having to go through those withdrawal symptoms.
Everything is about survival.
It doesn’t matter who you are, addiction will grab you. And if you don’t know how to wrestle with it, it’s going to pull you down with it because it hijacks your brain.
Tish’s Addiction and Recovery Story
Tish’s struggle with opioid addiction started after she had some medical procedures. She was a high-functioning addict that as a pharmacist, she still managed to work with drugs daily. But she also reckons her profession was also instrumental to her recovery.
Having the pharmacist’s knowledge, Tish learned to separate herself from the addiction. She had a clear understanding that it was the nature of the beast and it was the nature of the drugs to make her feel that way.
Having that knowledge helped her beat addiction for over three years now. It was a mindset shift that needed to happen in order for her to finally walk herself towards the other side of addiction.
Don’t Take It Personally
A lot of times with addiction, we take it personally. We think it’s a moral failing. But addiction is a chronic disease. It’s just like diabetes and high blood pressure. And so, stop having a pity party and stop hiding behind shame or guilt and do what you need to do to overcome it.
Do something else, find your purpose, and again, you have to separate yourself from this chronic disease. Otherwise, that just feeds the addictive process again. It makes it worse and then you just feel worse about yourself and then you just need more drugs to feel better.
Once you get to the other side of addiction, it’s going to be better than the life you had before.
If you want to learn more about how to separate yourself from the addiction, check out https://theaddictedmind.com/193