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Why people relapse
There are multiple causes for relapse. Common ones include stress, anxiety, anger, loneliness, boredom, purposelessness, the memories of great drug-highs triggered by people or places, and unrecognized triggers that can instantaneously over-rule the conscious mind and the intent to not do drugs.
Depression is a common side-effect of addiction and it contributes to relapse. People quit drugs and then instead of ‘returning to normal’ they find themselves feeling empty and depressed.
This happened to me and it brought me close to suicide. If only I’d known then what I do now about the power of nutraceuticals – of Chinese herbs and nutritional supplements. See, nutrient depletion is a major contributor to depression and addicts and alcoholics are nutrient deprived. If you are an addict, drugs create the impression that all your needs have been met. This is a major attraction of getting high.
Addiction can be an advantage. Sometimes drug and alcohol addiction is necessary to make us aware that there is a process of transformation awaiting us.
In the book, Intoxication, by Roland Siegel, he claims that the pursuit of altered states through drugs is a natural part of our biology and it is as deep-rooted as our drive for food, sleep and sex. The desire for drugs, for intoxication, is our ’fourth drive’.
Mainstream recovery is based on talk. First you have to talk yourself out of taking drugs (“no drugs today, no drugs today”), and then talk endlessly through the relationship dramas, sexual dysfunction, depression, psychosis, panic and anxiety that may arise afterwards, not to mention the endless probing into what went wrong.
Cannabis is the fastest growing industry in the USA, but people aren’t buying dope they are buying the way it makes you feel; laid-back calm, happy and connected. In TCM this all comes from free-flowing chi in your organs.
Just watched the Australian movie Ruben Guthrie. It wasn’t a particularly great movie but it was interesting because the main character was a hard partying high-achiever, who was using drugs and alcohol to sustain his success and feed that part of his nature that loved living on the edge.
The cause of addiction (or not)
I just read that Huffington Post article on the latest discovery into the cause of addiction. I’d previously read about that rat experiment they mentioned in which caged rats quickly got addicted to drugs (well, duh, who wouldn’t in a cage with nothing else to do?) but when those rats were relocated to ‘rat park’ which had everything a rat could ever dream of, they lost interest in drugs.
The Urban Drug Rehab Centre runs addiction rehabilitation programs that really work.