Drug Addiction – Numb Feelings To Open Feelings

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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