…if they bought into the notion below. I am developing sites to help people find good halfway houses and sober livings if they are coming out of treatment. On the home page I found myself writing the following paragraph, which sums up what I am about. For people who can’t toil through my longer stories in this blog — here it is in a nutshell, off the site The Halfway House Guide.
I am a huge believer in “dual diagnosis”, which in general is the theory that most alcoholic/addicts start their lives as normal people, but they develop a mood disorder somewhere along the way (anxiety, depression, mania, bipolar 2, etc). They then turn to substance or alcohol to numb the pain — and the degree of pain is only known to those of us with the disorders. Unfortunately, the routine of self-medicating to control this “brain pain” can lead to addiction, and I believe that is how the whole cycle starts and worsens –for most alcoholics or addicts, not all of them. My blog at Don’t Die Crying discusses this cycle. I personally wish I had recognized what was happening within my body and brain long before I finally accepted help, because I wasted many years on a gerbil wheel, running hard but going nowhere. If this is potentially your situation, you must get your mood disorder diagnosed first, then treated. If you do, it can lead to a full remission (or as close to a cure as one can get) from the nagging claws of addiction. The degree to which this is true for me as I look at it today is nothing short of miraculous. As I sit here writing, I honestly feel like I WANTED to feel when I was on the gerbil wheel self-medicating and continually trying to get the balance just right…but hardly ever able to.
