Can Drinking and Drugging Help me Deal With Painful Feelings? By Tom Horvath

Yes, but...

No one complains about feeling happy! But we don’t want to have other, painful feelings. When these feelings arise, one way to respond to them is to drink or drug. One set of painful feelings can be broadly labeled fear or anxiety: 'Drugs and/or alcohol helped me cope with feelings like anxiety, tension, fear, stress, agitation, nervousness, vulnerability, intimidation, embarrassment and panic.' Other painful feelings center around sadness and depression: 'They helped me cope with feelings like depression, sadness, hurt, discouragement, grief, feeling defeated, feeling deprived or feeling abandoned.'

There are many other painful feelings as well:

a) frustration, resentment, anger, annoyance, irritability and rage
b) feeling remorseful, ashamed, guilty, responsible, humiliated
c) feeling disgusted or shocked
d) feeling bored, apathetic or impatient
e) feeling over-excited, “amped up,” “wired”
f) feeling exhausted or depleted
g) feeling lonely, isolated, cut off, alienated
h) feeling powerless
i) feeling “in pain” without being able to define the pain very well (perhaps a mixture of many painful feelings)

How well do drugs and alcohol work to cope with these painful feelings? For most of us, quite well! If you have had the experience of alcohol relaxing you, or coke giving you energy, or vicodin just helping you feel better, you don’t need much explanation of these effects. For some, the drugs immediately create bad feelings more than they resolve them. Did you ever see anyone get paranoid after smoking pot or doing a line of coke? These folks aren’t likely to turn to drugs (or at least that drug) for help dealing with bad feelings!

But if you are reading this article, you may be in the group that gets emotional relief from one or more drugs. Have you found yourself thinking:

“It helped me bring my feelings into a more normal range. They were just too out of control without it.'

'I don't understand why, but I felt tremendous pain, and when I did this the pain was less.'

'It helped me cope when I felt like I had nothing left inside of me.'

So what is the problem with this? Maybe nothing, if you don’t do it often or in large quantities. Did you ever overeat to cope with stress? That overeating isn’t a big problem unless it becomes a pattern, a habit, a way of life.

The problems from drug use (or overeating) come from two factors: 1) by using you have not dealt with the problem directly (by delaying dealing with it you may have allowed it to get even worse), and 2) drug use is by itself becomes, sometimes quickly, a problem in many ways, including having a negative impact on how you fit you’re your family and social group, your health, your emotional well-being, your financial security, your legal status, and other ways you are likely familiar with.

However, neither of these facts is guaranteed. Maybe delay will actually help. Maybe the drug you use, in the quantities and ways you do it, causes little harm (think “caffeine”).

So, the only way to know if the drug use you engage in is worth the cost, is to list the benefits of using and the costs of using. Then think very hard about your lists. If you decide that the costs exceed the benefits, then it’s time to make a change.

Resource: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=300924&ca=Self

Can Drinking and Drugging Improve Your Social Life? By Tom Horvath

Yes, but...

In the first section let’s discuss how drugs and alcohol can actually have a beneficial effect on your social life (or at least appear to). In the second section let’s discuss why drug and alcohol use can still be a bad idea for you.

One of the most frequent reasons people use drugs, and especially alcohol, is to improve their social ability, either in social groups, or on dates: 'I didn't know how to enjoy myself with others unless I did this. And I could go on a date more easily.' Related to this benefit of using is the possibility of overcoming social awkwardness: 'When I did this I didn't feel insecure, bashful, shy, ill at ease, inadequate, or left out.'

Perhaps you don’t think you belong to any group. It is easy to join a group of other users/drinkers by joining in their activity: 'When I did this, I knew that I fit in with them, that I was one of them. By doing it I could be involved with others I would not have been able to be involved with otherwise, because they wouldn't have accepted me.'

Sometimes we are already in a group, and we get pressure to drink or use. The easiest way to deal with this pressure is to give in to it: 'When others put pressure on me, it was just easier to do it.' Or, in the group we already belong to, we want to feel more important: 'By doing it I felt that I was important and special, I was somebody.'

When conflict comes up, perhaps in a group, but more often in a couple or family, one way to respond is to drink or use, which can have the momentary effect of blocking out the conflict: “This was a way to deal with the conflict we had. I couldn't cope with him/her (or a group) very well otherwise.'

Sometimes the group we are interested in communicating with is society in general, and we want to assert our freedom: 'By doing this I could show others that I do what I want to do, not what others want me to do.' Sometimes the group is our family, and especially our (little) children, from whom we want to escape: 'They would have driven me crazy otherwise!'

So you may be thinking, “this is an impressive list of benefits of drinking and drugging.” Indeed, it is. This list helps explain why so many people drink and drug!

So why wouldn’t everyone drink and drug? There are two primary reasons. The examples given here show how drinking/drugging provides a short-term escape or coping device for the underlying problem, but also does not provide a real solution. Which means that if you don’t find a real solution, you just tend to keep drinking and drugging to deal with the problem.

You could keep drinking and drugging to deal with problems (of any type). But there is a good chance the drinking and drugging will over time become a bigger problem than the original problem. The risk of creating an even bigger problem is the second primary reason not to rely on drinking/drugging to improve your social life!

Resource: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=300925&ca=Self