quit-once

InRecovery, Did you take a MBTI test before you entered addie world? Or very early on in your addiction? It is good to know that the free test is not too far off base from the official one. I would have never guessed that every letter could change depending on your addiction status.

I still have a mouthfull of mercury and as long as those old amalgams are holding my teeth together I ain't fuckin with 'em

"The Dog's Mind" is one of the best books I have ever read - twice. I highly recommend it.

No, she quit taking them when she died. But I am convinced those b12 shots kept her sharp in old age.

Congratulations Cassie! Are they puppies? Are they siblings? What are their names? Dogs Rock!

Sunlight is the catalyst in the chemical reaction of converting cholesterol to vitamin D on the exposed surface of your skin. In the northern hemisphere, the sunlight is not strong enough to act as a catalyst from mid October to mid February.

Also iron. My mom got monthly or bi-monthly injection shots of vitamin B12 and iron for most of her life. She had so much more energy and mental clarity after getting them. There is something better about the injections because b12 and iron have issues being absorbed in the gut. Women need more iron.

How many days has it been since you quit, ham?

Hi Jared, I have some feedback and insight for you. Good for you realizing you need to quit. Using adderall like you were for the long term is not sustainable, and at 22 years old, you might just save yourself a lot of agony later in life if you learn a valuable life lesson on addiction at your young age. Your timing for quitting is ideal for long term success. Not going to school, and if that is what you used it for then you have this time to adjust to not being on it while you recover. Moving into a new place is good too because of the different surroundings and different people around you where you live. And finally, doing it after your dad has passed on takes advantage of one of the biggest defining moments in your life. Everything changes when a parent dies. I used adderall to help care for my elderly mother and also to treat the depression associated with seeing a loved one decline in health. But after my mom died I really didn't have a reason to take it any more so I began to plan my quit. It took me about nine months after she died before things were right in my life in order to successfully quit. I planned to quit right and quit once. I just kept reading too many stories about people and their relapses. So I decided that if I could not quit once on my own then I would have to go into a treatment program. As bad as I hated my adderall adiction, I thought treatment would be even worse so I wanted to avoid it at all costs. Regarding your supplement list, I did not see L-Tyrosine on it. For me, L-Tyrosine was the key supplement to managing the depression. Everybody gets depressed during their recovery period. With all the stuff on your plate, I am sure you too will get depressed. I found myself experiencing a lot of repressed grief and sadness in the weeks after I quit. Adderall was great for creating emotional numbness when it was needed, but those emotions have to come out and get dealt with after adderall. I think your plan for quitting is rock-solid and I am sure you will succeed. But you gotta cut off that supply chain. I suggest calling the doctor and either telling them you had an adverse reaction to the adderall or that you were abusing it. Tell them anything that will prevent another automatic prescription from tempting you with more adderall. Tell yourself you are completely done with that awful addiction. Relapse is not an option because once you have crossed the line from using to abusing you can never go back without the addiction returning as well. Good Luck!

Hey, Congrats on the success with quitting so far. And thanks for the update - it lests everybody around here know how you are doing and it lets the new folks know that people can and do quit and get on with their lives without addiction. Please continue to let us know how things are going.

How did you learn about desensitization? After reading that wiki link, it sounds like a good idea. But in reality, I think staring at photos of pills would be torturous. I can only immagine how fast it would bring on your paws. That would be like hanging out at a pharmacy watching people like us pick up their adderall prescriptions. That is another one of my triggers...the pharmacy window. Never been near one since I quit.

Was it as bad as that old farmers insurance commercial "my car's up a pole again"? Were you on your cell phone when this happened? talk about a good distraction from your recent trigger.... that's too bad, Ashley.

I have a harder time relating to the concept of paws. I was about a year into my recovery before I was even aware of the condition. By then I was mostly recovered. For me there were bad days and better days and gradually the better days became more common with time. Even now, if I am suffering from paws like symptoms, I just assume it is just a bad day for whatever reason - we all have 'em and sometimes you just get up on the wrong side of your bed. I had a bad day about a month ago and blamed it on paws, but they just don't come around that often anymore. I did have one physical symptom of withdrawl that lasted over a year after quitting. Sometimes, I would wake up around 3 or 4 AM with muscle tension/pain in my middle/lower back, and I could not get back to sleep. This was much worse when I was using adderall and attivan, however. Around 15 months post quit, I began sleeping all night without waking up most of the time although it still happens once every month or so. I bought more than one new mattress thinking that would solve the problem. Not sure if the back pain/sleep interruption thing is paws-related or not. Maybe taking up yoga practice helped?

I just recently became aware of the concept of "triggers". Although I have always been aware of events or other things that remind me of using adderall, I still struggle to define what a "trigger" actually is. One of my triggers is seeing the pills, or images of them. I have always known this because I became mesmorized by full pill bottles when I was using. I told all my adderall friends that I didn't mind them being high around me after I quit, but I did not EVER want to see a fucking pill. Of course I was taunted later on by a friend who put a couple of orange pills on the tip of his tongue and displayed them. I actually laughed at that because I wasn't tempted at the time. But I recently discovered that even a photograph of a single pill caused me discomfort. I had to go do something distracting right away in order to change the channel of thoughts about adderall pills and what they used to mean to me. Another trigger for me are relapse dreams. I have woken up in full panic mode hyperventilating from those disturbing dreams. It only takes one vivid, disturbing dream to ruin my day. Those kind of dreams will often repeat themselves through the night or come back in a different setting later on. It has been several month since I had a reallly disturbing relapse/using dream. At this stage of my recovery, 20 months along, these triggers do not create the urge to use adderall, they simply create a hard-to-describe uncomfortable feeling and emotion. My adderall addiction ran its full course to where the drug was working against me for EVERYTHING that I originally took it for. I convinced myself I did indeed have ADD in order to justify using, and then I experienced real ADD as a result of taking too much adderall. My list is long for the things that adderall helped me with, but there is not one single thing I would go back to it for. Any time I encounter something that I used my adderall crutch for, I simply remind myself "oh yea, it quit working for that, too".

True. It does not change who we are. But it does change how we think, how we make decisions and how we solve our problems. It changes how we interact with others. It also changes what we buy and what we eat and how much we sleep. And usually not in a good way.

Not a holiday I normally celebrate either. But thanks for the wishing us a happy day anyway.

That slippry slope back to beef....it all started with the Colostrum, Sky. I speculate there was some bad juju created when you consumed those colostrum pills made from the food that nature designed to be the very first bonding experience between a mother cow and her newborne calf. Not intending to lay a guilt trip on you, Sky.

I learned it from my dog when she was a puppy. Whenever she was barking or engaging in destructive or annoying behavior, all I had to do was tell her to "go find the ball", and she went off searching the house for it!

HaHa with an attitude like that, I have no doubt you will make it to Day 7...and beyond!

I've had my freedom for about 20 months now. LilTex, your early posts really inspired me when I was in the process of quitting and I have always wanted to tell you that.

CHANGE THE CHANNEL. Divert your adderall-justifying thoughts to ANYTHING else. Don't have another beer. Go to your profile page and click the "find content" button and read all of your 128 posts. Do whatever it takes to kill that line of thinking before you make that decision to relapse.

A great move in the right direction. Good Job. Don't let them overlook the eating disorder thing.

OK, I just read the entire article. I think it was good, except for the ending. I felt like there needed to be more of a summary or conclusion or something. What I liked was Ashley's courage to use her own name where the other two girls used aliases. I never understood that Ashley went through adderall hell at that level. I have even more respect for her ability to abruptly quit and stay quit after reading this story. Thanks for sharing it with us, Ashley.

I was thinking about Krax too - he just vanished. You can always check somebodys profile page and see when the last time they were active. Sometimes people just don't post but they still check in every so often.

Lil tex, that is part of the reason I maintain a continious presence around here. I believe that maintaining contact with people either who have quit or who are still in adderall hell just re-enforces my resolve to stay off the shit forever. I had a bad dream a month or two ago, maybe they can always come back. But my thoughts now are about what adderall did or does to other people and how they handle it, and not at all about my past use. At some point I feel like I won't need need that reenforcement any more, but I still do need it now. Anyway, I am glad you woke up and ended that awful dream. Please try not to let it ruin your day Edit: I just want to add that my adderall dreams have evolved over time. My first dreams (about 2-3 months after quitting) were about using and relapsing and I would wake up feeling awful and relieved it was just a dream. Later on, they changed into adderall rejection dreams, usually ending with forcefully spitting out a pill before I had a chance to swallow it. The last dream I remember stepping on the pill and crushing it like a bug and grinding it into the pavement. Woke up feeling pretty good after that one....