The “POW! Effect”
Opiate dependence is about a lot more then just using opiates: It has to do with what it is you feel inside that allows opiates to have a SPECIAL EFFECT on you (what I call the POW! Effect”). An effect so powerful, that you almost certainly remember it, from the first time you feel it. Once having had this feeling, you think often about having it again and again, and once you start taking opiates on any given day, there’s actually no way of telling when or how you will stop. From the earliest days of your opiate use, and for a very long time thereafter, pills or heroin aren’t the problem, they’re the solution, and they remain the solution for a very long time, until (to your deepest regret) they stop working, or you stop working- literally. For a variety of reasons – no matter the relief opiates have provided you, in terms of living in your own skin – they begin to cause havoc in every other area of your life (your family; your job; your doctor(s).Then they become the problem. But before opiates can have this special effect on you, and in order for it to meet so many of your unmet emotional needs, you probably had been feeling and experiencing some combination of these feelings for a very long time:
- Restless, irritable and discontent.* - You may remember having felt this way since you were a kid.
- Hypersensitive to criticism. - You always felt that everyone had some form of armor that you somehow didn’t get when they were handing it out. As a matter of fact there was some kind of instructions in general that were given out to everybody, and somehow you must have been in the bathroom, or out somewhere, when the instructions on how to live were discussed.
- Prone to Resentment. - Capable of holding a major grudge for a very long time, probably unbeknownst to the grudgee. Although you were sure it’s just killing them that you weren’t speaking to them or were angry with them.
- Inferiority wrapped in grandiosity - A strange combination of feeling “less than” and “better than” the same people at the same time. A problem that you specifically remember opiates addressing with a certain special warmth that almost immediately allowed you to feel pretty much like other people – or so you thought. The so-called “feeling on the inside like other people looked on the outside” phenomenon.
- Uniqueness/Isolation - You often thought to yourself, “As troubled as I am- and I know I’m troubled – nobody could possibly know what I’m feeling inside, or could really understand me. I am completely alone, completely separate. My problems are not like yours, and cannot be solved using your solutions. My problems are unique. My situation is hopeless.”
- Intolerant of flaws in others – You were the director, if everyone simply followed your direction, everything would be just fine. But of course, everyone refuses to do it your way.
- Sneaky and self-pitying - When you weren’t planning and plotting, you were feeling sorry for yourself.
- Immature- Sensitive to even the smallest perceived slight. You could be crushed if people who you didn’t even care about that much rebuffed you.
- Selfish and self-centered- It was always, always, about you: your needs, your problems, your issues. You never got your fair share of attention, even when you got all the attention there was.
- Filled with undefined fears- There were plenty of things you knew you were afraid of, but there were others that you could never seem to get a handle on.
- An actor, A chameleon, leading a double life. What people saw was only what you wanted them to see, what you believed was needed or expected at any given moment. There was no real you inside, and you were the only one who knew it.
- A worshipper of people, things, money – Jealous and envious of everyone. Especially, but not limited to, anyone who you felt had more than you did. You knew in your heart that they didn’t deserve it. They were fools or worse, yet you desperately wanted to be just like them.
For us, opiate use has never really been about a few pills more or less. This was always about a magic potion, one that almost instantaneously makes all of this emotional misery and turmoil go away. All of us have been able to stop using for periods of time; the problem is we can’t stay stopped. And the reason we can’t stay stopped, is we can’t stand living with all this turmoil – without opiates. It’s too painful. This is our great dilemma. We can’t keep using, and we can’t stop. It’s at this point that many of us land in rehab, desperately looking for some way to not use, and be able to live relatively peacefully in our own skin, without this cavalcade of personality defects that make normal living for us virtually impossible.
* These designations are not my own creations. Credit the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous for many of these insights, especially the idea of “restless, irritable and discontent”. But once you read them, you’ll know in a flash that they are identical to the feelings that drive many opiate pill users as well. It turns out we’re not a unique as we thought.
