Tag: recovery

Cuomo Wouldn’t. Hochul Did. Drug Addiction In New York Need Not Be A Death Sentence Ever Again

First came the “Let’s get rid of prior authorization for opiod treatment” which Governor Cuomo of New York signed, but vetoed for Medicaid enrollees. Which of course made the bill useless.

That was 2019. And even if one argues that it doesn’t count because it was pre-pandemic, that argument presumes that Medicaid clients don’t matter. He justified the veto because of the cost. Over the next two years, who here wants to say that any one of the overdose deaths didn’t matter?

Put directly, when was it ever justifiable to let people die because keeping them alive was too expensive? We don’t even do that to prisoners on Death Row. They’re fed. They’re treated. The cost? I don’t know. We do it anyway.

Oh, I know people have always justified such things as letting the poor die even when it’spossibleto save them. But how justifiable were they? Even Ghengis Kahn saw no honor or practicality in slaughter; as he approached a villa, all it had to do was surrender, and mostly the people would be spared. If Khan was a bloody conqueror and yet spared lives, why do we, calling ourselves so much more civilized, condemn so many?

Again, those who were on Medicaid were not valued as much as the cost of a voluntary program with delays for treatment removed.

I know the rehab program is keyed to keeping people hooked on methadone. Let’s change one thing at a time. Even having a user safely on methadone is better than having them overdose and end up in a coma in the Emergency Room. Or needing to be buried by the city or state because there’s no next-of-kin who can or will do it.

The end game–the goal– of every program should be Suboxone treatment: in the link are busted myths laid out plainly by the esteemed Harvard Medical School. Pay close attention to these myths and the realities which contradict them.

Opiate addicts and others increased in number during the pandemic, and so did overdose statistics. The numbers in any statistic like this are people. Human beings who still have rights, still have potential, still have gifts that we can all benefit from. Cuomo put money above their humanity, especially people of color, who need treatment to be immediate, with no time lag. That is unacceptable and inhumane, and makes me pretty certain that race was a consideration he couldn’t have possibly missed. Who’s expendable?

No one is.

And until we place every human life on a value scale that’s equal to each other and worth more than money, we cannot hope to survive as a species. We don’t live in Khan’s world.

We live in a much more dangerous one.

Yes, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Does Work.

CAUTION: CONTAINS TRIGGERS AND ADULT CONTENT! Read slowly and back out if you need to.

In 2005, I was in group therapy with an excellent doctor at Springfield Hospital in Maryland. He used the sessions to give us a look at several approaches to recovery. One of them was cognitive therapy. It worked. He gave us a single sheet of paper with a bullet list naming types of self-destructive and defeating thinking and the reasons people tend to use them.

I was resistant to most therapy because I was a victim of things people did that, at the time, were unspeakable. Newscasters wouldn’t get this shit on a written script. It was a taboo subject; incest, child sex abuse. Newspapers could do a bit more but never outside the lines.

When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon, I was already wounded. Had been for as long as I could remember. I was fascinated with the Apollo 11 broadcasts, I remember when he stepped off that ladder, and yet…most of me, lying on a rug in front of the TV, was somewhere else, having things done to me that can never be forgotten.

It was in the same room that my mother and father “taught” me about sex. And would continue to do so until 1976 when I was actually asked if I wanted to stop. I had to summon courage to say “yes” because it seemed like another typical Ralph Smith goddamn trick. He would lay manipulative traps like that. Ask a question and if he didn’t like the answer, give out a rage-powered beating.

I had already, though I didn’t know it then, displayed behaviour and symptoms of trauma. The severe kind. Everyone’s different, that’s true, so I can’t speak for my siblings, who seem to be more functional than I. Oh, they all got the same shit as me, but I guess something in me made me especially susceptible to damage and an inability to cope with it.

Ruminations are wandering, smothering trains of thought triggered by various things. If I see the sun reflect through a tail light on a parked car, for example, I’ll likely be taken back in time to a memory or emotion from the abusive “teaching” years. Back when I noticed the world around me. Back when I could drink grape soda or have a grape Tootsie Pop without getting violently sick. The both of them are now forever linked to a particularly bad stretch of time I survived, though I was surely dead inside, and died many times.

Ruminations can be synonymous with brooding, but the word has a broader meaning. Ruminating can be positive. Nostalgia for a simpler time. Or dread and anger associated with oppression and terror because there was never really a simpler time. You had to grow up early because life picked you for shitty things. Ultimately, though, ruminating is not going to do you well if you can’t control it.

There’s hope, though. You can get control over these thoughts which cause everything from dissociative thinking to depression and suicidal thoughts.

Look it up. Read about cognitive behavioral therapy and ask a therapist about it. Find one who knows it and believes it’s effective; it’s a current fad that is being used deceptively, even though it has been around a while and there is no reason to listen to those who hawk it as snake oil. “Lifestyle coaches” are worse frauds than California Psychics, who continue to run TV ads despite repeated reports to the BBB. If you don’t have sufficient insurance for therapy, work out payment agreements. Severe PTSD and the ruminations it causes are no joke.

Self-defeating thoughts such as “I’ll never win” are viewed in cognitive terms as “fortune telling”, something you shouldn’t be doing to yourself; you have no business being that hard on yourself when you don’t know any more what’s going to happen ten minutes from now than you do ten years from now.

A trick I learned from the doc was more mindful eating. You know, you go out for a burger and you wolf it down, barely tasting it. Now, go get a nice juicy organic strawberry and close your eyes. Clear your mind and concentrate on the strawberry. Feel the texture and the juice, let the flavor and the bite of fruit linger on your tongue. Chew slowly, never letting your thoughts stray from what you’re doing. Take this challenge with anything you like. Think of it like this: a kid eating cereal, staring vacantly at the back of the box. Or… A wine taster, sipping delicately, swishing the sip around in the mouth, over the tongue, concentration and pleasure plain to see on the face. That is the difference, simplified, between rumination and mindfulness.

Another neat challenge, if you’re in a safe place or you have a companion, is to take a walk. Doesn’t have to be far. Along the way, turn off the phone. Notice the smell of the air. Where I live, it’s full of honeysuckle and wild flowers and tree blooms. Look at the yards you pass. What’s in them? I used to walk past one that had a very old grindstone, complete with seat, on the front lawn. That’s cool, but driving past, you’d never see it. Challenge yourself to spot one thing that strikes your fancy as unusual. When you return home, you’ll be in a better mood, maybe not a great one considering what you’re dealing with in life, but you’ll still be better.

The article below is correct if extremely general. If you’ve read my stuff, then you know how much more I should be doing with the concept. But with severe, crippling or disabling damage like mine, there’s a roadblock. It’s a direct counterpart to cognitive living. It’s learned behaviour, often diagnosed as “personality disorder” or disorders. Due to repeated events and conditioning you can’t seem to fight back. Learned behaviours are comparable to what happened to dogs in a shuttle box experiment some years ago. Dogs were placed in the boxes. The box consisted of two compartments, the sides of which they could not spring over. Each compartment was connected to the other but could be closed off, keeping the subject restricted to one side. This was done. The compartment they were trapped in had a grid on the floor. The subjects received electric shocks from the grids, which they could not step off of because the compartment that wasn’t equipped with a grid was closed off. After a set number of these non-lethal shocks were administered, the barriers to the other side of the shuttle boxes were removed. The shocks resumed, but the dogs made no movement at all. Even when shown that moving to the other side stopped the shocks, when placed back in the grid boxes, they took the shocks.

This is learned behaviour at its most basic; in this case the behaviour was called “learned helplessness”.

It’s what prisoners who are institutionalized have to fight. Ten years or more and sometimes less is all it takes to teach helplessness. A life restricted to a place and a never-changing routine, with no ability to make any decisions whatsoever, and what results is someone who can’t live once they are paroled. Many break conditions of parole or commit felonies and plead guilty just to get back inside. Some commit suicide. They’ve done their time, but they’re hardly free.

With the case of the shuttle box dogs, eventually they were able to make it to the other side, but the process of teaching them to do it was arduous for their handlers. Learned behaviours and personality disorders are difficult to treat; so much so that the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis was expected to have this entire section edited out.

Cognitive therapy is a real thing. It is a long road to travel. No one recovers from trauma disorders. But with guidance and hard work, with early intervention, living with it is possible. My case is hampered because I went misdiagnosed for so long, and because I cannot afford therapy on Medicare. Not even once a month. You don’t have to end up like me. I have no fight left.

I’ll tell you this, though. And I mean every word. You are reading this for a reason. No one reads my posts. I have a free plan and whatever I post gets buried fast, especially on Reader but also on search engines. I’m sure you’ll recognize that you are here for a reason. And that if I tell you that you are special, that the world needs kindness and empathy and that you can get to a higher level and make a difference, you have a choice. You face a decision. Choose wisely. Time is running short for us all.

https://www.psypost.org/2019/06/mindfulness-appears-to-diminishes-depressive-symptoms-by-reducing-rumination-53885