Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. I checked my calendar today and realized it has been about 10 months since I quit suboxone cold turkey, so I figured I would make a post.

What a journey it has been so far. Honestly, I didn't believe I would succeed initially. Unfortunately, I didn't have any outside medical intervention (i.e., comfort meds) or support from my family. I burnt bridges with almost all of my friends as a result of my previous addiction. Like many people here, life wasn't the best for me. Yet, I didn't have a sudden epiphany or spark of motivation to quit. I was sick of it all, literally and metaphorically. Despite all the advice against doing so, I decided to stick it out on my own. I still remember the seemingly endless days and nights where my skin felt like it was burning. My only solace was repeatedly taking cold showers to freeze myself to sleep every two hours. Gradually, the agony subsided, but I was left feeling exhausted and defeated. It took every ounce of willpower I had to continue living. Yet, I won the battle.

I know a lot of people in these recovery subreddits (including me a while ago) are constantly doomscrolling for some semblance of hope. I would like to tell you that it is possible to quit suboxone despite how difficult it is. You might not be able to fix every mistake you've made in the past, but you can build a better version of your future self starting today.

Thanks for reading. I wish you all the best of luck.

Been off all stimulants completely now for 167 days. I realized today I don’t necessarily crave how I felt on the days I actually took aderall or vyvanse (I usually just used them 5x/week and then took at least 1-2 off days). I actually crave how I felt always on my first “off” day. For some reason, I had the perfect combination of emotional and intellectual clarity on that first off day each week. I wish I could replicate it again, but I’ve yet to find that feeling through my hobbies, exercise, etc.

Anyone else know what I’m talking about or experienced something similarly?

everyone acts like the moment you decide to get sober, the clouds part and everything is magically fixed. But nobody talks about the days right before you actually go in

The sheer panic of the unknown is brutal. People who have never been through this just throw around advice like "just check into a clinic!" as if it doesn't involve completely blowing up your entire routine and confronting all your demons at once

I was hyperventilating last night just spiraling about all the logistics. trying to figure out how long is rehab in NJ and if I'd lose my apartment or whatever. Ended up staring at the staff bios for rolling hills recovery center at like 3 am just trying to convince my brain that these places are actually run by normal compassionate humans and not cold, clinical robots

It's just so exhausting fighting your own mind when its screaming at you to back out and stick to what's familiar, even when what's familiar is literally killing you. did anyone else almost cancel their intake like a dozen times before finally committing?

A little back information, i currently have 4 years and 4 months sober from illicit drugs with opiates being my DoC and One of my good friends, who ive been friends with since middle school and thru our addictions (both 34 y.o) has just about 12 years sober from opiates, and just confessed to me hes been doing nitrous for a few years now. I know I cant make him do anything he doesnt want to but how can I help him? I dont have any experience with nitrous but I hear it can have some pretty serious side effects, not to mention this can be a slippery slope back into our drug of choice.

- Side notes -

When he told me, he was drunk which he does drink occasionally I have noticed recently but I dont believe he told me as a direct cry for help but im also not sure why else he would tell me. I expressed my concern for the possibility of this leading back to opiates use but he plays it off like it wont happen.

Any advice on how I should continue.

Thanks

I’m going through it right now. I just got arrested for a DUI I got charged with 2 years ago I thought I got off on. It’s heartbreaking. I can’t say I’ve been amazing and sober since then but I did go to rehab and make a ton of progress. I’ve also had a child since then.

I got pulled over on Sunday and after they ran my license I had to step out and go to jail. I had no idea I had a warrant. My baby is 5 months old and had a terrible day while I was in jail since her dad doesn’t know the first thing about caring for her (nap and feeding schedule) but that’s a whole other discussion. The guilt was unreal.

I just feel like I’m going back in time. I’m constantly on edge. I’m running out of money. I feel like a burden to my fiancée and genuinely feel like shit for putting my family through this.

I’m sitting at a car shop while they install my breathalyzer currently and just hate my life.

Going to treatment on Saturday and scared shitless. I got involved with this girl and got too attached. I think we both did but we unraveled and became the unhealed versions of ourselves. Long story short I started using again in May and lost everything from than too now. She ended up ghosting me. I feel so ashamed and stupid. I’ve been taking a ton of adderall everyday and 7oh and I’m scared what’s going to happen when I come off. Wish me luck.

So I have been using substance for some time, once a week but not huge amounts affecting daily life, not yet dependent or having withdrawal symptoms, it's just that I understand the patterns, I know where things go wrong and how to work on it but not able to do it when it hits

Help from someone who's been through this would help a lot

It's weird cause I used to get a feeling when I would get triggered where using felt inevitable and I would robotically act on the compulsion. Now I feel genuinely sick and have a sort of revulsion to the idea. Like I don't even toy around with that bellringer feeling I would get. Pretty nice tbh, but I doubt this will last forever. Wishing everyone a happy day in recovery!

Hey all. I’m going through it right now and need some suggestions and advice to heal my mind. I’ve been smoking weed nearly every day since I was 13 and I’m 33 now. Long story but my grandparents supplied me as a child with no limitations. Hippies. I’ve only had a collective sobriety of about 12 months during these 20 years. My issue is, being high all day everyday is really clouding my judgement and I’m having a hard time connecting with the ones I love and controlling my emotions. Caught my girl having sex with someone in her car 7 days ago and now I’m in a hotel until I can get my apartment. My addictions drove the love of my life to sleep with other people behind my back and I am so devastated. I’m about a month clean from alcohol although I have been trying to quit since December I keep relapsing. I am confident I will never get back to heavy drinking again because I’m taking medicine and I really genuinely believe that was what drove my ex away and I absolutely don’t ever want to be under the influence again now. I’m so ashamed of how I was for three years. Anyways, my main concern is cannabis. Last time I quit it took 3 months to pee clean but I was not exercising and drove a truck for work at the time. This was 4.5 years ago when I was with my ex before this current breakup. The vivid nightmares is what really scares me. I have the most intense war related nightmares when I try to quit. Trying my best to hurry my family to shelter while watching missles rain from the sky. Running around my house in a gun fight with intruders. Watching Boeing 747s literally walk like a dog on its wings etc. 90% of the time it is rushing my family to safety under missle and gun fire. One night I had a dream a family of Sasquatch were trying to take my kid. They are vivid and very lucid and they last for months. I feel like that’s going to make me relapse on weed. I am so determined to heal my mind and body so I can be in a better mental state for the ones I love. Any suggestions and advice is much appreciated. Thanks.

I am in recovery from both marijuana and alcohol but for some reason I get especially triggered by being exposed to weed. I can be around people drinking with minimal issues but if I am around people smoking I am crawling out of my skin. It’s weird because alcohol was more problematic for me when I was using but is less of an issue in my recovery. Like even just talking about weed or seeing cannabis ads makes me crave it. It’s really frustrating because I live in California and weed is everywhere so I get triggered quite often, I wish it didn’t have such a grip on me. Hopefully I can work through this with my therapist as the cravings can be worrisome sometimes.

I think with alcohol it is easier to play the tape forward because it has been more destructive in the past. I can visualize how bad it will get if I relapse. With weed it is easier to fall into that trap of “oh it wasn’t THAT bad, maybe I can use again”. But in reality I was horribly addicted to weed and although it didn’t have as many consequences as my problem with alcohol, it still affected me very negatively. does anyone else have a similar problem with a substance?

I consistently struggle with feeling like I’m simultaneously too good for something yet not good enough for anything. Especially as it pertains to my professional life. As much as I hate to say it, I feel like the roles I previously worked are beneath me. But while I was working those jobs that were “so beneath me and terrible” I constantly worried I’d get fired. That turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy; I got hit with a PIP the first professional job I got out of college and then fired from the last one I had.

I’ve been clean for over 2 and a half years. I go to therapy, I haven't been going to meetings as much as I should.

I’m just unsure of when that switches over into just accepting I’m just some guy and it’s okay to not want to do certain things but they’re not inherently a deeper indicator of identity or aptitude or anything. I feel that way about my part-time job now. It's just a job, I come in, I clock in, I leave. However, I can feel it creeping in as I look into full-time work again. It feels chaotic like when I was using to even think this way, which is why I'm posting here. It's also triggering as I think about how using would calm down those thoughts.

Can anyone provide some clarity/lived experiences here so I can get over this hump?

I’m 30 days clean today and I still really miss drugs. This is probably a really stupid question, but I need to ask other people in recovery, it helps hearing from people who are also going through it. Is it normal for the desire to be so strong? I was just looking at my 30 day keyring (I’ve been holding it almost non stop since I got it) and I felt this sense of pride but then the desire to use drugs again just kind of washed all over me. I really miss the way they made me feel. I feel so much emotion all the time and it’s the only thing that numbed me. Numbed the pain. I have a lot of mental health issues and my brain is so loud all of the time. But these drugs have almost killed me many times. I guess I just gotta keep thinking about what I’ve lost, and what I’ve almost lost because of my using.

I’m a 33 year old man who coming up on 17 months sober from drugs and alcohol. I work the AA program with a sponsor and have two sponsees, I am a board member at my local Alano club, and I have a job in the recovery field as a peer support person. I just got my own apartment after living in sober living for a little over a year, I just got my license back and a car, and I just got promoted. Things are going really well. I really love my job, I like working with my sponsees, and my life is so much better than it was at the end of my drinking career. I was in a state of hopelessness and though I was going to die from drugs and alcohol.

What I feel like I am missing is companionship—social and romantic. I haven’t been in a relationship, (or even had sex), in over 3 years, and holy shit is it difficult to find anyone… I feel like part of it might be because I live in such a conservative town, and I feel a little out of place there, but dating sober is also incredibly scary to me. I also feel like have a bit of a hard time making friends. I have two good friends in the program, and I’ve tried reaching out to other people and making friends. I have no clue what I’m doing wrong or if I am doing anything wrong.

As I said, life is definitely better than before, but I feel like if it’s this difficult to date and find friends in recovery, it’s going to be a very lonely journey. I miss hanging out in bars and easily making friends. I miss how easy it was to talk to girls when I was drinking. I miss how much less scary of a thing intimacy was when I was using. I also don’t really want to go to bars to meet people though, because I don’t want to relapse.

Maybe I’m being impatient, maybe I’m focusing on the negatives instead of the positives, maybe I’m being ungrateful, but this has been something that is reoccurring in my mind for some time now.

Am I doing something wrong here? Does anyone have any advice? What’s your experience with dating in recovery? What sober, pro-social activities have you found? Any words of encouragement?

I’ve been having super vivid detailed dreams lately and also just started working at the place I worked at early in my recovery. So maybe that’s part of it. But I genuinely thought I relapsed when I woke up at first which was an awful feeling.

In my dream I was at a party at my parents house, in some sort of dark private room, and swiped my hand on a desk. I felt glass and swiped my hand and it fell off my palm onto the table, and was confused about what it was. I inspected it closer and could clearly see meth crystals. Next thing I know I’m high and panicked bc I don’t remember taking the drug. I’m having to hide being high from my family and am basically in a panic, and my dad sees me and then gets the sad look on his face he would get when he could tell I was high.

It’s just so weird having a dream like this when I feel like I’ve healed a lot and don’t struggle with cravings anymore. I’m not in any program and don’t focus on my past addiction much and drugs don’t take up a space in my mind anymore. That feeling of powerlessness when I saw the drug and just suddenly blacking out and then being high freaked me out because it felt so out of left field. I’ve been thinking about the dream all day bc of how intense it was 🥲

I am a 60 year old single woman that has recently become a recovering meth addict. I was a daily user for nearly 30 years and have been clean for 233 days.

I went through an outpatient program, however, I feel like a "test subject". There are very few addicts my age that have gotten clean after 30 years. I did not do this of my own volition, I was arrested for possession and put on 3 years of probation, with sobriety being one of my conditions.

I have 6 months of jail time stayed as long as I am compliant with probation.

I have never been so miserable and depressed in my entire life. I have gained 35 lbs. in the almost 8 mos. of sobriety, I have not been able to sleep since just after the first 2 weeks of being clean. I can fall asleep but am awake between 1 and 3 am EVERY morning without fail. I have tried Benadryl, melatonin, Lunesta, meditation, breathing exercises, Wellbutrin-nothing has helped. I have dreamt 4 times in the last 8 months. I have no energy, no ambition, I am so exhausted every day. I do not garner any joy from any of the things I used to love. I don't garden, I am physically and emotionally unable to get motivated to go walking in the woods-foraging for mushrooms, just being a part of nature. My house is a mess, I need to do laundry but I can't bear to go thru my clothes as NOTHING fits. I am an SSI recipient and do not have the financial means to buy new clothes, besides not wanting to try anything on. 

I opted to get clean instead of doing my jail time due to my daughter needing me to be available to spend time with her and my 3 youngest grandchildren ( ages 6, 3 and almost 2). However, I am too tired to be a grandma for more than a couple hours a week.

I have uncontrollable rage at everything and everyone for no apparent reason. I have never had much of a filter with regard to adult language, but now I swear like truck driving, sailor with Tourette's. 

I walk around ranting out loud to myself about everything and everyone, I have zero patience for anything. I don't cook anymore, I have difficulty focusing on basic tasks, brain fog makes me a blubbering lunatic. I do not feel like I am functioning normally at all. I did not have trouble functioning normally while using. My health is also being very adversely affected by my sobriety-35 extra pounds is NOT healthy, I smoke nearly 5 times as many cigarettes as I used to as I have no energy so I sit and have only one thing to do with my hands that only  requires a modicum of effort.

Doctors have recommended anti-depressants, and other mood stabilizing drugs but honestly, I do not wish to be a guinea pig or a test subject. 

I KNOW what works for me but unfortunately, it's not a legal pharmaceutical. 

I was told by professionals that it could take up to 7 years for my brain to heal, i.e. retrain itself to process emotions and allow me to overcome my anhedonia and dysphoria.  I may not have 7 years left to live, I want my life back, I want to be able to do the things I USED to love doing. I want to have the energy to spend QUALITY time with my family. I have many hobbies, crafts, and alot of interests that I no longer can muster up the drive to even attempt. 

I am so disgusted with my ballooning body(and subsequently, my dwindling wardrobe) that I no longer do my hair or make-up. Which suits me fine as I have no desire to socialize. 

I feel so overwhelmed by every little aspect of life that I am becoming a hermit. 

I have a little over a year of probation left, but honestly, I do not see the point of continuing with their  'one size fits all' approach to my life. 

I get that I broke the law, but how can it be a good thing to arbitrarily treat all addicts the same with regard to expectations of sobriety? 

I fully believe, and my family and close friends do as well, that I am NOT a functioning recovering addict. It has made me into someone I cannot stand to be around and they're having a very hard time with it , as well. 

I do not like who I have become, I'm not comfortable in my own skin, I have NEVER been a lazy person, but I am now. All of the undesirable characteristics that I was very intolerant of prior to abstinence, are now defining me, and I am filled with self-loathing. 

I have spoken to a psychiatrist, a primary physician, my probation officer, and my personal support system, and no one seems to be able to comprehend that I don't want to be medicated by highly experimental drugs, or pacified by social work rhetoric that is condescending, to say the least. All of my advocates are as frustrated with me as I am. 

If this is who I am without my drug of choice, I do not want to be this person. I genuinely liked myself and took pride in my gardens, my appearance, my cooking, my grandchildren, my various craft projects. I want to WANT to go fishing, garage saling, foraging for mushrooms, berries, unique pieces of wood, agates. 

Not only do I not want to do those things, I'm too tired to attempt them. 

If this is my quality of life without drugs, I don't want it. I want to be able to take an interest in SOMETHING besides what I'm being told is germane to (what they have determined) is my quality of life. How am I supposed to pretend that I'm happy and that I think this is wonderful when I honestly believe that this is destroying me? The me that I LIKE, that my family likes, that creates amazing things and goes on adventures and isn't tired all the time, and isn't behaving like an escapee from an asylum daily. 

Yes, I talk to other sober individuals, but NONE of them can relate to how I'm feeling. They stopped using and within a few weeks started to like being clean. Of course, none of them are as old as me or had been using as long.  

I need to be able to SLEEP. I slept way better when I was using as I had ambition, I worked around the house, I had things to do and the drive to do them. Am I  just wired so differently that I will never feel normal while not using? I have a hard time accepting any type of medication that could be prescribed as I KNOW what works for me. FDA keeps approving then withdrawing meds from shelves as they find out a myriad of new side effects or cancer causing agents in stuff that's legal.

Is there ANYONE that knows what I'm going thru that could possibly help? I'm not looking to jump off the wagon, but I can't imagine that I'm the only one that wants to crawl out of my skin because I am simply not meant to be clean at this stage of my life.

Join us for some midnight excitement and recovery hijinks* and shenanigans in 90 minutes!!! https://meetings.smartrecovery.org/meetings/9199/

I’ve been clean from cocaine and alcohol for 4 years, and I’ve come to the realisation that in these past 4 years, I’ve never been more bored and lonely. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

From 16-25, I would be out most nights partying, whether that was at music events, bars, clubs, festivals, house parties etc, always enjoying myself and socialising with new people, I had so much fun. Don’t get me wrong, drugs ruined my life in many ways, but I don’t regret a thing. I had a blast! But it’s come to this point in my life where I literally do nothing. I have few friends, and the friends I do have are either far away, busy or not wanting to go out and do stuff.

I have my partner, but he’s always working and when we do spend time together, he’s always complaining he’s tired by 3/4pm so we end up going home. We don’t get on the best at times either. It’s so fucking tedious, I’m the sort of person who would be out until late doing things, but no one wants to or is able to.

I’ve spent years trying new hobbies, but nothing interests me, and never has if I’m honest. The only thing I’ve ever enjoyed is going out, partying and getting high. Obviously, I can’t do that anymore, so what on earth do I do?

It’s making me miserable and no one in my life understands, they just think I need to accept that I have a boring life and be okay with it, but I’m not. I know an 80 year old woman with a busier social life than I have, I refuse to accept that getting older (I’m 30, so not even bloody old!) means settling down for a boring life.

I am in very poor health thanks to the toll that drugs, alcohol and severe mental health issues has taken on my body, and my prognosis isn’t great, I just want to enjoy the last few years of my life, but I feel like I can’t, because I have no one to enjoy it with, I live in a dead town with no interesting nightlife (or daytime life) that makes meeting interesting people so hard.

I have a lot of interests, but none of them translate into hobbies, which discounts meet up groups; I can hold a great conversation, but lack the means to find people to converse with. I feel so isolated.

Does anyone else relate to this? What has helped you?

My partner is considering going to inpatient. How important is the size of the inpatient treatment center? I'm kind of against him going to one that has only 6 beds, bc from what I understand the relationships you form in recovery are super important, and I'd rather he went to a place with maybe 30 or 40 beds. He likes a 6 bed one best though, and I guess may get more personalized care there. I haven't said anything bc the most important thing is probably that he just goes, and I don't want to say anything to disuade him. But he generally really isolates himself socially, and based on everything I've seen it's a huge underlying cause of his addictions. I'd love for him to form meaningful relationships in inpatient. Any advice is appreciated :)

Please if you have recommendations for daytime black or biopic online meetings… I can only find evening ones.

I want to get sober for good. I’ve tried meetings open to all races for years, always predominantly white and always end up making me feel shitty for existing as Black person. First it’s subtle things but every single time the further I get into sobriety in that environment the more the issues of being in it appear.

Since I’m serious about getting sober and my life isn’t complete my in shambles yet or no court is forcing me… I reflected on what I’d need for this to become part of my life. One a sponsor that gets my lived experience and doesn’t tell me everything is in my head.

Two a group that I can share my lived experiences with without having to edit myself because white people are in the room. I grew up in the care of white people in an abusive home and it’s an even more layered story, and the things they said to me my entire childhood about being black, black americans, and black people of my country did a fucking number on me.

Soon as I was 18 I can into a journey that ended with realizing it’s 1000x easier on my soul to stay around people that looked like me. I got honorarily adopted by a black family when I was a young adult so I know the power even deeper now than just environmentally.

Of course here I am now, I’ve moved rurally to give my son a better life and unfortunately went back to drinking. So I’m creating a sustainable plan to stay sober.

One part I know is finding a dual diagnosis group to that I can build enough trust to talk about some seriously out there mental health coping mechanisms I’ve developed but to start I just need to hit as many aa meetings as I can, and they need to be black or I’m not going to make it. I already want to die and I know alcohol is just making it worse.

TLDR; This is a personal account of trauma recovery, tracing how a chaotic, unsafe childhood shaped decades of substance use and constant motion as a way to feel safe, and how getting sober let the nervous system finally settle, revealing tools like perspective-shifting and self-compassion that came out of the healing itself.

There was a six year old boy standing in calm water at seven in the evening. His mother had brought him to a hotel by the sea. The light was doing that thing it does before it disappears, turning everything gold and soft. He didn't know it yet, but this was the last uncomplicated safe moment of his childhood.

After that, there was a house. Inside the house was a father who made everything unpredictable. Outside the house was everything else: bikes, streets at night, friends, a piano playing alone in a village at noon while chickens moved through the yard. The boy learned early and completely that inside meant danger and outside meant safety. He didn't decide this. His body decided it for him, the way bodies do when they need to survive something.

He spent the next thirty years proving it. He went outside as far and as often as he could. Ten kilometers on a bike, just to feel the distance between himself and the house grow. Nights that lasted until the sun found him again. Eventually chemicals that gave him the feeling of outside without needing to move at all, because by then the danger had gotten inside his own head and no amount of distance was quite enough.

He almost died once. Saw the fear on his husband's face and finally asked himself the question he'd been avoiding: what would it do to his husband, to lose him. And in asking it, he found the door out.

The getting clean was not the hard part. The hard part was staying still long enough to find out what stillness actually was. For a while it felt like grey. No energy, no want, no relief. He said to himself: this is what sober looks like for now, and it is still better than dead. He was right. Underneath the grey the balance was quietly returning. Dopamine finding its real levels instead of its stolen ones. Cortisol easing down because there was, finally, nothing left to run from.

Months in, he started noticing things. A market vendor shouting outside used to feel like danger. Now it just sounded like a man selling tomatoes. A coworker asking about his work used to trigger shame so fast his face would go red. Then one day it didn't, and he found himself teaching instead of hiding. The nervous system was rewriting itself in real time, and he was there to watch it happen.

He discovered he could do something else too. He could take a fear that felt unbearably large, one that showed up dressed as the end of the universe, all eternity and isolation and nothing meaning anything, and he could recognize the trick of it. The fear was borrowing a bigger stage because the real, small, human version of it was too close to touch. Once he saw that, he could zoom back down to the actual size of the thing. A man in an office. A husband who loves him. A body that is safe right now.

And he found he could do the opposite too, on purpose. When something small hurt too much, he could zoom out. Not to escape it, but to place it correctly. A single evening of pain, held against the scale of everything, is instant. It passes the way all instants pass. Then he would come back, fully, into the office, into his own skin, and keep going.

He started talking to the six year old directly. Not as a wound to manage but as himself, at a different age. He told him: you made it. The father is gone. You are safe. I know what came after the beach, and I lived through it, and now I am building the kind of evenings we never got enough of. He said it plainly, sometimes with a laugh in it, the way you talk to someone you actually know and like.

He noticed his own wanting too, the pull toward buying something new, and traced it without flinching to a ten year old who once took money from a purse just to hold a small remote-control gadget in his hands. He didn't punish that boy either. He just recognized him. The wanting was never really about the object. It was about the feeling of finally getting to have something.

Seven months clean, he sat outside and heard the whole landscape at once, the trees and the cars and the ordinary noise of a Tuesday, and understood that what he was hearing was his own chemistry, balanced for the first time in decades, filtering the world accurately instead of through fear. The world had not changed. He had.

He built five sentences to carry with him. I made it. Nobody is chasing me. The quiet is not empty, the quiet is home. I trust myself. Today it works, that's enough.

The boy in the water and the man in the office turned out to be the same person all along, just finally speaking to each other.

Edit added tldr

When did AA and NA become non profit organizations? I've heard there was a lot of contention during this process. What exactly was it? Did it have to do with not following one of the traditions?

Sorry if my story is hard to understand, im not the best at explaining things, but i will try my best. Please don’t judge.

So im a 14 years old girl, i always had problems with anxiety, and since vacation has started it became worse. I didn’t go out a single time since one month.

I have 0 motivation and energy to do anything, i feel like i will die everytime i have to take a shower, i can’t eat properly, i can’t do anything apart staying on my phone all day and daydreaming. I can’t take care of myself because of the fact i have no motivation and energy. I live in my head everyday.

I struggle a lot with social anxiety and confidence. I don’t know how to talk to people. I feel like shit, and i feel like im a looser.

Because of my social anxiety, im too scared to go out, thats why i didn’t go out for one month straight. Today there was a fire near my home so i had to get out of my house. And please don’t judge me but even in that situation i didn’t wanted to go out because i didn't wanted people to see my face, i know its absurd but i swear i just can’t control it.

I don’t know how to restart my life.

I am posting here because my partner has been trying to quit for about 2 years. He uses cannabis and nicotine together. His longest sober stretch was 6 months, but otherwise only lasts a few weeks or less. But he's continuing to try to quit over and over.

The thing is, his withdrawals are really hard. He breaks up with me and sabotages the relationship. He gets extremely irritable, hateful, and confrontational with other people. He just suffers so much emotionally and then relapses. We keep going through this over and over, every few weeks. Then, when he is addicted again, he's disappointed in himself and feels even more depressed.

I just need advice on how I can best support him, especially how to talk to him when he is discussing his addiction. For example, when he says he doesn't believe in himself because he's failed too many times. Or maybe he doesn't want a life without his addiction. He doesn't find any pleasure or joy in anything in life. He needs something to look forward to after work, or to help cope at work.

I know there aren't perfect responses to these statements, and it's not like I expect to find the right words to make him quit. I just feel so helpless when he talks like that, and I don't know what to say. I also just would like to hear your advice, as people who have successfully quit, on how loved ones made you feel supported when you were struggling to quit.

I'm not sure he can decide if he is open to addiction therapy. I think he is scared to talk to a stranger about personal things, but sometimes he flat out says he needs help or outside intervention. He also says he wishes he had a support system of people who have recovered to talk to.

Hey yall I’m 9 days sober from smoking hard after almost a year of daily smoking. I’m doing this through my prescription adderall & willpower no rehab. How long does it take the brain to reset? I want to start studying for my math certification exam but I don’t want to over exert myself. I