Thanks KittyHawk! I agree; it will work out for both of us! We both just have to keep strong, keep fighting and accept that there are bumps in the road which will cause some delays or detours. All in all it is also a process of personal development. It's not just beating an addiction. I think that in order to beat your addiction, you must be 100% willing to critically look at yourself, your thought and your actions and face the consequences of them. So basically beating addiction is critically looking at your current self and compare it to a future self you want to be. When compared, the differences in personality gives directions on where to go, yet it does not show if and how many bumps there are on the road. That is something we'll have to tackle along the way
So last night was shit. I had neck pains, a raging mind and I couldn't sleep at all! I tossed(ba dumm tss) around in my bed for 90 minutes and then the urges came, fully automated. As 'learned' from earlier behaviours! So a quick purely natural fantasy bases MO was done to attempt to induce some relaxation. This partly helped, i was physically more relaxed but my mind kept raging on. No negative thoughts but just a torrent of diverse thoughts. One of those thoughts was that I was content with myself for MO-ing with a non-P based fantasy!
After a while I couldn't take it and went out of bed to smoke some weed (not the best approach, i am well aware of that, but it is always effective).
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So, about using drugs to avoid a certain feeling.
I'm not in favour of using substances to avoid or flee from certain situations or emotions. Better yet, i'm actually against it, since this exact behaviour is what can be a prelude to addiction. I used to PMO the same way; to get to sleep or flee from negative emotions. It's exactly the same.
From my point of view there are two ways to use substances; recreational and abuse.
In the first case one can use weed when with a group of friends, share a laugh and enjoy the collective feeling of being mellow and in the moment. In this situation the use of weed is incidental and only done in a social setting. The second situation is entirely different and not so easy to determine when use can be labeled abuse. But, for me the basic guideline in this is if you take it to feel quiet, relaxed because you are not able to do so without it, then it can quickly become abuse.
I am mainly the number one type of guy. Every few months or so, a group of friends/family will come over and we will take some weed and just listen to music, enjoy food and laugh a lot.
However, in times when I'm not feeling well (this was especially the case before me opening up about my addiction) I also used it after work or when I was agitated.
I've decided to stop doing this and only use weed when i'm in a good place. This goes pretty well and 9 out of 10 times i wont use weed to escape or fall to sleep.
But sometimes I make an exception, like last night. And it has to do with a risk analysis. On the one hand taking weed is me fleeing; addictive behaviour and it will not force me to face what's really happening with me. But, the other side for me was that if i didn't take weed there was a high chance of me not falling asleep for hours and being a total trainwreck the next day. Me being a trainwreck can also be a catalyst for more destructive behaviour and a large change of destructive manners and possibly relapse.
So, did I use weed in an abusive manner; yes! Did the pro's outweigh the con's ? I think in this case it did.
But, i must face the hard reality that this weed use is also something that I need to address, addictional to why I couldnt sleep last night.
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I went to bed again, after I ate a small snack and in bed I've noticed that the raging mind was now calmer but that there were also physical sensations of activeness, like a warm band around my head. In the end it still took me approximately 30 minutes to fall asleep...
No chaser effect as of yet...
Today is day 6 of hard mode
