Well I can tell you devildawg, that hits home for me. The stress I was under and a relationship contributed ALOT to my addiction problems.
I was in a stressful relationship during the time I was on my painkillers for chronic pain I am in, and during the relationship everytime she made me feel like blowing up, I'd just take a pill or two and everything would seem fine. I started out taking everything as prescribed, then through time and finding out what the pills did to me, I learned, hey this fixes sh*t, and it was downhill from there. I ended up not even being able to talk to her without being on my pills. And dwelling on the past is a huge problem for me, and one of my triggers. And I have yet to find a way to just put the past behind me and move on. I even think about girlfriends past, problems from the past, fights, anything that would stress me out. It's like I try and find something to stress me out.
And I think its horrible because you become used to popping pills to take away the problems of life. The grass gets greener, the sky more blue, and the clouds just roll away and the sun shines again. I know that feeling all too well. Pills didn't do to me what I've seem them do to a lot of users I've seen. It brought me up, yet down at the same time, if that makes sense. It brought me "up" in the sense it gave me energy, made me want to go out and do things, made me want to be a useful, hard working person. Unlike most people who would lose their job and everything over them the pills had the opposite effect on me. It made me a go getter. But it brought me "down" in the sense that it took my stress and anxiety away, and just made things all around better. And I have yet to find a doctor, pyschiatrist or anything to tell me why these pills did what they did to me. I also found that, when I took too many, I had what they call a paradoxial effect. I became mean, easy to anger, frustrated, mad at everything and everyone, and easilly irratated. It was a fine line between taking the right amount to feel "normal" and going over the line and taking too much and becoming that angry screwed up pillhead.
In my opinion, I think that just using for a "high" and getting clean would be easier, because now for me, everytime I get stressed, worried, worked up, or anything, I crave the pills. It's horrible. And I keep worrying myself thinking, is this how it's going to be my whole life? But then I just keep telling myself, just get through today. If I had just been a user to get high, I wouldn't be fighting the feeling constantly every day of wanting to go back to the pills to feel normal, stress free, and non depressed.