Old 05-11-2016, 10:34 PM
  # 7 (permalink)  
Andante
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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Pacific Coast
Posts: 785
I had a really rough time with PAWS too. At over 3 years sober, I’m still not entirely symptom-free, although I’m getting closer all the time.

Fairly early on, I recognized that I was way out on the end of the curve as far as severity and duration of symptoms, so there wasn’t much point in expecting a lot of identification or sympathy even from so rich a resource for recovering alcoholics as Sober Recovery. The incidence is just too rare.

I also found that although I couldn't control my symptoms directly, I could control how I reacted to them emotionally. Part of the PAWS symptom suite often seems to include both a tendency to hyper-focus and obsess on symptoms, and a overriding sense of despair that they’ll never go away. Eventually I was able to train myself to detach better from the emotional reactivity and remain mindful that no matter how demoralizing and debilitating the symptoms might seem in the moment, eventually they would ease — as long as I remained sober. The action of detaching had the added benefit of actually helping the symptoms to abate.

Hang in there!
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