August,
Yeah I think I definitely need to come up with a solid plan on what to do and for example follow up once a week how well I have followed the plan. Thanks for giving me better insight on this. Also I need to have a solid plan on what to do it things get messy. I now firmly believe this is the kind of stuff that I should have thought about a long time ago even when I was going to NA-meetings regularly.
And I think I will make it a daily routine that I come to some recovery forum (probably here most of the time because this seems most active) and try to think about my recovery every day at some point.
But I think I need to build a program of positivity for myself, instead of something that's centred around fear. Some fear of relapse is good but being occupied by it is not and using positive motivators works 100 times better (at least in my case) than motivation through fear. I think this has been one of my issues in general, I tend to motivate myself through fear, and in some areas it works but what happens is that I overdo it in some areas of life and neglect other areas. I think I need to build this positive image of what my life could look like if I go through with my "program", instead of focusing on what will happen if I keep neglecting some areas of my life.
Maybe I will later also consider some options of reaching face-to-face peer support like even going to the local AA-group once in a while, now that I think about it they probably wouldn't condemn me if I attend irregularly because they don't know me and thus they probably won't care whether I attend that regularly. But right now I think I need a break from everything 12-step related for at least a week, I'm not in active danger and I don't want to trigger myself too much, all these realisations that I have made during the past couple of days managed to trigger me pretty badly and I need to work through that so I won't re-trigger myself.
One thing I realised is that my addiction problem might look a bit different since I have a strong dual diagnosis (I have bipolar with psychotic features, but I'm now 10 months into complete remission, and I also still have moderate ptsd). I have read from the literature that in cases of strong dual diagnosis (meaning bipolar or schizophrenia), especially if like in my case the mental illness was not triggered by substance abuse, the whole thing often looks a bit different than in cases where the main component is addiction. So I need to realise that the fact that my addiction looks in many ways different from e.g. most of those who I met in NA, doesn't mean that I'm not an addict (I never questioned whether I could use again, but I admit having had conflicting thoughts on the nature of my addiction recently, and for a very long time on a more subconscious level), and it also means that I really need to keep working on my mental health (which I have been working on with extreme efficiency for the past year), and that like I have always known, the most dangerous moments for me are the ones when my mental illness gets active.
I think I will actually begin working on some kind of plan today or tomorrow. Actually lol, I just realised why I'm having difficulties with that type of stuff and generally with having balance in my life. I have a cognitive distortion about it, I feel like I'm really bad at living a balanced life and I always fail in trying to find a balance. This is very common for me, like two weeks ago I started programming again after having a period of heavy ptsd-symptoms, and I currently am slowly expanding my own business into a full-time job (I do websites and plan on also doing smaller-scale e-commerce sites), and my business strategy is to start doing uniquely designed websites that I code from scratch and also to mostly design the sites myself. The thing is I worked as a back-end developer in larger-scale e-commerce projects in a very demanding setting for four months, so I'm a good programmer, but I just was unable to learn the front-end and graphics design stuff, until... I realised that I was thinking that I totally sucked at it. Once I defused that cognitive distortion, it took me 1,5 weeks until I had my first custom-designed website up and running, I had thought it would take three months to get to that point, lol.
So yeah, that was CBT at its best. It's not very unexpected that you can't find proper balance in your life, if you think that it's impossible for you, lol.
So.. Maybe I will start working on the plan now (though I'll possibly go for a walk first) and email it to my therapist, she usually doesn't reply but she reads them and I get the best insights always when I write to her.
ImNotThatGuy,
AVRT seems interesting, will dig into that, and I already have used SMART Recovery in the past
