Yeah, Limeran’s withdrawal is going to feel just like drug withdrawal. Per my last video, it’s the same brain chemicals, the same thing has happened. So let me share about what I was like for me to quit myth 20 years ago and what that withdrawal process was like and what help me.
So for probably like the first three, four, maybe six months of quitting, I thought about using every day. It was so hard. It really took up all of my mental space. But I was going to 12 step meetings and absorbing all of their teachings. And it was like, just for today, can I just get through today? And sometimes it was like, can I just get through the next five minutes? And I Learned a whole bunch of new tools. And the first one really is like redirect your thoughts. And this is gonna help with limerance, like redirect.
So if you’re like ruminating and fixating on a person and the fantasies you’ve created in your mind, just like I would be fantasizing about using again and how good that was gonna feel, I would just halt that, call a friend. That was my main one. Just call a friend, hey, can we talk for a few minutes? I’m, you know, spinning out in my head. And by the time I got done talking, I didn’t have that same urgent craving anymore. It just wasn’t quite as urgent. But then also, it’s really important to be doing things that feel interesting to us. So at the time, you know, I was going into college classes, so I had like that routine every day. I didn’t do that great in my college classes when I was first in recovery, but I was going to class, so that was keeping me going. It could be good to take up some sort of sport or hobby.
You know, physical activity is going to create a lot of the same endorphins in the brain as the drugs and the limerance. So, you know, staying really active so that you can divert the rumination as soon as you can is going to be so helpful. After doing that for several months where you stop the habit and its tracks whenever you can think of it, you are creating new neural pathways in your brain, so it won’t feel as hard. It will take less willpower every time that you reinforce that new neural pathway.
I started doing yoga for the first time after doing rehab, and that was so important because not only did I have this new interesting thing, but it was helping me regulate my nervous system, helping me be present in my body and help me feel more comfortable my body. So that is such a good one.
Therapy, I know it’s not accessible to everyone cuz it can be expensive and not everyone has health insurance, but making sure that you’re talking to someone regularly who cares about you and can challenge you when you’re being insane and delusional. So important. But if you don’t have a therapist, you can ask friends that you really trust, like, hey, can you call me out when I’m being delusional or when my brain is going in circles and I know that it’s coming from a place of love and caring, but I really do need you to be firm with me and let me know what I’m being insane. My friends and I, we still do this for each other. And it’s just so good. We’ll be like, hey, I know what you normally do under high stress and you’re kind of doing that now. Can you see that? And they’ll be like, oh man, thanks for calling me out.
So another one is 12 step meetings. They’re not perfect, okay, but it’s really important to understand that you are in a room of people going through the exact same thing that you are. It’s really helpful. And these programs have been around a long time, and there are a ton of great tools. Typically, if you go to an open meeting, you can go to any meeting for any type of addiction. So if you have lab addiction, you can go to an alcoholics meeting and still get a lot out of it. You’ll just know that your primary drug of choice is other people and the Limeran’s feeling. But you can go to other meetings and it’s okay. But there are a ton of very specific meetings. Co dependence anonymous, probably the best fit for this.
Love Addicts Anonymous and then Alan on. I really love, I’ve had a great experience in Alan, which you can go if you come from any type of dysfunctional family at all. You don’t need to have like a close person to you who’s an ad predict. You can, but you can go to just heal from growing up in a dysfunctional family. Similarly, there’s a group called Adult Children of alcoholics. And so when you go to these meetings, you’re gonna look around and you’re like, oh my God, here’s a whole room of people who have the safe dive of insanity that I have.
This gives a lot of strength to change. One of the things that can keep us from changing is because we have convinced ourselves that we’re, our delusions are special and real. And so if we can really stop that in our tracks and be like, oh, wow, there’s 20 people in here. We all have these same religions and they’re not working for any of us can be really important for getting out of the, this spin cycle that we’re in. I think one of the biggest things that, I’m not saying is easy, but it’s trying to form an identity, a personal identity that’s not based on someone else. Like I am proud of myself for showing up to class, working my hardest, doing new things, trying a new sport. I’m proud of myself for going to yoga. And pretty soon you have this identity that’s like, I’m a good student, I’m an athlete, I’m a yogi, I’m a meditator, I’m a good friend.
That when you have that really strong sense of identity, it doesn’t need to depend so much on and how much we like someone else or infatuated with someone else at the time. But it’s hard because when we come from a dysfunctional family, a lot of times we’ve gotten into this holding pattern where we’re caring for all the people around us because there was so much chaos at home. So now we’re just used to constantly focusing on everyone else because that’s what we always did. I’m not saying it’s easy to break that habit, but we do need to break it and figure out who we are and what we stand for, and that comes through our actions. So again, coming back to my first one, like as often as we can disrupt, so that hurts, like how feeling, we don’t have to believe that feeling fully. We can say, oh, I’m noticing I’m having a part that really hurts about this. I am gonna disrupt this. I am gonna call friend. I’m gonna go for walk. I’m gonna go to yoga class, I am gonna pick up knitting, I’m gonna read a book and just disrupt that hurting feeling so that we don’t stay in that spiral.