Ten0275: I'm Dave and if I am capable of healing, each of you are - Please hang in there.

[ten0275]

Community of Healing, hello.

 

In December of 2014, just a bit more than 6 years ago, I came to this site after already weathering two years of nearly life-terminating withdrawal. I'd been on psychotropic medications for most of my life and in my estimation, my nervous system had decided it'd had enough. From February 2012 to approximately March of 2014, I felt I was literally living in hell. I was hospitalized twice, lost long-running friendships and new career opportunities, tried a plethora of medications, supplements, and herbs in an attempt to "fix" withdrawal, and ultimately came to the realization that pharmaceutical medications would not be the answer to my suffering. Pharmaceutical medications had been the cause of my suffering. And what my brain and body needed was support, tenderness, forgiveness, care and time... TIME... to heal.

 

Benzodiazepines had been the first drugs I withdrew from. That was a brutal, nightmarish withdrawal, but relatively short-lived (acute @ 8 months). Tapering from Mirtazapine proved a longer journey, a much longer journey that I shared here.

 

 

So this is my success story, my chapter-turning post. This is my declaration that I have been successful in tapering from medications that had deranged my nervous system to such a degree that I was scarcely able to operate in the world anymore. I took much time to make this declaration of success as I am by nature skeptical, and wanted to be sure that healing had indeed come - and come to stay. I feel that it has.

 

I discontinued Mirtazapine, my last psychotropic medication, on June 15, 2019. There are still some echos of it that I deal with in day to day life. My issues with histamine intolerance I believe are directly attributable to Mirtazapine's affinity for histamine receptor occupancy. I manage this issue with dietary and exercise modifications as well as use of select vitamins and herbs. It is not life-deterring. It can be inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant, but it is nowhere near as debilitating as withdrawal itself had been.

 

Despite posting this success story, I'm not going anywhere really. I am always happy to answer questions about my journey. When I was in the worst of my own withdrawal, the feedback from moderators and members of this community and elsewhere were absolute lifelines. Not that anyone could necessarily fix my problems - but I could walk away with sound, compassionate advice and if nothing else, the knowledge that my suffering had been heard, and that someone ultimately cared about me. Your suffering is heard, and someone ultimately cares about you.

 

I want to thank @Altostrata and every moderator past and present for their kind forbearance, compassion, and dedication. I want to thank every member for their strength, endurance, bravery, and perseverance towards a healthy life free of the chemicals that have caused them harm. You all have something, many things, to be proud of.

 

I believe in every human's potential to heal. Take your time, taper well, make the most sound choices you can, and know that healing is absolutely within your power to achieve.

 

Hang in there,

 

Dave

 

Edited January 10 by ten0275
Date correction, I couldn’t math before withdrawal, and I still can’t math :)

[mva96]

Congratulations Dave, you've earned it. Enjoy the shiny, new brain! 🧠

[manymoretodays]

Yay!    Thanks Dave/Ten!

[Mimi79]

@ten0275 Thank you so much Dave! And congratulations for your healing! You are such an inspiration for me.
Always the good words to give us hope! 

Mimi79

[benesh]

Yes excellent. Big uplift for me. Telling my supporters so they can remind me.

[getofflex]

@ten0275I'm so touched and inspired by your story that I'm crying tears of relief.  Thank you for sharing this!  Jennifer 

[ten0275]

 

@mva96 @manymoretodays @Mimi79@benesh @getofflex

 

My sincere thanks for your kind words of congratulations and support. You know, it was actually really hard to write the success story for me. In some ways, despite feeling as well as I do, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I was actually in the position do declare victory.

 

I think a great majority of us go through that period of time where we are absolutely sure that there is something about our particular circumstances - drug histories, genetic make-ups, life situations, etc. that exclude us from healing. I know that was the case for me. I was pretty sure that having been medicated since I was a child, and on some drugs that aren't even prescribed anymore, that I was beyond healing. And of course in the middle of it all, when time seems to move so, so slowly... it truly seems an insurmountable and unending challenge. I was glad to be proven otherwise. 🙂 And I truly believe that healing is within everyone's grasp no matter what the medications, the genetics, or life has dealt upon you.

 

So much respect, love, and gratitude to this community. ❤️

 

Hang in there,

Dave

[wantrelief]

37 minutes ago, ten0275 said:

And of course in the middle of it all, when time seems to move so, so slowly... it truly seems an insurmountable and unending challenge. I was glad to be proven otherwise. 🙂 And I truly believe that healing is within everyone's grasp no matter what the medications, the genetics, or life has dealt upon you.

This is so beautiful and helpful, Dave.  Thank you so much for everything you have written and for all of the support you have provided here. Congratulations on your recovery!!

[arbor]

I can't thank you enough, Dave, for the hope and compassion you share with us here.  I've felt quite desperate recently, but support from others and now, reading your post really, really helps.  All my best wishes to you.   What strength it must've taken you.

[ryan1982]

Dave, I know we don't know each other but I'm so dang proud of you. I'm currently struggling and in a bad wave and I sometimes think I can't do it. I really appreciate your story and testimony to keep me strong.

[Jay78]

Great news Dave! May you live long and prosper!

 

[freespirit]

Congratulations Dave! You've done an amazing job not just of coming off meds, but also, of documenting your journey in such a profound way. I remember reading your thread early on and finding so much inspiration from your writing and experiences. I'm so grateful for the support you've shown me while we travel this path together. I hope you are proud of what you've done--including the ways in which you've supported so many others. 

[ten0275]

@wantrelief@arbor@ryan1982@Jay78@freespirit

 

It means a lot that you stopped by, checked out the success story, and gave me some good wishes. If anything I've ever written on this site has helped, or will help, another going through the process, it is truly a gift to me.

 

I'd never want to go through what I went through in withdrawal again. But I am stronger because I did survive it. I'm more certain of my own strength - as a human being. There were so many people that showed me compassion and care during my darkest days of struggling when I didn't think I was going to make it - and when I didn't even feel like I deserved the compassion and care extended to me. There were some times when I questioned... everything.

 

What are the gifts we can give each other on a peer support site like this? We can give the gift of relaying our own unique stories so that others can find solace in a shared experience of suffering. We can give the gift of techniques that have worked for us in terms of lessening the suffering during the ups and downs of windows and waves. We can give the gift of sharing both our triumphs and missteps, so that others might utilize or avoid them. But honestly, in my opinion, the best gift we can ever give is hearing one another - of being present to listen to one another. Of validating the experiences that so much of the medical establishment and drug industry invalidate. Of bearing witness to our shared journeys. Of being peers - through the thick and the thin of it.

 

I found these gifts here.

 

Hang in there,

Dave

[Shep]

@ten0275Thank you for gracing the site with your success story.

 

Your writing is always calming and your posts helpful to anyone struggling. 

 

On 1/11/2021 at 1:45 PM, ten0275 said:

I was pretty sure that having been medicated since I was a child, and on some drugs that aren't even prescribed anymore, that I was beyond healing. And of course in the middle of it all, when time seems to move so, so slowly... it truly seems an insurmountable and unending challenge. I was glad to be proven otherwise. 🙂

 

This especially resonated and is something that needs to be messaged. 

[HardTimes]

Hey Dave. Thanks for writing this. I just read your earlier "almost there" success story and found it moving and helpful. I'm kind of in that really crappy place you describe, but then again, maybe not as bad as what you went through. I can't believe how many people have it even worse than me, and yet I feel so very horrible! But I appreciate your points about the hospital - I'm kind of on the verge of checking myself into one, if I could find one to check in to, because I want to abdicate responsibility for all this. I'm so, so, so sick and tired of trying to figure it out an make the effort, I just want to check in somewhere and let someone else take charge. But I take your story as a warning not to do so, tempting as it might be. Thanks for staying in touch here and helping out people who aren't there yet.

[senseless]

Hi Dave,

Congrats on your success and thankyou for sharing, it provides much needed hope for the community. 

I was wondering if you could detail the progression of your sleep?

[ten0275]

@Shep

I'm truly grateful if my writing has a soothing effect. I know how important that is at all stages of the process. Thank you so much for the kind words, they mean a lot.

 

@HardTimes

I can very much appreciate what you are saying when you note that a driving force behind your urge to hospitalize is the abdication of responsibility. Well said. That is a lot of what it was for me. In my case, I was having such heavy-hitting intrusive thoughts of self and external harm, I just wanted to take my own power away because at that point, the fear caused me to not trust myself - at all. I wanted to give up whatever control I had left in the name of not having to own the suffering or the consequences of the suffering. It was the wrong choice for me to hospitalize once, let alone twice. It was completely fear-driven. I had to learn by getting burned in that case. It didn't sink me obviously, but it probably set me back a bit. I'm glad if what I wrote helped you to frame your own decision-making. It's nice to meet you, thanks for the good words. Hang in there, and keep up the good work.

 

@senseless

Thank you for the congratulations, I really do appreciate that. Sleep was a struggle for me very early, when the benzo and mirtazapine withdrawal were happening in destructive unison. I went through approximately 2 months where I was essentially netting zero hours of sleep. Basically my body would lose consciousness for about 10 to 20 minutes when it simply couldn't operate anymore and I'd snap (literally, an in-my-head audible snapping sound and muscle jerk) awake for another indeterminate time-frame.

 

After those couple of months, the sleep started to come back... slowly. When I was around 7.5.mg on the Remeron, I'd sleep well during periods of stabilization. Every time I would cut, I'd lose that stabilization and have low-sleep and sometimes no-sleep nights. Now an interesting thing for me - and perhaps it is the result of my laboriously slow taper - is that once I got below 2mg, the cuts didn't really effect my sleep any more. And when I jumped, sleep was not an issue. I couldn't believe that. I had braced myself for a bad round of sleepless nights post-taper and it never came. All this to say that as my nervous system would gain some semblance of equilibrium between cuts, the sleep would even out. And in fact, better sleep was a sign to me that I had in fact stabilized.

 

At this point, I still will have periods of poorer sleep if I am not careful with histamine intake. This is a leftover wound from the Mirtazapine and how it impacts the histamine receptors. But I try to be careful and usually that caution is rewarded with good results. If sleep starts falling off, I know I need to reign in the histamine again.

 

I hope this helps.

 

Hang in there,

Dave

Edited January 13 by ten0275
typo city

[Sheera]

Beautiful story ❤️

[ten0275]

@Sheera

 

I appreciate you taking the time to read my story, and check in. It means a lot.

 

Hang in there,

 

Dave