IS VALIUM ADDICTIVE?…MY STORY

So to put it bluntly, my anxiety was really out of hand. When she would go out with her girlfriends to get some drinks on her girls night out, she would often leave her phone in the car since she could never hear in the bar, and she wears very tight jeans(she’s 24, and her in prime), so having the phone in her pocket would often be very uncomfortable for her(she has a blackberry, quite big phone so it would cut into her leg when sitting down). So, I would text her…and when I wouldn’t get any response…I would literally throw a fit, and bombard her phone’s inbox with 30+ text messages asking her why she wasn’t answering me, who was she with, accusing of her of being with another man and doing things with him, all the while she’s just out with her friends trying to have a good time. So when she could go outside for a cigarette, and go to her car and see her phone with 30+ text messages and 15 missed calls from me, she would assume something was wrong and would call me…and then I would flip out on her for not texting me. It got so bad that I would be so accusing and mean that it would make her cry, and ruin a completely fun night for her when she was doing nothing wrong. Also, every night this happened, I was invited by her to come out with her, but I always turned it down. I always would just say, "keep in touch every so often letting me know you’re ok, just a text every couple hours or so" and she would text me to say hi when she could, but it was never enough and I always started problems. It got in the middle of our relationship big time, and we actually broke up about 4 months ago, but have gotten back together since. The klonopin has made me stop worrying about her and what she’s doing entirely. When she goes out, I simply say "Have fun! and call me if you need a ride or if you’re coming over to the house afterwards, and if we text at all during that time, then great. If not, I’m usually not bothered anymore. Sometimes I find things sketchy, but the mind is a powerful thing and more times than not, when you have anxiety, if you think of something, or a certain scenario in your head for long enough, you actually begin to believe in it. Which is crazy.

The other part of the anxiety that really hurts is the social anxiety part. It’s almost impossible for me to sit up and speak to a group of people I don’t know. I could never do it in school when I was younger, and I still have a hard time doing it now. At all of my past job interviews, I would skate by by forcing myself and trying to block out the anxiety, and just answer questions as best I could. With my anxiety, answering on the spot questions I haven’t prepared an answer for is very hard for me. I often lock up and get stuck saying "Um..well..uh.." etc. When I go out to a social gathering somewhere, and I’m around people I don’t know very well, I find it basically impossible to put myself into a conversation because I would always feel like if I didn’t know the situation, if I joined the conversation, people would look at me and be like "huh?" and I’d feel foolish. If I go out, I have to be with someone(A wingman) or my girlfriend to feel comfortable. Unless of course I take klonopin beforehand, but then I can’t drink because I’ll risk blacking out, which is not safe nor is it fun. I already feel alcohol much more strongly with suboxone in my system, and it limits how much I can drink. I drink to obtain a small buzz, to "loosen" up. I’m not someone who drinks to get drunk. Just not my thing, as I don’t like being drunk and not being able to barely hold up my own weight, or lose most of my motor function. So the social anxiety is just as bad as the paranoia/insecurity with my girlfriend and faithfulness in our relationship.

So with all of that said, I really feel your pain when it comes to anxiety. I have not developed a dependence on Klonopin yet, because I’m very careful with how I take it now that I know what addiction is like with opiates. Another addiction is something I certainly am trying 110% to avoid…so I only take the klonopin when I know I’m going to need it. My doctor/psychiatrist will only write me for Klonopin though. I told him initially that before I was put on suboxone, I used to be prescribed 0.5mg xanax, twice a day, but he said he wouldn’t write me a prescription for xanax because of it’s addiction potential in comparison to other benzos, like Klonopin. He said Klonopin was the only benzo he would write me if I felt I really needed a benzo because it has a longer time of on-set and a much longer half-life/duration of action which would make it have less addiction potential, because it would eliminate having to dose multiple times throughout the day, unlike with xanax which has a short half-life, and a rapid onset, and if I have steady anxiety throughout the day, I would need to be taking it upwards of 3 or 4 times per day, which is something he didn’t want me having to do, as it’s the fast track to addiction. I had never tried Klonopin, but know people who have and have said it works great, and being that it’s a benzo like xanax, I figured why not give it a try.

So far it has worked well, although I do have some issues with it. One: The sedation is very apparent if I have to take two 2mg tablets in a day. Much more sedation than the xanax ever gave me. The xanax made me feel more "up" than down, while making me simply not care about much. It did have more memory loss associated with it than the klonopin does though. Another problem I have is, since the Klonopin really takes an hour or two to really start working, I have to know that I’m going to need it ahead of time. I don’t really like that. I would like to be able to take it once an episode starts, and have it work right then and there. It’s truly hard to know when an episode is going to start, and the Klonopin doesn’t knock out a panic attack like xanax does, although it does work better for prolonged anxiety throughout the day because of it’s long duration of action like I said. So those are my only issues.

My girlfriend really doesn’t like the fact that I take a klonopin because she knows they are addictive if abused, so I go out of my way to let her count them. She also doesn’t like it because of how drowsy they make me. When it’s getting late, and we are sitting on the couch watching tv, she’ll sometimes catch me zoning out, or almost dare I say it "nodding out" like I used to on opiates, if I had taken Klonopin earlier in the day. When she sees me like that, it reminds her of my opiate addiction and the hell we went through TOGETHER with that. She used to have to enable me. If I didn’t have money to get my DOC, she would often take money out of her checking account and give it to me, because it absolutely crushed her to see me withdrawaling and in so much pain. So she would RELUCTANTLY enable me in that regard. She also hated me looking so pale, with pin-point pupils, and practically falling asleep for 30 seconds at a time every 10 minutes or so. It’s a double edged sword though because she knows my anxiety can get pretty severe, and she’s been very happy with the fact that I am not insecure anymore when she decides she would like to go out with her girlfriends. I mean, I’ve always been insecure with her kind of because again, with the anxiety, my self esteem kind of sucks, and she is a VERY, VERY attractive red-head. She is by far the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been in a relationship with, and she smokes me in the looks department. It’s also been my longest and most serious relationship in all my years of dating. We are planning to get engaged as soon as we get our own apartment in the spring/early summer of 2012, but we’ve been acting as if we were a married couple ever since we started dating. We never took things slow, we jumped in full speed because we knew we both found exactly what we were looking for in a partner. It was one of those "too good to be true" moments, but it was really true lol.

The other thing though is that like all benzos, tolerance develops quickly, and it has for me with Klonopin. I started out at 0.5mg twice per day, and after 4 months I am at 2mg twice per day because it simply doesn’t have the same "anxiety killing" potential that it used to have when I first started it. So far the 2mg knocks out it out when I have an episode, but once that starts not having the same effect, I’m not sure where to go from there. I’ve come to realize that benzodiazepins are simply "what works" for my anxiety issues, and I’ve tried so many other methods. I’ve been to a therapist(still see one for both my substance abuse, and behavioral issues), I’ve tried other medications like Effexor, Vistaril, which are non narcotic anti depressant/anti anxiety medications to no effect. The effexor would calm me down slightly if it was really bad, but it would never take it away. I would still have 1000 thoughts racing through my mind, sweaty palms, pacing, bouncing my leg up and down whenever I sat. It would do nothing for my social anxiety either. Benzos are simply the only thing that has worked.