How to Live With an Opiate Addiction

Living with an opiate addiction is a difficult task to accomplish. Asking for help and learning how to cope with it is even harder. Sometimes, it may even seem your family and friends have abandoned you. There are certain steps you can take and places you can turn to for help. Always talk to your doctor for advice concerning the risks of opiate addiction before taking any course of action. Just keep in mind that it is possible to live with an opiate addiction, no matter how difficult it seems.

Instructions

How to Live With an Opiate Addiction

• 1

  Admit you have an addiction, first to yourself and then to someone else. This is the first step any addict must take. If an addict cannot admit she has a problem with addiction, there is no way to help her and no way to live with the addiction properly. You cannot force help on someone who does not want it.

• 2

  Ask yourself what you want to do about the opiate addiction. Do you want to get off opiates completely? Do you want to go on a maintenance program where you will take substitute medications to manage the addiction? Coming up with answers to these questions are the key in living with an opiate addiction.

• 3

  Talk to someone, a family member or anyone else you trust. Talk about how the problem of opiate addiction is affecting you and what you think you want to do about it. Tell them about the questions you asked yourself and the decision you have come to.

• 4

  Make an appointment to talk with your doctor. Doing so will cement the fact you want to get help. Making the appointment with your doctor will also show your family and/or loved ones that you are serious about the situation.

• 5

  Go to the appointment and talk to your doctor about the opiate addiction. Tell him how it makes you feel and what you think you want to do about it. Tell him about the questions you asked yourself and the answers, if any, you came up with.

• 6

  Follow your doctor's advice. No matter what the decision between you and your doctor, it is usually the best one because both you and your doctor agreed on it. Your doctor may send you to a treatment program on an inpatient or outpatient basis. She may recommend long-term maintenance medications.

• 7

  Join a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) group. Look in the phone book or online to find out where it hold meetings in your community. For long-term treatment of any addiction, attending regular Narcotics Anonymous meetings is pertinent to your recovery. Attending regular meetings will allow you to talk to like-minded people with the same type of addiction. Attending regular meetings also helps prevent relapse (using drugs again after a period of being clean). If you cannot physically make it to a NA meeting, there are online ones at all hours of the day. NAChatroom.org is a good place to find online meetings.

• 8

  Follow-up with your doctor on a regular basis, if you are on substitution medications, you will need to see your doctor at least twice a month or more for the duration of your treatment. If you are completely free of opiates, you will need to keep regular appointments for other reasons such as kidney and liver testing. When opiates are taken for an extended period, it can cause physical damage to these organs, among others.