Personal opinion: just waiting it out doesn't do the trick

[[B1...]]

Hello all.

I continue to make big strides in my recovery. I accredit most of those strides to really engaging with my recovery and dealing with my pre-existing issues and current issues via therapy. I have kept my distance from BenzoBuddies for a while because I could not read anymore "just hold on" or "wait" anymore. Especially when it comes to issues like intrusive thoughts. There are things that can be done to change your relationship to this symptom that makes it much easier to deal with and that licensed professionals can help with - without getting a labeled slapped on you. And I am speaking as someone who has OCD so I will likely deal with intense intrusive thoughts for the rest of my life, not just during withdrawal. This suggestion to simply wait it out is not something I see as much on other forums. I wonder why there is not a lot of advocacy for therapy (with a non-benzo prescribing psychologist, not psychiatrist) or not a lot of encouragement to deal with the issues that lead people to benzos in the first place? I know there are certain symptoms for which therapy is useless, such as Akathisia, but issues such as anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, looping thoughts, OCD or OCD symptoms, panic attacks,  cognitive distortions etc - therapy can be very useful for. They may not eliminate the symptom, but changing your relationship to them can make a world of difference. For me, shifting from a state of victimhood to a state of agency has been monumental. I suppose I am here as an example to say not everything is benzo withdrawal for everyone. A lot of mental symptoms are pre-existing and amplified to the max during withdrawal. For some people it is entirely withdrawal, and I am not denying that, but I hate to see people suffering and just told to wait it out. If I had followed the (very well intentioned!!) advice of people who helped me in the beginning, I do not think I would be where I am today in terms of my recovery. It is just my two cents and just my experience and I wonder what others have to think about this. I believe that time is the ultimate healer when it comes to benzo withdrawal, but therapy is the healer when it comes to dealing with pre-existing issues. 

I would like to state that I appreciate every single person who has shown me kindness and support here and I cannot thank the MODs enough for the work they put into continuously providing hope for those of us in the trenches. This post is not a bashing of anyone on particular and especially not the MODs. I love you all. 

Sending you all lots of love and healing in the world. Regardless of how you get there. ❤️

[[kl...]]

Very good post. Wish you continued success with therapy!

[[Ta...]]

Yes, therapy can be a very useful healing modality if you are cognitively well enough to synthesize the information. Once I got through the worst of my acute-protracted-BIND (still dealing with these heavily I might add) I brought in my old therapist and her helpfulness and strategies has been such a wonderful support to me over the years. I am so grateful to her. But also for me, the passage of time and allowing my neurotransmitters and synapses to heal has ultimately been the best healer for me but often we need tools to get us through to find out what may have been pre-existing and what are symptoms of the brain injury. 

[[B1...]]

Totally! I'm not discounting time entirely. As I said the brain physically needs to heal as well and for that time is the best medicine, I just think that telling people consistently to just wait it out may not be the most helpful approach when someone is physically able to speak to a professional. I'm so glad you were able to find healing with your therapist AND time. ❤️

[[ro...]]

How long before you could process and handle therapy? I can not handle it. I have a therapist I see to help reassure me and process the insanity of this injury but I can not engage enough or understand therapy to work on past issues. I feel so stuck and doomed. It has been over 15 months since I was ct’ed 

[[ve...]]

Nearly 8 years here.

My issues are related to the functional and possibly structural (the jury is still out) brain damage, which has left me with horrible cognitive and memory damage, so yeah, unfortunately therapy is of zero help for my symptoms. That's not to say there's not value in therapy, however. 

But I agree with the sentiment of the OP. I don't want to hear "everyone heals in time" because, frankly, I think that's just a crock of feel-good BS. It is also entirely unknown to what extent peoples brains CAN recover from this. We have zero- I repeat, ZERO- clinical trials that have looked at long-term outcomes of patients withdrawn from a benzodiazepene. We also have very limited data regarding the functional changes the brain has made in the face of this new drug-insult. Everyone takes Heather Ashton's n=1 experience as a clinician as Truth with a capital-T. "Heather Ashton herself has said that she thinks everyone eventually heals 100%!" God, I am sick and tired of hearing that. First off, her actual take on this point was not so black and white. She herself acknowledged that while most of her patients claimed to eventually recover, in the subset of stubborn cases (aka protracted individuals), the long-term outcomes seem to be less clear. And she was always the first to say that there is simply not enough research to say one way or the other whether or not some people will be left with permanent damage. Second, Heather Ashton was just that... a clinician. She was not a chemist. She was not a neurologist. She was not a pharmacologist. She was a clinician. Of course, that is going to give her a sense of just how bad off people are when dealing with this phenomenon, and give her a general idea of most peoples improvement timelines. But she was not in the lab, giving benzo-dependent rats a radio-tagged isotope and then euthanizing said rats to evaluate tissue perfusion/distribution, or conducting Morris water-maze research on rats who had been withdrawn from bnenzos several years prior to try and look for spatial memory/cognitive deficits, or ANYTHING like that. She was seeing patients in a private practice setting.

She is NOT the person(s) who are going to tell us definitively whether or not certain people are left permanently damaged. That's not how we do things in the sciences. The people who are going to tell us definitively whether or not people can be permanently damaged from this, are the people who are actually looking at the tissues and systems in question. It's neurologists, pharmacologists, and biochemists. It's not clinicians. Not even clinicians who have seen hundreds or even thousands of benzo patients. That is NOT how we determine whether there is a possibility of permanent damage, and if Heather Ashton were here, she'd be the very first person to tell you that. We need studies that look at functional and structural brain changes in vivo (not in a test tube), and actually analyze brain areas (neurotransmitters, synapses, cortical columns, etc) to look for any changes/damage. We'd have to settle for rats, because obviously there are moral and ethical issues when it comes to dissecting actual brains, from actual humans who were withdrawn from benzos. But even working with rats could tell us SO MUCH more than we currently know about what is going on in the brain in benzo withdrawal/BIND/PWI.

So, frankly, I'm over the whole "Heather Ashton said it, so it's true!" thing that seems to be so prevalent around here. There is no evidence that everyone will eventually return to their pre-withdrawal state. In fact, the very limited studies that are available seem to suggest the opposite... basically all human studies (which themselves are only epidemiological, but still) have found people that are still struggling, even at the 18 months or 2 year mark, and go on to recommend that longer-term studies are needed to determine the outcomes of those individuals.  So in fact, the published literature seems to indicate that there is potentially permanent damage in a small subset of people who were the hardest hit. It's not conclusive, far from it. But if you're going to look at all the published research that's currently available, a quick summation of that research would leave you with the impression that permanent damage IS possible, not with the impression that "time heals us all!!!"

Edited December 1, 2023 by [ve...]

[[Ed...]]

On 22/08/2023 at 21:28, [[B...] said:

A lot of mental symptoms are pre-existing and amplified to the max during withdrawal. For some people it is entirely withdrawal, and I am not denying that, but I hate to see people suffering and just told to wait it out.

I feel that B1rdie's point about PRE-EXISTING symptoms is extremely important. Benzos are given to suppress pre-existing conditions. Bizarrely, it is too often suggested that  these conditions that existed before the benzo was ever taken will somehow eventually disappear after the benzo is out of the system. That makes no sense at all.

A long suppressed, untreated morbidity doesn't simply go away after the benzo is gone. If anything, it may be worse for the lack of needed psychological attention all that time or from physical damage done to the system by the benzo.