Should I cut or stay still?

[[Sh...]]

Have other people really had a situation in their taper where they were not stable at a certain dose for a long time but they finally made a cut anyway and they actually got more stable or didn't get any worse? The reason is because I have been at .35mg of ativan for almost 4 months now with no stability at all...a couple of day or 2 windows but for the most part feel scared and horrific (I know I have posted similar questions before so I appreciate you bearing with me ). I wonder if it is true that if I keep going down anyways that things will improve and if I stay here they wont? I really can't deal with it getting much worse so this is a scary decision for me. Any thoughts or ideas would be great!! I know i have been told on here that this can happen and I really appreciated that but if people could give me personal experience or what they have read or heard from others that would reallllllly help.

Thanks

Sean

[[Sh...]]

Has anyone waited along time to reach a point of some stability before cutting when they have hit a wall?

[[On...]]

Shift,

 

From my reading on the subject, the issue I see with all benzodiazepines is that even at a steady does, no matter what that dose is, even very, very low doses, in time habituation occurs and the withdrawals can follow for most people. With that said, it would not surprise me that if most everyone that steps down their dose would most certainly have withdrawals of varying degrees at all levels of receding dosages, some more than others. In -other-words, theoretically after a given point your withdrawals could become worse the longer you stay at each level as your body continues to demand more.

 

I think that cutting down at the levels as the Ashton Manual indicates would almost always be the prudent and best choice for getting free of the hold from benzodiazepine. I really do think that achieving a "soft-landing" may very well be rarely had, something that the Ashton Manual only seems to briefly state. I believe that for most each descending step will be different in severity and even types of symptoms.

 

It seems that for a drug such as benzodiazepine to be so physically addictive at such low doses, especially from long-term use, it would seem that the drug works algorithmically in random sequences or levels of effectiveness, in that the higher the dose appears not to be incrementally even in it's effects on the body. That seems to be the case when going up in dose as well as down, not to say that higher doses do not have a drastically different effect. What I'm trying to say the effective curve on this drug appears to ramp immediately at the lowest of doses and gradually climbs thereafter, so it's tough to say what the next "cut" will do, if anything.

 

I can understand your apprehension as to what lies around the corner and I don't know at what quantities you're are making your cuts with Ativan, but perhaps you can make them smaller using a "razor blade"? I'm not sure if this could help at all, since I had cold turkey'd off my Valium at the end of January of this year? Is it possible for you to switch over to a longer equivalent half-life of Valium to help you finish out the taper? I'm just guessing by what I've read on that one.

 

I don't know if this is any help or not?

 

 

[[Be...]]

How were you before your taper? If you were in tolerance withdrawals Ashton suggests that, unfortunately, the best solution may be to grit your teeth and press forward. Maybe you could move to a method such as water titration to allow for smaller incremental cuts and see how you feel (though just moving to water titration itself may seem like a fairly major cut).