How it's Possible to FORGET Withdrawal

I think it got better because I forgot about it . . .

Introduction

There’s a fascinating story about a Greek immigrant in America named Stamatis. He was told he had terminal cancer with six months to live. So he went back to his home island of Ikaria to die. But instead he reimmersed himself in a tight-knit community, planted a garden, worked contently in nature every day, and ended up living over a hundred years old. He was interviewed and asked how he survived terminal cancer. And he just shrugged his shoulders and said I don’t know I guess forgot to die. 

The implication is that the joie de vivre —the joy of life— gave him the will to live on. Now if that’s really the case I don’t know. Still, it makes some sense to me because while I had nothing life-threatening I did have soul-destroying protracted withdrawal sensations and chronic pain and I think the reason they went away is because I forgot about them. I forgot I was supposed to experience them—that’s how they resolved for me. Now I didn’t have a Greek paradise with a low-stress easy-going community in one of the Blue Zones but there are other ways of forgetting that I can talk about today.

Hi welcome to my Substack I’m Gustav and I talk about how it’s possible protracted withdrawal sensations are a learned syndrome caused by emotional stress and our belief there’s something wrong with us. Now I’m not a medical professional but in my experience withdrawal sensations can completely resolve by addressing the emotional tension that maintains the sensations we’re feeling. This is, by the way, a non-pathologizing view of emotions; it’s natural to have emotions.

Now today’s subject is how protracted withdrawal sensations can almost literally be a bad memory that we keep remembering over and over again and also how it’s possible to forget this memory so that the sensations go away. Now we might not suspect that memory can be involved in lingering withdrawal sensations. Often it’s thought there’s a drug-related injury and there’s nothing we can do about it. But when sensations go on and on this tends to make less and less sense—at least it did to me. 

An alternative explanation, what’s been discovered in chronic pain and related research of mysterious syndromes, is that something like withdrawal sensations can be learned by the nervous system over a period of time. And this happens when withdrawal brain pathways fire again and again to the point that they can get wired into the brain’s circuitry. It’s a form of learning and when we learn something it’s stored in memory. So when we experience protracted withdrawal sensations we’re recalling a memory, we’re viscerally reliving the past. Now sometimes we develop new sensations because our memory isn’t perfect. Our mind just knows we’re supposed to experience something scary. It’s like having a recurring nightmare, the details might change, but it’s basically the same nightmare. 

So if withdrawal is a memory then why do we keep reliving it?  Why do we keep dreaming it? What activates it? And how can we forget this withdrawal memory so that it goes away?  

Remembering Withdrawal

Now before I get into how people remember withdrawal I’ll just say some people seem to experience these sensations all the time and others experience them in a pattern of waves and windows. Now the conventional explanation of waves and windows is the nervous system is somehow healing itself with this pattern. And for people this works for, that’s great, but personally I’ve never really seen this as an explanation that makes total sense to me.

People have non-linear recoveries from many things beyond psychiatric drugs that are explained differently. In persistent pain, for instance, people have flare-ups and flare-downs on their road to recovery but no one’s like oh I’m having a flare-up, my brain must be healing a lot right now. No one really thinks that. So why is this flare-up happening? Or if it’s happening all of the time why could that be?  Well I think there are at least three things involved that help us to remember withdrawal sensations. 

1. Emotional Stress

The first thing that can make us remember withdrawal is emotional stress. A lot of mysterious syndromes have now been found to be caused by an ongoing stress response. In acute withdrawal there’s a danger signal that goes off in the brain and we feel withdrawal sensations. If we’re scared or stressed out at that time we can reinforce that danger signal so it keeps going and going and going until it’s learned. And what fires together wires together and so if we’re experiencing stress with withdrawal sensations they can wire together. So if we get stressed in any way in our lives then we might get withdrawal. I think this explains one way why withdrawal can activate or worsen with stress. Now sometimes withdrawal sensations might be remembered out of the blue when we don’t feel stressed. This could happen for a few reasons.

One of which is that deep down inside us we might be really upset about something or angry about something—and that’s what keeps activating this danger signal that recalls withdrawal sensations. John Sarno talked a lot about the role of repressed emotions and how these powerful emotions can get wired to this danger signal as well because everything in the mind is connected. All our memories of feeling unsafe can get connected. In other words we might be really emotionally tense and even if we don’t always feel that way consciously there can be emotions percolating beneath the surface making the mind feel unsafe.

2. Conditioned Response

The second thing that can make us recall withdrawal memories often out of the blue is conditioned responses. Our brains operate with something theorized as predictive coding: our minds are constantly trying to predict what is going to happen next. The mind does this so it doesn’t have to build a new model of reality every time we experience something, so if it can just use what’s already programmed in here, that’s more efficient. For us then this means that our minds can learn to predict when we’ll experience withdrawal sensations and actually make them happen. The mind might think for, instance, oh it’s morning so it’s time for withdrawal sensations to be remembered. This is because maybe we had acute withdrawal one morning that left an impression on us or some stressful unconscious mind activity was going on before we woke up—and remember our stress can create withdrawal sensations because they’re wired together—so if we wake up one morning with withdrawal sensations then the brain learns that’s the way things are supposed to be in morning. Maybe we go online and other people are experiencing a bad time in the morning as well and this reinforces this idea. And then we re-live every day like Groundhog Day because that’s what our brain is expecting. I used to wake up in the night and my arm was numb. It happened for years. I wasn’t sleeping funny it was a conditioned response. Now, similarly, withdrawal sensations can also be associated with people or concepts or food or exercise or what have you. So we might not feel any conscious emotional stress at all then suddenly a conditioned response happens and we go back into the withdrawal dream.

Now if we’re feeling withdrawal sensations all the time then maybe the mind is predicting withdrawal sensations all the time. It’s just become its habit. So they might feel constant because the mind is stuck in a feedback loop of fear and anticipation of sensations. In this case it might it might feel like we’re stuck in a timeless void, like we’ve fallen into some eternal suffering. Now if this is what the mind is predicting and we believe it—that’s very important that we believe this is an accurate prediction, that this is our inevitable fate—well that leads me to my final point of remembrance here.

3. Believing We’re Drug Damaged

When withdrawal sensations are happening and they’re so scary and we don’t know why we can assume that we’re physically damaged in some way. And if our interpretation is that something is seriously wrong with us, this reinforces this danger signal, this stress response. So our meaning-making, how we make sense of our situation, can be very important in maintaining mysterious sensations that go on and on. If we think then that we have protracted withdrawal syndrome and there’s nothing we can do, that the only healer is time, then what is the mind going to predict? It’s going to predict withdrawal. We’re helping fulfil this prediction, we’re feeding into the prediction of withdrawal and suffering when we believe this. We’re buying into the withdrawal nightmare as our reality as opposed to understanding it as a bad memory, a nightmare. But it’s possible to wake up and forget this dream or have only the vaguest memories of it. That’s certainly how I feel now when I try to remember my previous withdrawal experiences, I have to make an effort to try to remember them—and I don’t want to do that anyway—but the point is that they’re such a distant memory that they’re now forgotten.

Forgetting Withdrawal

Forgetting painful things is something humans long to do. Think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a very popular film based on the idea that’s possible to go into the mind to delete specific painful memories. Now the film also shows all the negative implications of that but I’m sure if I could have deleted withdrawal memories, the sensations I was experiencing at the time, I certainly would have. But in reality, intentional forgetting is quite hard to do. In fact the harder we try to forget, the more we might remember. It’s like saying don’t think of a pink elephant which paradoxically might make people picture that in their heads. Sometimes what we resist might persist. 

So in our situation what I mean is if we’re trying too hard to forget, that is, if we’re trying hard to “fix” ourselves, if we’re in constant problem-solving mode, if we’re researching frantically about what’s wrong with us, this will only reinforce the danger signal that’s remembering the sensations. It’s keeping the nightmare going. Alternatively the more we avoid things: I can’t do this, I can’t eat that, all the people on forums saying I did x and it made me worse, the more we get away from immersing ourselves in the world, living our desired lives, the more we get away from ourselves. Ultimately we get so focused on withdrawal sensations that we can forget ourselves, we forget who we are, what our purpose is, the people in our lives, what we want to do. All of that and more.

So the way to forget withdrawal is to remember ourselves. We forget withdrawal by remembering ourselves. It’s a process where we forget the sensations because they’re not a natural part of us, they’re distracting us from ourselves. In fact once we stop caring about the sensations that’s when we forget them. So how do we remember ourselves to do this?

1. Remembering our Health

For one we have to remember that we’re healthy. As far as I know protracted withdrawal sensations are medically unexplainable. Most of us get checked out by physicians and nothing is found wrong with us. Yes, there are awful experiences and even visible things, like I had skin problems, but it was not caused by anything fundamentally wrong with me. It’s just a stress response. So in remembering that we’re healthy this counteracts the danger signal, the stress response that’s making us believe something is wrong with us.

Now to do this sort of self-remembering we might have to forget about internet-constructed identities like I have protracted withdrawal syndrome and other related identities that might be holding back our authentic selves from reemerging. I’ve heard it said before those of us who tend to get withdrawal sensations or whatever mysterious sensations the longest are the ones who become “experts” on what’s wrong with us. We self-diagnose and hold on so tightly to this idea that something is seriously wrong with us and there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe that idea needs to be forgotten so that we can remember that we’re fundamentally healthy. 

2. Remembering What’s Happened to Us and That We’re Now Safe

Now what we can also do to remember ourselves is acknowledge the events that have happened in our lives that have made us feel unsafe. Our reactions to these events might have generated some really powerful emotions keeping this stress response going that maintains withdrawal sensations. And sometimes we’re not aware of all this because emotions can be repressed because they’re too painful to deal with. This is a massive part of John Sarno’s concept The Mindbody Syndrome.

So when we focus on withdrawal sensations, become distracted by them, we miss the message coming from our nervous systems, from the sensations, that we’re really upset about something. That’s the message. Something is not right. But by receiving this message we remember ourselves, we remember our life experiences and how they can affect us. Maybe it’s something from our past, maybe something more recent. I always talk about my rage toward psychiatry. The mind wants us to hear its message, it wants to be comforted. Self-compassion is huge here. We can remind the mind it’s safe to have emotions and that this danger signal can be turned off. And, again, this is a process, I’m not suggesting we can just forget about these sensations right away. It takes time to forget them because it takes time to understand the message.

3. Remembering We’re Conditioned Creatures 

Now another thing we might need to remember is that we can have conditioned responses. So if we find ourselves routinely reacting negatively to something, we forget ourselves if we always pass it off as protracted withdrawal as opposed to understanding we have a hypersensitized nervous system because we’re under constant stress. We’ll have lots of adverse reactions if we’re stressed out and scared of everything. That’s just what will happen. But when we become aware that our minds are predicting danger, again, we can talk to our minds and say yes I know you think this is dangerous but it’s actually safe. I’m safe. Alternatively if we notice our conditioned thoughts when we have sensations saying something is wrong with us we can tell our minds that we don’t need to go down that route again. We can receive the message we’re in danger and remind the mind, no it’s actually okay. Or we can read or listen to Sarno book or a particular TMS book or podcast or video that you like, and get this message in there. Again and again. We’re reteaching our minds.

4. Remember How to Live and Ultimately Forgetting

Finally I think we might have to remember the stuff we like to do and get back to doing things we used to find fun and enjoyable. Back to human relationships. Back to activities. Once I started learning about these mindbody concepts and started to understand them I could use them to give myself some confidence to get return to my life. I could then start, to some degree, getting lost in activities again. It’s great to have activities that are second nature that you can lost in. I would start to do this and then after a while I would suddenly remember oh I haven’t had any withdrawal sensations or pain for the last hour. So for me the resolution of these sensations wasn’t so much that I noticed withdrawal sensations going away as they were going away. It was more noticing in retrospect. I started to forget about them. This is how it happened, I just started to forget about them as I was living life. And each time I forgot them the withdrawal memory faded away more and more. It was no effort to forget them. The effort was toward remembering who I was and returning to living. And as time went on I stopped caring about them. And then I stopped even noticing whether I had withdrawal sensations at all because I’d moved on. It was over. It was forgotten. And all that remained was myself.

Conclusion

So to bring this back around, I didn’t realize I’d be talking for this long, but when I think about this Greek guy with terminal cancer who says he forgot to die, well, I think maybe he forgot to die because he remembered how to live. And when we learn to remember ourselves, remember how we want to live and do it, I think it’s possible to forget the stuff antagonistic to living like protracted withdrawal sensations. So I hope that might provide some idea of how this is possible and I wish you the best in your process of remembering yourself. I think this process of remembering ourselves can be essential to the resolution of protracted withdrawal sensations. At least it was for me.