I Tried Naltrexone To Control My Drinking
By: Lizzee Bee
Tags: Alcohol, Addiction Treatment, Addiction, Personal Growth, Sobriety

I Tried Naltrexone To Control My Drinking

The result completely depended on my mindset

My inability to moderate my drinking has slowly increased as I have gotten older, to the point where it is no longer about trying to moderate in any way, shape or form, but instead to give up the booze completely.

This hasn’t really come as much of a surprise to me like just about every sober self-help book author or blog writer out there has come to the same conclusion.

The way alcohol affects our minds and our bodies makes it pretty much impossible for “problem” drinkers to moderate because once we have a drink, the rational, sensible part of our brain that promised that it would only have one drink switches to auto-pilot and says: “One more won’t hurt” or “Everyone else is drinking” or “It’s my birthday, why should I miss out?”, and moderation is thrown out the window — again.

Seeking help

During one of my frequent bouts of deep despair about my binge drinking and needing to reach out to something, anything, anyone for help, I finally admitted to my doctor that I was drinking too much. It was painfully embarrassing. I felt like such a loser — an educated, professional, middle-class, capital L loser.

While it surprisingly felt good to blurt out my shame, it was still one of the hardest things I have ever done. My doctor, luckily for me, was very matter of fact and pragmatic about it, assuring me that my situation was much more common than I would think and that things would get better just from having reached out. There were no soppy platitudes or furrowed brows, just a “take charge” attitude that was exactly what I needed.

I needed to hand myself over to someone else — like a child would want their parents to tend to their scraped knee. To trust that this well-groomed doctor who seemed to have it all together would wave a magic wand and “fix” me.

It wasn’t that simple

Her solution was through the prescription pad. Naltrexone was, apparently, what I needed. I was ecstatic. A savior in a little plastic bottle meant I didn’t have to try, I didn’t have to face my failure to moderate or quit over and over and over again. A pill a day and I would be cured, hallelujah!

Not quite.

It has been a long and bumpy road on and off Naltrexone over the past year and it is only recently that I am back on it with a vastly different attitude that I can see it’s potential.

Before then, I was kind of misusing it. Not because of a failure to read the instructions or because my doctor hadn’t explained it carefully enough, but more because I was actually kind of sabotaging myself. Who am I kidding, I was definitely sabotaging myself.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

What is Naltrexone?

Initially, Naltrexone was used to treat opioid addiction… Recovering addicts … no longer experienced the pleasurable sensations association with opioid use, and were therefore less motivated to continue drug abuse. It was discovered that the same was true for alcoholics - [Naltrexone] also suppresses the euphoria and pleasurable sensations of alcohol: https://www.addictioncenter.com/alcohol/naltrexone-for-alcoholism-treatment/"

But what I misunderstood about Naltrexone in my rush to be “fixed” is that I thought it would make me nauseous and throw up if I drank alcohol, thus stopping me in my tracks. That is not what it does. There is no severe response when you drink alcohol while on Naltrexone.

What would happen is that I would still drink but the usual anxiety about where my second (and third and fourth) drink was coming from would be lessened. There was no panicked gulping down of wine waiting for the effects to kick in. Instead, I could have just one, drinking it slowly, and then stop.

Except I didn’t. I would keep drinking.

Why? Because I wanted to get wasted. Because notwithstanding reaching out to my doctor and asking for help, I obviously wasn’t ready to commit 100% to stop like I desperately needed to. I did want to, but not enough.

Instead, I still had that desire to obliterate myself and not be “me”. To turn my brain off and ramble along pretending things were different, that I was different.

The trouble then was that because of the Naltrexone, it seemed to take longer and longer and more and more alcohol to get me to the state I wanted to be in, and so I would end up drinking more than I would have before.

So that was a fail.

Luckily I realized what was happening and that my misuse of the drug was causing me more problems than before I started it, and so I pushed it to the back of the cupboard and forgot about it and continued on my merry sporadic binge drinking way.

A few months later

After lots of ups and downs and false starts, I came across the Naltrexone and its repeat prescription (while probably looking for some paracetamol!).

Maybe I could try again? I had been having longer and longer of periods of sobriety and felt like I had had a mind shift towards getting bloody serious about ending the carnage that I was doing to myself.

So after a lot of thought about where I went wrong before and how I would need to change my approach if I was going to get any benefit from it, I started taking Naltrexone again.

And so far? So good. The combination of taking the medication and my stronger than ever determined to win this war has given me a sense of calm that I never had before. I can drink kombucha, or tonic or fancy Italian sparkling water when everyone else around me is quaffing champagne and I am OK. Previously I would have been feeling anxious to the point of panic and would have invariably given in and gotten stuck in. But not now.

Lesson learned?

So if you are contemplating taking Naltrexone, what you need to know is that while it may reduce the feeling of intoxication and the desire to drink more once you have a drink, it doesn’t magically just stop you drinking. It is not a miracle pill. You have to want to stop.

If like me when I was first prescribed it, you are simply not ready to honestly admit you have a problem that you are ready to seriously tackle, then no amount of Naltrexone will help because it does not reduce the cravings for alcohol. This is VERY important people — cravings are not reduced. Neither physical cravings or the mental associations with activities/people and drinking that can be our undoing.

If you are not 100% serious about giving up — if you are not truly at the pinnacle of wanting to change — then like me you will just drink your way through it, making the drug completely pointless. Not useless, but pointless.

But, once you are in the right place mentally it may be worth having a chat to your doctor about it. For me now it feels like a healthy, tangible back-up to my mental and emotional determination to beat the wine witch.

One pill a day, for each day at a time.