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How I got off hydrocodone, recovered from fibromyalgia, and got my life back

November 30, 2014 by Kristen Horner Warren
Filed under Blog

I spent nearly a decade suffering from debilitating pain and side effects from the drugs used to treat it. I was stuck — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — and I felt despair as I looked toward the future.

I am now 100% off all of medications and I feel ten times better than I ever did on the pills. I feel powerful and victorious, clear-headed and free. I love it when I fill out a form and can write “none” when I’m asked what medications I take. I am free of side effects and my body is MINE again!

If you are being held hostage by pain, insomnia, depression and/or the medications used to treat these conditions, I know where you’re coming from and I have felt your frustration and discouragement. I have solutions for you and can tell you with conviction borne of personal experience that there is hope.

This is my story.

My mother is a midwife, a nurse, and a very wise woman

One of my mother’s greatest gifts to me is a deep faith in the ability of the human body to heal itself and a conviction that our thoughts and beliefs affect that capacity (for good or for ill) more powerfully than anything else. My mother taught me this lesson from the time I was a little girl; it was as much a part of my upbringing as learning to say “please” and “thank you”. In retrospect I can see that my mom was way ahead of her time — thirty years ago belief in the link between the mind and body was definitely not the norm, especially among conventional healthcare providers like her.

This world view led me to degrees in nutrition and physiology and to eventually become a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist. At its essence, acupuncture is nothing more than a tool for strengthening and directing the body’s own self-healing capacity. Doctors of Chinese medicine have known for thousands of years what those at the very forefront of Western science are just now beginning to understand, namely that our feelings and beliefs have a profound effect on our physiology and that unresolved emotions are a primary cause of disease. These principles harmonize perfectly with what I knew from my earliest personal experience to be true.

Everything changed in a split second

The moment that everything changed

I was strong in this knowledge for the first two and a half decades of my life, but a frightening car accident in 2003 and its aftermath caused me to lose touch with this fundamental truth.

I had just completed six grueling years of graduate school and moved to Texas. One afternoon I was on my way to a ladies retreat with some friends when we were broadsided at high speed by a woman who ran a stop sign while talking on her cell phone. The force of the impact left the vehicle I was riding in upside down in a ditch and transformed my life forever.

In the months that followed, pain spread from my neck and back to my entire body. My hips, elbows, fingers, shoulders, and knees ached like I had the flu. Even my scalp hurt. The pain made it next to impossible to sleep. Even simple things like swallowing my meals was excruciatingly painful.

Eventually two specialists told me I had a clear-cut case of trauma-induced fibromyalgia. They emphasized to me that I would never again be free of pain. I was prescribed Vicodin, Flexeril, Lyrica, and Ambien and was told that I would need to take them every day. Indefinitely.

As a practitioner of natural medicine, I bristled at this notion. But living with the pain wasn’t an option either. Before the accident I had lifted weights, done yoga, run, and relied exclusively on natural medicine. Afterward carrying a grocery bag in from the car made it virtually impossible to get out of bed the next morning. The notion of facing a lifetime like this was discouraging to say the least.

The vehicle that caused the accident.

I was frightened and confused

I was still rattled from the shock of the accident itself and couldn’t get in a car without breaking out in a cold sweat. I needed to be able to keep up with my responsibilities as wife, mother, and healer and my pain was keeping me from doing that. The authoritative words of the doctors rang in my head, telling me that I needed to accept this as my new normal. My faith in myself and in the natural health care methods that had always worked for me in the past was shaken.

A small voice inside my heart tried to remind me that healing physically and emotionally from the accident might take time but that ultimately my body had the capacity to regain its equilibrium, but much louder outside voices disagreed. My physicians told me that fibromyalgia is an irreversible and often progressive condition. Stories that I found on the internet scared me to death — Google led me to dozens of stories of people who had lost their ability to work, had to apply for disability, and fell into desperate straights following injuries like mine.

So I swallowed my pride and swallowed the pills

Although the medications dulled my pain and gave me some much-needed rest, they made me tired and depressed. Even though I took them exactly as prescribed and never engaged in behaviors characteristic of addiction (such manipulative or dishonest behavior to obtain medications, using medication to manage emotional as opposed to physical pain, or unwillingness to discontinue medication even when it is no longer being used for a medical purpose), I felt the stigma of being dependent on pills and hated it.

At some level I began to doubt the medicine I practiced – every day I saw acupuncture and herbs bring about remarkable changes in the lives of my patients, but I had given up hope of those same means helping me. The awareness of this inconsistency nagged at me constantly.

Eventually I stopped talking about my pain because I was tired of it. I hated it when people would ask me if I was feeling better because I never was. My pride made it hard for me to accept sympathy or assistance, so it was only a small handful of people outside my family and my physicians who even knew about my struggle. I felt incredibly alone.

I put one foot in front of the other

I parented three young children and single-handedly started and ran a successful small business. My first marriage melted down and I carried myself through a difficult divorce. My second husband and I did the extraordinarily challenging work of blending our families and supporting my sons through the emotional fallout from my divorce from their father. I exhausted myself as I forged through all of this, never taking time off work and never pausing to grieve the things that I had lost or appreciate the things I had accomplished.

Weeks turned into months and months turned into years

For eight years I literally did not miss a single dose of my meds. Each time I tried to wean off of them my life (and the lives of my children and husband) came to a standstill because my pain roared back with such a vengeance.

My body was an unpleasant place to be so I retreated to inhabiting my mind. Although this tactic gave me some distance from my physical pain, it caused me to lose touch with simple sensory pleasures. I no longer enjoyed the feeling of a full belly after a good meal, the comfort of a cozy bed, the warmth of the sun on my face, or the pleasure snuggling with my children. I felt disconnected, discouraged, depressed, and stuck. Even though I had every appearance of success, my quality of life was nil.

Worries about the future nipped at my heels whenever I wasn’t busy with something else and the meds made my mind feel cluttered, like a house that hadn’t been organized and deep cleaned in years. I found myself wasting hours and days scrolling through my Facebook feed and wandering around the Internet, seeking to escape. I was snappy with my husband and kids and alternated between feelings of seething irritation and wracking guilt.

I had lost the ability to experience the simple pleasure of the sun on my face.

One day I woke up and knew that it was time to change

Marcus Aurelius said “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Well, I was ready to take back my power. I was sick of pain and most of all I was sick of pills.

I got a dog-eared old copy of The Mindbody Prescription off my bookshelf, re-read it, and began implementing the self-treatment protocol. I had first read this book about a year after my injury, but at the time I reacted with defensiveness and skepticism to its bold claim that the vast majority of pain has its origin in the mind and the emotions rather than in the body. Now, out of desperation, I was ready to be more open-minded.

I started an aggressive tapering schedule and weaned off my medications one at a time. I followed my own advice – I gave myself acupuncture three times a week, meditated, became religious about taking my supplements and herbs, took Epsom salts baths, and did Qi Gong daily.

I started forcing myself to do things I had avoided for years for fear of pain — moving boxes and furniture, exercising, spending the whole day on my feet doing chores, sleeping without my special pillows.

I discovered an ancient Chinese secret — I was in pain because I was a lot more pissed off than I realized

An excerpt from the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor.

I had never thought of myself as a particularly angry person, but as I worked through The Mindbody Prescription self-treatment protocol, I began to see that there was rage lurking around every corner in my mind.

As I unearthed these emotions, my meditation practice made it easier for me to be a neutral observer of what was going on and to simply notice that my pain would flare when I was upset but subside when I acknowledged my feelings and processed them (using Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT) rather than ignoring them.

Being in closer touch with my emotions required me to make some adjustments in my personal relationships. It meant saying “no” more often, beginning to break my lifelong habit of quietly nurturing resentments rather than confronting problems head-on, and getting comfortable with the notion that pleasing everyone and being happy all the time are impossible goals.

I realized that if I simply let myself feel what I was feeling, emotions moved through me and naturally changed — as everything in nature changes — and I was able to carry on without suffering ill effects. This was particularly true when I was getting frequent acupuncture and used EFT. I was surprised when I experienced how quickly my negative feelings lost their charge when I used EFT. I was stunned to find that, as the negative feelings dissipated, the pain did too. If, on the other hand, I resisted my feelings or dismissed them, my pain would flare almost immediately and I was stuck with the bad feelings to boot.

The realization that anger was causing much of my pain was a turning point in my recovery. Reading The Mindbody Prescription several times helped me to crystallize this recognition. According to Dr. Sarno, repressed emotions result in restriction of blood flow to muscles and nerves, resulting in unremitting pain, a condition that he has termed Tension Myositis Syndrome or TMS. The problem wasn’t “all in my head” — the pain was absolutely real — but the origin of the problem was in my mind.

Although he doesn’t realize it, Dr. Sarno’s hypothesis corresponds exactly to Chinese medicine concepts which date back over 2000 years. The Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor (written around 200 BCE) says “bu tong ze tong, tong ze bu tong” which translates roughly to “if there is no free [blood] flow, there is pain; if there is free [blood] flow there is no pain”. The same document states that emotions — not physical problems — are the primary cause of lack of free flow in adults.

All of these insights reinforced my sense of urgency about discontinuing my medications. Not only were the medications not fixing the problem – they were making it worse because they kept me convinced that my problem was (1) strictly physical and (2) had no cure. They were distracting me from the real solution, which was addressing my unconscious emotions and regaining faith that my body is healthy and strong.

I needed that conviction because stopping my medications was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done

My whole body howled in protest against the withdrawal of the medications that it had subsisted on for nearly a decade. My pain levels were through the roof, I was wide awake and pacing the floor in the middle of the night, and I was tense and on the verge of panic all the time. I was terrified that I wouldn’t hack it and would return to the pills with my tail between my legs. But this time things were different – I had to know what my life would be like without these drugs – and something (God, the angels, the Universe, whatever) was giving me the wherewithal to make that happen.

Thanks be to God that my husband and sons are patient and forgiving people because I can only imagine that I was awfully unpleasant to live with through this transitional time. The physical effects of withdrawal and the emotional effects of my new found resolution not to stuff my negative emotions rendered me a snarling bitch for a period of several weeks. (These were the times that I thanked my lucky stars that I am an acupuncturist. Like opening the valve on a pressure cooker, a few strategically placed needles left me decompressed, centered, and settled within myself, if only temporarily.)

After a hellish month of acute withdrawal, the dust settled enough for me to see that a lot of my pain had been CAUSED by my meds

“Opiate-induced hyperalgesia” is the big medical term for a dirty trick that medication plays on thousands of chronic pain patients, me included. Constant exposure of my nervous system to the drugs had turned the volume control on my pain to its loudest setting. With the drugs out of my system my pain quieted and my body became mine again. I started getting nights of sound and restorative sleep. This was a revelation and a delight.

Getting the medications out of my system enabled me to clearly recognize the emotional patterns that were contributing to my pain and also enhanced my confidence that my body had the capacity to regain its equilibrium and become pain-free. There is something incredibly empowering about no longer having to depend on something outside yourself in order to carry out basic life functions like getting out of bed in the morning, keeping up with day to day responsibilities, and sleeping at night.

The answers had been with me all along

For eight years my physical and emotional pain had distracted me too much to see what should have been patently obvious to an “expert” like me.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, through the whole exhausting ordeal all I had to do was click my heels three times and say “there’s no place like home”. Given half a chance, my body and mind had the ability to set things to rights, I just needed to get the damn medications out of the way so that my nervous system could function normally and so that I could see the relationship between my feelings and my pain clearly enough to do something about it.

The problem was that I had stopped listening to myself and given up my power

In retrospect I can see that I had an acute injury from the car accident that unnecessarily evolved into a chronic condition because of the messages that I was given by my health care providers, as well-intentioned as they were.

They told me that there was no cure, that typically people with my problem become progressively more and more disabled as they age, and that I needed to swallow my pride an accept that prescription medications and chronic pain were my lot in life. My pain and the stress that it caused made me vulnerable to these messages and I allowed them to penetrate to my deepest sense of self.

I know without a doubt that my doctors’ only goal was to help me, but I can see now they were operating with a tool set that was limited. Western medicine is just now beginning to understand the complexity and power of the link between the body and the mind but insights of those at the forefront of this research have not trickled down to the way pain is managed by physicians.

This experience has returned me home to myself

I am not completely pain-free (after all, I am nearly 40 and am still suffering the ill-effects of nearly ten years of inactivity), but I no longer have fibromyalgia and am back in touch with my Life Force. Rather than seeking distraction and escape from pain and the emotional ups and downs of life, I am present. From this place I can weather the storms of life — big and small — with equanimity.

I recognize that the path that I have taken in discontinuing all medications is not right for everyone. There is no shame in resorting to prescriptions when needed and I wholeheartedly support the right of chronic pain patients to access to narcotic pain medications. But for me, as difficult as it was, stopping medications was THE KEY to my recovery. It was only after the medications were out of the picture that I was able to have insight about the emotional dynamics behind my pain and regain my confidence in my body’s ability to heal itself. (Anyone interested in discontinuing their pain medication MUST consult with their prescribing physician about how to go about it safely.)

Having been through this experience, my passion for my work is stronger and my purpose is clearer. Helping people find relief from chronic and life-limiting conditions is not just a theory out of a textbook for me. It is first-hand, I’ve-been-there experience. If you are stuck — living a life that is limited by pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety, or any of the myriad of other symptoms associated with fibromyalgia and other types of chronic pain — please get in touch. I would love to share more details of my recovery with you and help you get started on your own journey back to health and full participation in your life.

Be well,

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