Celebrity Drug Rehab Profile: Jeff Conaway
Jeff Conaway is one of the celebrities on VH1’s Celebrity Drug Rehab, a popular new reality TV show that I’ve talked about here before. I’ve been doing celebrity drug profiles this year as a way to encourage you—either by an example to shoot for or by showing you how bad it can get—and it seems to make sense to do a celeb drug rehab profile on each of the celebs currently sharing their very painful experiences on national television.
The most painful of all for me to watch is Jeff Conaway. His withdrawal symptoms and pain are terrible, as is his ambiguity. As he stated in the last episode, he knew he didn’t want to continue to live the way he had been (that is, addicted to drugs) but he wasn’t sure he really wanted to be sober, either.
It’s a problem that many addicts have and, as Daniel Baldwin points out in their group meeting, it’s an oxymoron; you can’t have one without the other. If you’re sober, you have no hope of attaining the fleeting high that is the virtually nonexistent pot of gold in long-term addiction, and if you’re living in addiction, you’re sick and obsessed with trying to “get well.”
But watching Conaway go through the pain of withdrawal while still so completely “enmeshed,” as Dr. Pinsky says, in his relationship with his girlfriend highlights another aspect of drug addiction that is huge when present: codependency. When you are living in addiction with someone who is trapped in their own addiction, especially when the drug of choice is an opiate, it is even harder to disentangle yourself. Life without the drugs, life without the partner is unimaginable and with someone right next to you voicing out loud and acting out the doubts you have about getting clean, it makes it that much harder.
When you choose to take your sobriety into your own hands and treat your addiction at home with a Suboxone prescription, you can detox off of prescription painkillers and other opioid-based drugs with a minimum of the symptoms demonstrated by Conaway. He clearly has more going on with him as far as physical issues than just detoxing off of drugs, but it’s also true that those who spend years addicted to opiates lose the ability to fight pain naturally. That’s why it’s important for those who use Suboxone to detox off of painkillers which they use to manage chronic pain find a healthful, natural alternative to pain management, one that they integrate into their treatment along with the Suboxone.
At Meditox, a support team is available to help you find healthy, non-opioid-based pain management locally so that you won’t be tempted to fall back on opiates during your recovery. Now if only they had a cure for exes….
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