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Sahara Flores
Professor Jacobs
PSYC 2301
October 24, 2018
Bio: Unexpected Addiction
It seems that every day on the news you hear about some Hollywood
celebrity or athlete star having an addiction problem, whether steroids, alcohol, or
painkillers. You think it can never happen to you because your life is fine and you
can deal with you own issues. But now I understand addiction because I developed
one of my own, and I had to struggle to free myself from it. In the process I learned
a few things about myself.
There’s no good reason I should have developed an addiction, because I had
a basically good life with stable, loving father. I was raised by a single father for
the most part, he remarried my senior year of high school, and he did a great job.
We were always close. I remembered when my mother left(I was seven years old)
with my sister so, that left me and my brother with my father we made a deal that
we were going to be a team and stick together. It was just the three of us and he
worked very hard to put food on the table and buy us the things we wanted but he
couldn’t afford. Of course we had our fights, especially when I was teenager, but
he always a mixture of a good friend that I liked to talk to, plus a parent who taught
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me right things to do. I made mistakes(everyone does), but at the end of the day we
watched out for each other. One time I heard my neighbors gossiping about him,
and I marched right up to them and told them to stop because they had no idea
what he went through. He actually punished me for being rude to the neighbors but
when he got sick a couple of years later he told me he was proud of me for doing
that.
It was when he was diagnosed with cancer that I fell apart and started having
problems I had never had before. I was 16 and in high school, and I thought I could
handle my father’s health problems. But I fell apart, I was crying all the time. I
kept thinking what if I lose him but I had to be strong and take care of my brother.
I couldn’t study, I couldn’t eat, and worst of all I couldn’t sleep. I was exhausted
and having panic attacks. I was a total mess, but I refused to go to a counselor
because I thought I could deal with my problems all on my own. Well, I was
wrong about that.
Then my aunt, my father’s sister, came to visit me and my brother. It took
one look at me and said how awful I looked. She had a prescription for a
tranquilizer called Ativan (also called lorazepam) and she gave me some pills to
help me sleep. I took one and it work incredibly well. It relaxed me and I fell
asleep, and woke up the next day after sleeping about 15 hours. I also felt much
less upset so I went to the doctors and asked for a prescription. He gave it to me
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but said he would only do it if I went to a counselor also. So I took the pills twice a
day for three months and they really helped me. The problem was they also took
away my energy. And talking about everything with my high school counselor
(Jul...
