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Action

In the action stage, the person has actually made the change. Their constant preoccupation will be whatever they are not doing and it’s phenomenally hard to think about anything else. There may also be issues to do with physical withdrawal, cravings and a yearning for the old behaviour. Everything is difficult and the only solution that will make it better is the thing forbidden.

• ‘I am getting through it minute by minute but it’s a battle.’
• ‘Giving up smoking is a full time occupation.’ (attributed to C.S. Lewis)

Depending on what drugs were being done and the pattern of use, there may be withdrawal symptoms or psychological symptoms as brain chemistry readjusts. They will certainly experience cravings.
One of the most common things said by people talking about the time when they were dependent is that they stopped developing emotionally – dependency has been described as a kind of re-ordering or stopping of time. Gerda Reith* noticed that in “interviews conducted with ‘ex-opiate addicts’ the state of addiction was described as a period of ‘lost time’ characterized by an inability to envisage the future. The recovery from addiction was expressed as a re-animation of the future and an ‘awakening’ from the previous state of present oriented temporality into a state in which temporality is experienced conventionally. “
When people come off Benzos, apart from the withdrawal, there is a re-experiencing of the emotions that were blocked or swamped by the drug – this can be hideously distressing and requires a lot of reassurance and faith from the worker. Anecdotally, similar things seem to happen with other drugs that have been used in similar ways.
When problematic use began very early on, the person will not have experienced adult life without the drugs or drink. As a result they may not have acquired a lot of usual adult skills and have an exaggerated idea of what is available or feasible for most people. This will mean that there may need to be a lot of work required to develop a range of life skills and to manage expectations of what life is like. Everyone gets bored, stressed, frustrated and angry. Monday evenings are dull. Learning to handle these difficult emotions and boring situations without the drug is essential.
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* Reith, G. (1999). In search of lost time: Recall, projection and the phenomenology of addiction. Time and society, 8(1), 99–117. cited in Suzanne Fraser, The chronotope of the queue: Methadone maintenance treatment and the production of time, space and subjects, International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 17, Issue 3, , June 2006, Pages 192-202.