PAWS question
Hello! I don't know if anybody here would know this, but I couldn't find any answers when doing research so I thought I would give it a try.
Is PAWS exclusively connected to substance use? I'm wondering because I've more or less had addiction issues as far back as I can remember. It was behavioral when I was a kid, and then drugs and alcohol got tacked on as I was older, but I can say with certainty that my brain's reward pathways were shot from the beginning and I didn't exactly help the cause.
Recently I started making attempts to get proper sober, but I was still maintaining some of my other addictive behaviors. I noticed what resembled PAWS symptoms, but it wasn't until I had to cold turkey quit all of my behaviors for health reasons that I totally lost all motivation and all ability to feel pleasure. I didn't have much of that to begin with, but I'm operating at 0% and it's ruining my life. I've tried sunlight, exercise, goal-setting, therapy, various medications, and every other piece of advice I've been able to find.
I'm only staying afloat because of a system I built that enforces it (ironically my OCD is what's helping me) but I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. If it could be PAWS, that would give me a little bit of hope knowing there's a general recovery timeline and would also help me zero in on useful resources. If that's not plausible, at least I can move on to the next thing.
I kind of only recently acknowledged my issues and started working on them, so if I've used any incorrect terminology or am misguided in other ways, please correct me. Thank you for your help, and good luck to everyone else here working through their own addictions.