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OCR
4. USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS ® 63 experience of SC use can be treated as a particular type of trauma. The effect of SC is inverse: the users’ motives for consumption and relaxation have pleasurable effects, but after a short time they experience the opposite. The drug destroys them and strips them of a sense of self: ,,totally destroys our soul”. The post traumatic condition is characterized by lost sense of self and destroyed identity where competence is paralyzed (A. Ehlers & Clark, 2000). The retreat from social connections and disinterest in everyday life as described by the participants: ,,It turns you inward’, reminds us of the compulsive characteristics of traumatic experience (A. Ehlers & Clark, 2000). The elimination of the everyday routine of SC users evokes the alienation that follows trauma (Pintér, 2014), because one effect of trauma is to alienate the survivor in his or her world (Herman, 2003). Another trait of SC use that is related to trauma is self-disgust: ,,I felt disgusted... I hated myself”, similarly to the appearance of shame among trauma survivors (Herman, 2003). The representation of experiences derived from drug use are incoherent, unstructured, and disorganized, similarly to the narratives of trauma (Ehlers et al., 1998; A. Ehlers & Clark, 2000; Foa & Rothbaum, 1998). The self-deterioration, the lost sense of identity and the experience of drug use reported by SCs users are similar to the experiences of heroin users. Experiences reported by heroin users - such as retreat from the world, and the emergence of the ,,addict lifestyle” where the drug becomes the most important thing that becomes the only thing that can give them relief but that simultaneously deprives them of identity and humanity (Barros, 2012) — were also reported by participants in this study. Nevertheless, the organization of experiences due to the absence of a positive user self, lack of turning points, and sense of control are different. With psychoactive substance users, as experiences change from positive to negative, identity changes in parallel from positive to negative (J. McIntosh & McKeganey, 2000). As a result of the rapidly appearing negative effects of SCs, no positive identity relates to the consumption of the drug, so the transformed self will be based on negative experiences and therefore will not be part of an emptied identity. The use of psychoactive drugs gives a sense of control at the beginning (Barros, 2012), but later the recognition of fake control leads to the ,,rock bottom” (J. McIntosh & McKeganey, 2000). However, neither at the beginning nor in the later stages does SC consumption give a sense of control, so users try to control their transformed self by the user self. This experience relates to the one that was previously described at the study by Van Hout and Hearne (2016), where the craving and acute physical withdrawal symptoms were resolved by resumed smoking of SCs. Due to the transformative effect of SC, participants in our study experienced drift and vulnerability; thus, they did not experience the metaphoric battle with addiction described by psychoactive substance users (Shinebourne & Smith, 2010b). The significance of the
