“God restored my faith in me!”
After Paula Friedrichsen was prescribed opioid painkillers to ease excruciating chronic migraines, she found herself in a spiral of addiction and shame that she couldn’t escape… until she sensed a voice calling out to her in the darkness that ushered in a
Hands shaking, Paula Friedrichsen popped the cap off her bottle of prescription pain pills. She closed her eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath and poured the tablets down the garbage disposal. As her finger hovered over the switch, she hesitated, fighting a wave of panic and the powerful urge to dig down into the damp drain to retrieve every last capsule. You can’t handle the pain…you NEED them, a dark desperate part of her screamed.
But Paula longed to be free from the years of shame and secrets that had haunted her…and to be the good mother, wife and church leader that she once was. With a prayer for courage, she flipped on the disposal. It was done. The pills were gone. This will finally be the time I take my life back, she thought triumphantly.
Two days later, at 7:59 am, Paula stood at the locked door of her local pharmacy, feeling anxious, shaky and nauseated as she waited for the doors to open. It’s okay…I’ll get off the pills next time around, she promised herself as she paid for her refill, tore open the packaging and popped a painkiller into her mouth before hurrying back to her car. But despite Paula’s
determination and promises, “next time” never seemed to come.
A pit of addiction
On a sunny morning in 2008, Paula awakened to the most excruciating headache she’d ever experienced… and life as she knew it had changed forever. After being rushed to the doctor, she’d been diagnosed with severe and chronic migraines, and they began to appear almost daily.
After countless medical tests, prescriptions and natural remedies had failed to provide any answers or relief from the searing, blinding pain, Paula struggled to hold on to any hope at all. “My fear was that I would live with this debilitating suffering every day for the rest of my life,” she admits. “I’d say to myself, Everything is going to be okay, Paula. God will heal you. But the truth was that my head hurt so badly, I just wanted to die.”
After six months of agony, Paula’s doctor had prescribed Vicodin (an opioid-based painkiller) to take the edge off her migraines. “It was instant relief,” Paula recalls. “At first, I was extremely judicious about the painkiller use, but over time I started to build up a tolerance and needed to take more and more to get the same effect. The addiction crept up on me slowly until it was a runaway train.”
Within weeks of starting the drug, Paula had begun showing up to church functions, family outings and work high on opioids. “I felt ashamed and out of control; I hid it from everyone,” Paula confesses. “But to be honest, I got to the point where I almost didn’t want to be healed because I loved my painkillers so much.”
Paula had tried quitting many times to no avail, but her breaking point came in 2011, two and a half years after she’d started taking the painkillers. She’d realized with horror that in just two weeks, she’d taken all 60 of her strong-dosage Vicodin, as well as stolen and popped 30 Vicodin that had been prescribed to her husband after a recent surgery. “I’d taken 90 pills in a matter of days,” she sighs. “A local woman had recently died from an opioid overdose and I remember thinking, That’s going to be me. I knew in my heart the addiction would kill me, but I still craved more.”
Devastated, hopeless and drowning in despair, Paula hit rock bottom. “I was sitting outside on our porch swing at 4:30 am, so desperate that all I could do was cry out to God,” Paula shares. “I said, ‘I surrender,’ and I felt in my heart God challenge me to stop taking the pills…forever. Just stop. I couldn’t imagine how I’d do it—it had never worked before.” Terrified, Paula said yes. “That was the most painful moment of my journey, but giving it all over to God was when everything changed.”
From trapped to transformed
The next day, Paula stopped taking the pills cold turkey. “It’s dangerous to do this,” she cautions, “but shame kept me from seeking outside help.” Eventually, Paula called her doctor and pharmacy, admitted that she was abusing Vicodin and asked them to no longer prescribe her the drug.
During her first few days of withdrawal, prayer and two quotes became Paula’s life rafts. “The first quote was, ‘One is too many and a thousand is never enough.’ It hit me like a lightning bolt,” she says. “The second quote says, ‘Until we make the decision that we’ll never go back, regardless of how painful it gets, we will not go forward with the force of faith that it will take to fulfill our destiny.’
“Until we make the decision that we’ll never go back, regardless of how painfulit gets, we will not go forward with the force of faith that it will take to fulfill our destiny.”
—Rick Joyner
“This second quote rocked me to my core,” Paula admits. “I knew in my heart that my destiny was not to spend the rest of my life chronically ill and in pain or to accidentally kill myself with opioids.”
Day by day, Paula surrendered all her desires, cravings and urges for the pills to God, recited Scripture and read those two quotes again and again. “There were times I prayed and read those quotes a hundred times a day,” Paula recalls. “I was terrified because I wasn’t just laying down my beloved pills and going through the withdrawals, but I also had no way to manage my migraine pain.” Each time Paula’s head started to pound, she says she prayed for that pain not to have power over her. “I asked for strength not to go back to the pills even though it hurt like heck,” she recalls. “Before I would go to bed each night, I would remind myself of the many Bible stories where God performed healings or miracles for people. This nightly ritual was the only thing that worked so I could relax and not fear the pain as much.”
Paula also took another very difficult step in her recovery: She admitted she was an addict to her family and friends. “Having others offer prayer and support made a huge difference,” she states. “To have my husband and kids, my parents all believing in me made me feel I could be healed. The leadership team at our church also prayed for me, talked to me and greatly encouraged me.”
Through that unconditional love, Paula says she began to believe that God was indeed going to heal her. “Realizing that I wasn’t alone in the fight transformed me and made me so strong,” she adds. “To my surprise, the headache frequency became less and less and my desperation for the painkillers was slowly drowned out by hope and love and joy.”
Stronger than ever
Today Paula is free of the painkillers and migraines, and dedicates herself to helping others trapped in the horrifying vice grip of opioid addiction and chronic pain. “The message I share is that breaking the grip of addiction isn’t easy and takes time— but everyone can do it,” she says. “I summoned every bit of strength and hope I had from the deepest part of my heart, and I found that God had already equipped me with all I needed to overcome my addiction and pain—in the form of the people, the hope, the love.”
This beautiful well of power completely changed how Paula thought of herself. “God restored my faith in me!” she marvels. “That was such a miracle. You may believe there is no way out, but with faith, surrender, support and reminding ourselves of the strength we all have deep down, we can overcome anything!”