As part of our recovery, some of the important work we’ll do is establish and maintain boundaries about things that are important to us. When we’re working towards sobriety, some of our boundaries will involve separating ourselves form people who use drugs, drink or otherwise engage in addictive behaviors that might be triggering or tempting […]
Category: Alumni
Bringing Enthusiasm into Our Recovery
When approaching recovery, many of us feel mentally and emotionally spent, exhausted, and totally worn out. We’ve been doing intense inner healing work, confronting our fears and insecurities, conquering our inner demons, and battling our addictions and mental health issues head on. When we’re dealing with this kind of burn-out, it can be natural to […]
How Our Addictions Limit Us
Of the many reasons why we want to quit our addictions and focus on recovery are all the ways in which we’re restricted and limited by our addictions over the years. When we’re working to heal ourselves from our addictions and mental health issues, we want to be able to feel at peace within ourselves. […]
Celebrating Ourselves in Recovery
One of the things many of us share in common as addicts is our tendency to be super hard on ourselves, even in our recovery. We beat ourselves up for how long it took us to get here. We’re disappointed in ourselves for taking longer than we would have liked to get well. We continue […]
Examining Our Childhoods
As much as we might want to leave our pasts behind us so that we can move forward and look to a happier future, we can only truly move forward once we’ve come to terms with our past. We are often still grappling with unresolved issues, unanswered questions and unhealed fears and emotions. We still […]
Recidivism in Recovery
We think of recidivism as a bad thing when it comes to criminal offenses – it means we’ve reoffended and are facing even harsher punishment. When it comes to recovery, recidivism means we’ve relapsed and are returning to treatment again, sometimes after multiple attempts to get clean. In this case, recidivism is actually a good […]
The Spiritual Test of Recovery
Sometimes it can help us to cope with the many challenges of recovery to view it as a journey, an evolution, and a spiritual test. We’re being tested mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Our willpower, resilience and inner strength are all being tested. How well we succeed has a lot to do with how much […]
Staying Committed to Our Intentions
Part of our recovery work involves setting intentions for ourselves and our sobriety. Our intentions are the goals we have for ourselves, the practices we want to incorporate as regular parts of our routines, the ways we’ll actively work to keep ourselves on track with our recovery. When we set our intentions, we’re often brand […]
Resisting Complacence in Recovery
When we’ve finished treatment, we sometimes want to think that the bulk of our work in recovery is over. While it’s true that we’ve laid the important foundation for our recovery program, the journey of our recovery has just begun. We sometimes think that because we’re no longer in treatment, we can ease up on […]
Staying Connected to Our Recovery Community
Many of us in recovery know that when we leave our treatment center, our recovery work is far from over. We’ll still have intense inner healing work to do. We still have to revisit our childhoods and retrieve suppressed memories. We have to reprogram our subconscious minds and confront the deeply rooted fears that are […]