Many of us who suffer from addiction also experience body image issues, often perpetuated by mainstream media. This is a look into the painful causes of body image issues and the importance of embracing radical self-love. As we know, our addictions are often accompanied by mental illnesses, and they are connected and linked to one […]
Category: Mental Health
Growing Up With a Parent or Caregiver Struggling with Addiction
The trauma surrounding living with addiction in the household or within our families can be extensive and profound. Children often blame themselves for the dysfunction in the family unit. They feel responsible for the problematic relationship dynamics. They are filled with so much confusion as to what they might have done wrong to warrant the […]
Emotional Reasons Why We Enable Our Loved Ones’ Addictions
As we’re working to support our loved ones’ recovery, we realize that we have to put a stop to the many ways in which we’ve been enabling them. When we enable our loved ones, very often we aren’t conscious of how and why we’re doing so. It can help us to change our detrimental relationship […]
How Our Loved Ones’ Addictions Affect Our Mental and Emotional Health
Many of us whose loved ones are addicts become so focused on them and their challenges that we often don’t realize our own mental and emotional health are being adversely affected by their addictions. We fail to see all the ways in which we’re being limited, held back, brought down and hurt by our loved […]
The Habits that Form Addictions
We tend to think of our addictions in much the same way we view our mental health issues, as powerful forces beyond our control, as illnesses we were born with or inherited but can’t heal from. We fail to realize that the patterns we develop, the mental and emotional habits we practice and repeat over […]
Finding the Valuable Lessons Within Our Emotions
Many of us living with addiction and mental illness have developed patterns of avoiding, suppressing and resisting our emotions, in particular the ones we find most difficult to handle. When we feel stressed out and overwhelmed, depressed and afraid, confused and ashamed, our instinct is often to shut down and try to stop feeling our […]
Understanding Behavioral Addictions
We most commonly associate addiction with a dependence on drugs or alcohol, but addictions can also be behavioral in nature. We can find ourselves forming dependent attachments on certain behaviors such as sex, eating, gaming and gambling, attachments that can be just as intense and detrimental as our attachments to substances. We can become mentally, […]
Remembering the Purpose Behind Our Goals
Sometimes as we’re setting goals for ourselves, outlining our intentions and clarifying our objectives in our recovery, we forget why it is we’re working so hard to recover in the first place. When we remember the purpose of our work, the meaning behind why we’re in recovery, all the reasons why we want to be […]
Dealing with Misunderstanding
As we’re coping with our addictions and mental health issues, one of our greatest challenges can be in dealing with people who don’t understand us or our illnesses. Both addiction and mental illness are common and exist within every community, ethnic group, religious affiliation, sexual orientation and socioeconomic grouping. In other words, they are universal. […]
How Drugs Worsen Our Depression
Many of us who struggle with substance abuse also struggle with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. When the two different illnesses affect us simultaneously, they are often referred to as co-occurring disorders or dual diagnoses. Those of us suffering from these particular issues are aware of the dualistic nature of our illnesses […]