Category: Alumni

As recovering addicts, we know that certain emotions can be especially triggering for us, emotions we’re particularly sensitive to, that make us feel increasingly depressed or anxious, that make us want to seek comfort and relief in our drugs of choice. For many of us, one of the strongest of these emotions is the loneliness […]

As alumni of addiction recovery treatment programs, we sometimes have a tendency once we’ve completed treatment to disconnect from the program that helped us to achieve sobriety. We often don’t want to stay connected for various reasons, many of which have a lot to do with our inexperience with sobriety. Sometimes we assume that because […]

One of the hardest parts of recovering from addiction and mental illness is trying to come to terms with how unfulfilled we’ve felt all these years, how disconnected we’ve become from our inner selves, and how much we feel we’ve strayed from our life’s purpose. We don’t feel we have a clear sense of our […]

Our recovery program can entail anything that supports our sobriety and helps us stay on track with our goals. For many of us, this work can include learning entirely new skills that we might not associate with recovery because they don’t necessarily relate to sobriety in particular, but that bolster our recovery in various different […]

One thing that can help us in our recovery is to focus on the gifts we’re receiving by staying sober and by working on our health and peace of mind. Sobriety gives us so many life-changing gifts that we sometimes take for granted and forget to be mindful of. When we remember them and focus […]

When we’re working to recover, we want to supplement our sobriety with as much self-supportiveness as possible. Often the ways in which we talk to ourselves and think about ourselves can actually hinder our sobriety. When we feel down on ourselves, self-hating and insecure, we’re more likely to want to return to our drugs of […]

Some of the hardest emotional work we do in recovery is releasing the ways in which cultural stigmas around addiction have hurt us over the years. We’ve been carrying and holding onto the very negative perceptions people have of us and allowed them to impact how we feel about ourselves. We’ve internalized the unkind, dismissive […]

When we are actively working towards recovery, there are some habits we hold onto that can slow down our progress and impede our ability to get well. We have a hard time relinquishing control over how we think things should go. We hold on tightly to certain expectations. We worry excessively, we obsess about things, […]

As we’re doing the work to recover, we find that many of our mental and emotional patterns have been contributing to our addictive patterns, often without our being conscious of them. We’ve developed patterns of denial, secrecy and dishonesty. We’ve been dishonest with the people around us but also more importantly with ourselves. We’ve lied […]

Our recovery can be an immensely confusing time in our lives, when we’re coming out of the dark cloud of addictive dependence but perhaps not feeling totally confident yet in our sobriety. We feel confused as to what path we should take in life, what our purpose is, and where we’re headed. We feel confusion […]