For many of us, our addictive patterns are something we try our hardest to conceal from the people in our lives. We don’t want them to worry about us. We don’t want them to judge us. Very often we don’t want them to try and force us to get help, because chances are we’re not […]
Category: Resource Center
Staying Sober Around the Holidays
Maintaining our sobriety is always a challenge, but it can be uniquely so during the holidays because we tend to associate holiday celebrations with using our drug of choice, and we create holiday rituals around it. Our drug use becomes an important pastime for us and is linked to how we spend time with loved […]
What Happens When We Feel Supported?
Many of us struggling with addiction, unfortunately, have grown accustomed to not feeling supported in our daily lives, around our addictions and mental health issues, and pertaining to the intense issues and deep pain we’re experiencing. We’re used to our loved ones telling us to just snap out of our depression or to calm down […]
How to Interact with Old Drinking Friends
One of the many challenges of sobriety is determining how to handle the relationships that were important to us in the past and navigating the dynamics within those relationships. It can be confusing and stressful trying to figure out how to interact with old friends and loved ones, particularly if they are still using our […]
Loneliness as a Trigger in Recovery
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 […]
Staying Connected to Treatment as Alumni
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 […]
What Can We Do When We Feel Paralyzed by Fear?
Fear has a way of overtaking us and making such an impact on our lives that we feel there’s nothing we can do anything about it. Our fears contribute to our mental health issues such as our depression and anxiety, and they become these invisible but totally debilitating, overpowering, destructive forces in our lives. We […]
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 […]
What Does Patience Have to Do With Resilience?
When we’re struggling with addiction, as with any other challenge, we sometimes have a tendency to rush to the finish line, to want to reach our end goal as quickly as possible. We’re tired of the struggle and want to finally experience success. We want to feel the relief of having finally finished. Seeing our […]
Discovering Our Life’s Mission
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 […]