When we’re working to achieve sobriety and stay on track with our goals in recovery, we can find ourselves totally overwhelmed with all of the different emotions that arise, many of which we’re feeling for the first time. We’re experiencing brand new things, the clarity of sobriety and how scary that can be because it […]
Category: Resource Center
Celebrating Our Recovery
As we’re working towards recovery, many of us can at times feel disheartened, unmotivated and defeated when dealing with all of the many challenges that arise. We’re struggling to stay sober against what feels like insurmountable odds – pressure from family and friends, the expectations we hold for ourselves, the mental health issues we’re still […]
Where Do Our Coping Mechanisms Come From?
We’ve become so committed to avoiding and suppressing our feelings that we develop all kinds of unhealthy compulsions and defense mechanisms as our misguided, self-destructive attempts of protecting ourselves from more pain. We suppress our feelings and avoid our thoughts. We use denial, secrecy, manipulation, and control as coping mechanisms. We aren’t open and honest […]
Shedding the Cultural Stigma We’re Still Carrying Within Us
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 […]
What Happens When We Embrace Our Emotions?
Much of our lives revolve around finding ways to avoid feeling our emotions because they’re too painful, too scary to confront, too overwhelming and confusing. We reject our feelings and refuse to accept them as they are. When we do this, we’re not just resisting how we feel, we’re also rejecting entire parts of ourselves […]
The Benefits of Long-Term Treatment
Sometimes as we’re approaching the recovery process, we’re tempted to think that a short stay in rehab will be all we need in order to achieve a full recovery. We’ve been struggling for so long, we want a quick fix and an escape from all of our mental and emotional pain. We want to feel […]
Why Should We Discuss Our Trauma?
Many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness have a hard time being open and honest when it comes to discussing our traumatic experiences. We shy away from talking about them at all. We avoid the subject and change it as quickly as possible whenever it comes up. We keep our traumas a secret […]
Signs of Substance Use
Very often addicts will show signs of substance use long before we know consciously that they, in fact, have a problem with addiction. It can help us to support our loved ones, or to initiate our own recovery if we’re the ones struggling, to know some of the signs of substance use and to familiarize […]
How Do We Know If We’re Still Being Impacted by Our Trauma?
Because we so often suppress our pain and try to avoid feeling it, many of us have a very fractured relationship with our own thoughts and emotions. We run from our pain, afraid it will overtake and overpower us. We’re afraid we won’t be able to handle it. It can be so intense it can […]
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 […]