As we commit to our recovery program, one of the best things we can do for ourselves and our sobriety is to make the effort to attend 12-Step meetings consistently. Just like working with a therapist and a sponsor, attending meetings can help us to address some of the deeply rooted mental and emotional health […]
Category: Resource Center
How Can I Determine My Identity Beyond Addiction?
Our addictions and mental health issues have a way of overtaking our lives and causing us to forget who we are beyond our illnesses. We can begin to feel as though our identities have been reduced to being merely addicts and people who are mentally ill. We have a hard time remembering what it was […]
The Benefits of 12-Step Programs
There are multiple different options when it comes to addiction recovery programs, and one of the more common programs recovering addicts turn to is the 12-Step program. It is often used in conjunction with detoxification programs, professional treatment, and long-term therapy. Once people finish a treatment program, they will often continue to attend 12-Step meetings, […]
What Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?
We tend to associate our mistakes with all of the shame, regret, and remorse we felt when we first committed them, the same emotions we can’t seem to let go of after years of trying, unsuccessfully, to forgive ourselves. We think of our mistakes as evidence of our failures and as defects in our moral […]
Positive Thinking in Recovery
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 […]
Understanding the Marchman Act
The Marchman Act is a law under the Florida Statute that allows for individuals struggling with substance abuse to receive an involuntary assessment and be treated if they are unable or unwilling to seek out voluntary admission to a treatment facility. Unlike the Baker Act, the Marchman act enables family members to seek help for […]
How Can Setting Intentions Help Us Stay Sober?
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 […]
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 […]