If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). One of our greatest challenges in recovery is figuring out how to find fulfillment and cope with the boredom that has been a huge factor in the development our addictions. Many of us find that it is our boredom […]
Category: Resource Center
How Can We Help Our Loved Ones Get Better?
When our loved ones are suffering from addiction and mental illness, our instinct is to protect them from harm, to shield them from hurting themselves more, and to rescue them from their pain and self-destructiveness. We want to fix their problems for them. We want to save them from themselves. While these instincts are normal, […]
Allowing People to Help Us
When living with addiction and mental illness, there are some fundamental habits we have that can negatively impact our experience with recovery and our ability to get well. One of our most detrimental habits is our inability to allow people to help us. We’re afraid of being a burden on our loved ones. We’re afraid […]
Rethinking Anxiety in Recovery
Those of us recovering from addiction are no strangers to the overwhelming force of anxiety. It often accompanies our depression and other mental health issues and makes our struggles with addiction that much harder. We often come to think of anxiety as something we have no control over. Once it hits, it takes over us, […]
Can Childhood Trauma Lead to Mental Illness?
If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Our traumas are some of the most debilitating and painful experiences we’ll go through in our lives, and we can be totally destabilized and overpowered by them, especially if we don’t have the skills to be able to process […]
Family Roles and How They Can Impact Us
Part of our recovery work entails looking at our childhoods, our families and our home environments to explore some of the hidden factors in our mental and emotional health issues. Our addictions are sometimes rooted in the family roles we experienced and witnessed when growing up. We might have had parents or caretakers who were […]
Why Are We Afraid of Personal Development?
As we’re working to recover, we’re being called to make important changes in our lives, to create new patterns in our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and to explore all of the choices we’ve made thus far in order to learn how to make healthier ones. We’re being invited to explore our self-destructive tendencies, our inclination […]
Our Fears Around Having Children
For those us struggling with addiction, the decision whether or not to have children is fraught with some unique fears, on top of the common, universal fears we all experience around parenthood. When we’re making the decision to become parents, oftentimes we’re consumed with fear that our children will inherit our addictions. We worry that […]
How Does it Help Us to Stay Calm?
Our addictions and mental health issues bring us a great deal of stress, turmoil and anxiety. We can be consumed by the negativity and toxicity of our harmful patterns, our difficult relationships and our challenging circumstances. We can find ourselves feeling so overwhelmed that we react with intense panic, anger or volatility. We can find […]
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 […]