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 […]
Category: Resource Center
What is the Difference Between Solitude and Isolation?
When we’ve been struggling with addiction and mental illness, we often will fall into patterns of isolating ourselves and avoiding any kind of social interaction and interpersonal connection. We’re afraid to confide in people lest they judge us more than we’re already judging ourselves. We’re afraid of being told to just get over our depression, […]
Cultivating Inner Peace
Our work when healing from addiction goes beyond sobriety and abstinence, although these are important to our recovery. The true objective of our recovery is to be able to cultivate the inner peace, calm and fortitude we need to handle anything life throws at us. We want to be able to stay grounded and centered, […]
Navigating Confusion in Recovery
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 […]
Why Do We Hide From Ourselves?
As we learn more about our addictions, we come to discover that they are not just extreme attachments to substances and behaviors, they are also our way of distracting ourselves from our pain. They are our attempt at trying to escape from it. We run from our pain. We bury and suppress the painful memories […]
How Social Anxiety Can Block Our Recovery
Our struggles with addiction are often compounded by our battles with mental health issues, particularly depression and anxiety, as well as the different kinds of anxiety disorders we experience such as social anxiety. Our mental illnesses can make coping with our addictions and trying to recover from them that much harder. When we have social […]
Should We Move On From the Past?
As we’re working to heal, something that often causes us confusion is knowing whether or not we should move on from the past, how we should let it go, and when we should be moving on from it. We don’t want to get stuck in an endless loop of our painful memories, constantly replaying them […]
Believing in Our Future
As we work towards recovering from our addictions, one thing that can help us move forward is to focus on our future and really believe we’re capable of creating a happy, healthy life for ourselves. So often we find ourselves consumed by our pasts, weighed down by the shame we feel and the disappointment of […]
Can Writing Help Us Heal?
As we’re working to recover from addiction and mental illness, we want to develop new coping skills to replace all of the destructive, limiting, damaging patterns we’ve been perpetuating over the years. We want to tackle all of the different manifestations of our pain, our addictive patterns and the symptoms of our mental and emotional […]
Seeing Beyond Our Addictions
Our addictions have a way of completely overtaking our lives and along with them our identity, our sense of self, and our feelings of self-worth. We label ourselves as addicts and can’t see beyond that label. We start to believe that our complex identities have been reduced to our addictions and the difficulties we’ve incurred […]