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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
Remembering Our Well-Being
As the loved ones of people struggling with addiction and mental illness, we often fall into patterns of neglecting our own well-being for the sake of theirs. We seem to think that by constantly worrying about our loved ones, by devoting all our time and energy to their care, and by taking on their recovery […]
Can We Use Self-Hypnosis for Addiction Recovery?
Self-hypnosis might sound complicated, difficult and elusive, but the truth is we’re always hypnotizing ourselves, each and every day, with the thoughts we think repeatedly and the beliefs we give the most energy to. When used consciously and with mindfulness, self-hypnosis can be applied to any challenge in our lives and can help us establish […]
Toxic Positivity in Recovery
Positive thinking is something many of us start practicing when working to recover from addiction and mental illness. We learn that our thoughts create our attitudes and beliefs, and that in order to heal we want to be as positive and optimistic as possible. What we often aren’t aware of is that there is such […]
What Do Our Young People Need From Us?
The stories we hear of young people experimenting with drugs and overdosing from them are becoming all too common. It’s so distressing to think of young people in that much pain that they’re willing to risk their lives, and it’s so unfortunate that they don’t know the life-threatening risks of experimenting with drugs, that they’re […]