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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
How Does Our Self-Perception Shift in Recovery?
Our struggles with addiction can cause us to form a self-perception that is dominated by the shame and insecurities we feel as addicts. We think of ourselves in terms of our mistakes and regrets, our shortcomings, wrongdoings and transgressions. We identify so strongly with our illnesses that we allow them to become the bulk of […]
Protecting Ourselves from Toxicity
Our struggles with addiction and mental health issues can bring us face to face with all kinds of challenging circumstances full of turmoil, conflict and toxicity. We manifest relationships, often with other addicts, that are unstable and full of insecurity, misunderstanding and miscommunication. We’re dealing with so much internal mental and emotional difficulty that we […]
Why Do We Experiment With New Drugs?
Many of us struggling with addiction find ourselves dependent upon a specific substance or behavior, or a certain combination of them. We often don’t stray too far from this combination or veer too much from it because we develop a comfort level with it, we grow accustomed to it, we know how it affects us, […]
How Do Our Relationships Change with Sobriety?
When we’ve grown accustomed to being in relationships while simultaneously struggling with addiction, we often don’t know what relationships could be like when we’re finally sober. We don’t know what kind of partner we’re capable of being. We don’t know what our relationships could look like, how they might function, and what we can expect […]
Identifying Our Motivations for Sobriety
A major factor in why so many of us struggle with our sobriety is our inability to solidify and clarify within ourselves the specific reasons behind why we need to get sober, the motivating forces behind why we want to get well in the first place. We know our lives have become unmanageable and that […]