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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
How Are We Impacted by Tragedy?
Those of us living with addiction and mental illness are also often coping with painful tragedies in our lives, traumatic experiences we’re still reeling from, events we don’t understand and can’t wrap our brains around, losses we feel we’ll never be able to recover from. Culturally we’ve been conditioned to avoid thinking and speaking on […]
How Can We Change the Reward System of Addiction?
Our addictions are fueled by a phenomenon called the reward system, where we are driven compulsively to use our drug of choice or to engage in our addictive behavior of choice because we know that once we do, we’ll feel a certain kind of reward. The reward we feel might be a rush of dopamine […]
Embracing Our Experiences as Gifts
When living with addiction and mental illness, we accumulate layers of challenging experiences that make us question who we are and what our place in the world is. We tend to see our difficulties as a negative thing, especially when they bring us years of confusion and turmoil. As we’re working to recover, though, we […]
How Do Our Personalities Hold Us Back?
Our personalities are the culmination of all the habits, patterns, thoughts and feelings that we’ve come to associate with ourselves and that we’ve used to formulate our identities. We tend to think that our personalities are permanent and set in stone, that they can’t be changed even when we’re not happy with them. We come […]
Reasons Why We Falter in Our Commitment to Our Sobriety
Sometimes when we relapse and fall back into our old patterns of dependence, it’s because we’ve faltered in our commitment to ourselves and our sobriety. We’ve lost sight of the goals and intentions we’ve set for ourselves to get well. We’ve lost faith in ourselves. Often the reasons as to why our commitment might waver […]