Those of us living with addiction and mental health issues often find ourselves in toxic relationships in part because the unhealthiness within us attracts people who reflect that back to us and who compound our issues, pushing us to learn even more about ourselves and gain a deeper understanding of who we are. Unfortunately, many […]
Category: Resource Center
Understanding Behavioral Addictions
We most commonly associate addiction with a dependence on drugs or alcohol, but addictions can also be behavioral in nature. We can find ourselves forming dependent attachments on certain behaviors such as sex, eating, gaming and gambling, attachments that can be just as intense and detrimental as our attachments to substances. We can become mentally, […]
Choosing Forgiveness in Recovery
As we’re working to heal ourselves and stay committed to our sobriety, there are certain emotions that can linger well into our recovery and bring us so much turmoil and conflict that we feel tempted to use our drugs of choice just to escape them. One of these painful and destructive emotions is the anger […]
Can We Enjoy the Healing Process?
When we’re working to recover, we tend to have our focus set on the end goal, the finish line, the goal of sobriety. Everything we’re working for is for our sobriety. Every change we make, every intention we set, every goal we have, is for our sobriety. We sometimes get so caught up on reaching […]
How Judgment Hurts Us
Whether because of our family patterns, our own insecurities, or our cultural obsession with critiquing people, many of us have a tendency to judge other people harshly, whether we know them well or not at all. We criticize people for their personal choices, for their ways of life, for their addictions and mental illnesses, even […]
Can Learning Patience Help Us with Our Sobriety?
When we’re struggling with addiction, our approach with ourselves and our recovery is often one of harshness and strictness. We’re aiming for total abstinence and complete sobriety, and while these might be what we need in order to recover, how we go about accomplishing them can be problematic. We are extremely hard on ourselves. When […]
The Importance of Learning Healthy Communication Skills
One thing many of us struggling with addiction have in common is that we have a very hard time in relationships because of our lacking communication skills. We find it impossible to resolve conflicts amicably. Our interpersonal interactions are full of turmoil and misunderstanding. We struggle to find our voice and to speak our truth. […]
How Are Our Addictions and Our Physical Ailments Related?
As many of us come to discover, our ailments tend to operate in tandem with one another. Rarely do we have only one affliction we’re struggling with. For us as addicts, we also tend to be struggling with mental health issues, and for many of us, we’re also coping with physical health issues as well. […]
Making Sense of Our Pain
The pain we experience in our lives, especially the pain of our addictions and mental health issues, can be so hard to understand, to make sense of and to find clarity around. We feel confused, overwhelmed and perplexed by it. We feel lost, abandoned and alone trying to figure out why we’ve gone through the […]
How Can We Define Our Boundaries?
One of the things we rely on drugs and addictive behaviors to help us avoid are the conflicts in our relationships, many of which are a result of unclear or nonexistent boundaries. We tend to choose unhealthy relationships full of control, manipulation and toxicity. We allow ourselves to be abused, and we’re abusive towards others. […]