Our addictions are very often the coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms we’ve adopted to help ourselves deal with the pain in our lives. We use all kinds of thought patterns, emotional patterns and behavioral patterns as our ways of coping with the stress of everyday life, our complex relationship issues, and the tough situations and […]
Category: Resource Center
Healing Subconsciously to Manage Addictive Urges in Recovery
As we embark upon our recovery journey, there are certain things that still frighten us and make us uncertain of our ability to stay sober, even after we’ve done a great deal of work and feel confident about our sobriety. One of these things is the temptation we still feel to use our drug of […]
Why is Solitude Important for Resolving Conflict?
Many of us struggling with addiction are also grappling with unhealthy relationships, complex life circumstances and difficult issues we’re trying to resolve. We experience a great deal of conflict, misunderstanding and tension in our interpersonal relationships. When we’re living with addiction, we’re also often living with mental illness, which can greatly exacerbate the difficulties we […]
Quitting Cold Turkey
When deciding how to quit our drug of choice, some of us make the choice to quit “cold turkey,” abruptly and with finality, without any form of intervention, medical or otherwise, to help us quit. Some of us don’t put thought into it, we just are able to quit for good, in one shot. For […]
How Can We Deal with Regret?
Of all the things we use our drugs of choice to cope with, our regret might be one of the most painful. We live with intense regret for the harmful things we’ve done and the ways in which we’ve hurt people. We regret all the things we wish we had done and said but weren’t […]
Learning to Control Our Impulses
Some of the most important work we do in recovery is completely internal, the outside world might not see it, but we feel huge changes taking place within us. One of these crucial changes is the ability to control our impulses, something we really struggle with as addicts. Our impulses that are related to our […]
How Can We Stop Using Drugs to Cope with Our Grief?
When we use drugs and addictive behaviors to cope with our grief, many of us find that not only are we not helping ourselves heal from the pain and sadness of our loss, but we’re making that pain worse by adding on all of the self-destructiveness and pain of addiction. We find that our addictions […]
Remembering the Purpose Behind Our Goals
Sometimes as we’re setting goals for ourselves, outlining our intentions and clarifying our objectives in our recovery, we forget why it is we’re working so hard to recover in the first place. When we remember the purpose of our work, the meaning behind why we’re in recovery, all the reasons why we want to be […]
Why Should We Stop Guilt Tripping Ourselves?
When we make mistakes or feel we’ve let ourselves or others down, our instinct is usually to react with harshness – judgment, criticism, self-blame, self-deprecation. We berate and belittle ourselves. We put ourselves down. We call ourselves a failure. We tell ourselves we’re stupid, weak, not in control. We guilt trip ourselves, exacerbating our already […]
How Our Dysfunctional Families and Our Addictions Are Connected
Many of us who identify as addicts also identify with having come from dysfunctional families. Our families were broken apart by separation, neglect, abuse and abandonment. We didn’t have healthy family dynamics, strong communication or effective conflict resolution. We grew up being traumatized by loved ones and watching others be hurt. We grew up blaming […]