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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
Why Do We Self-Blame?
Many of us have a tendency to form unhealthy attachments to our emotions, and among the feelings we commonly become unhealthily attached to are our guilt, shame and self-blame. We instinctively blame ourselves for things that aren’t our fault. We hold onto our mistakes and wrongdoings long after they’ve stopped hurting anyone else, but for […]
What Are Emotional Addictions?
We tend to associate addiction with a dependence on a substance or behavior, drugs and alcohol, gambling, sex or eating, to name a few. Some of us become addicted not to something external but to our own emotions, feeling compulsively attached and dependent upon feeling these emotions in order to cope, to be happy, or […]
Believing in Ourselves and Our Recovery
As we’re taking on the process of healing ourselves, one of the things we sometimes overlook is how we feel about ourselves and our recovery, whether or not we’ve lost faith in ourselves, whether or not we still believe in ourselves and our ability to recover. Many of us have very mixed emotions about our […]