Our pain, our traumatic experiences, our fears and our difficult life circumstances can all leave us feeling broken, wounded, damaged and brokenhearted. We can feel empty, lost and incomplete. These feelings are normal, natural and common, they are part of human nature, but if we don’t actively work to heal them, they can contribute to […]
Category: Resource Center
Criminalization and Transformation
In the midst of our struggles with addiction, sometimes there are events that feel catastrophic at the time but that end up serving as deterrents to our addictions. In other words, they help us to finally stop our destructive patterns and get sober. At the time, we’re often filled with anger and resentment. We want […]
Are We Afraid of Ourselves?
We fear a great many things, especially when we’re struggling with addiction and mental illness, but what we fear most might very well be ourselves. We fear facing our difficult thoughts and feelings. We fear confronting our pain and fear. We’re afraid of what the world would think of us if we allowed it to […]
Coming into Alignment
When struggling with addiction and mental illness, we tend to be quite out of alignment with who we are, with our intuition, with our instincts and our sense of direction. We feel unclear about what it is we want out of life and where we’re headed. We’re filled with confusion, anxiety, self-doubt and uncertainty about […]
How Does Shame Fuel Addiction?
For many of us, our addictions are our coping mechanisms for the painful emotions we’re trying desperately to avoid having to feel. They are our escapism, our distraction, our way to numb our feelings. One of the most painful and debilitating emotions that many of us have a very hard time feeling, expressing and releasing […]
Determining Our Values
An important part of the recovery process is getting to know ourselves better and therefore getting clearer on our values. When we’re embroiled in our addictions, we tend to lose sight of who we are and what values are important to us. We forget what principles we want to lead our lives by. We’re so […]
How Can We Change Our Mentality to Manifest Healing?
In order to heal ourselves, we have to have a mental and emotional foundation that supports our recovery, that strengthens and empowers us to be able to heal ourselves. Oftentimes we have a mentality of self-doubt, insecurity and perceived inadequacy. We don’t actually believe we can heal. We don’t believe we’re good enough to have […]
Making the Most of Treatment
When we make the decision to get sober, many of us will seek professional help with our recovery program. For many of us, entering treatment is a scary and overwhelming undertaking. We might still be suffering from depression and other mental health issues. We might feel resistance to doing the work, partly because our addictions […]
Violating Our Own Boundaries in Recovery
As part of our recovery, some of the important work we’ll do is establish and maintain boundaries about things that are important to us. When we’re working towards sobriety, some of our boundaries will involve separating ourselves form people who use drugs, drink or otherwise engage in addictive behaviors that might be triggering or tempting […]
How Do We Become Desensitized to Trauma?
When we experience something traumatic, we are usually deeply impacted by it, and sometimes there is considerable damage done to our mental, emotional and physical health. Over time, we can become desensitized to trauma in various ways. We start to forget and even trivialize just how traumatized we’ve actually been, and we therefore don’t take […]