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 […]
Category: Resource Center
Missing Out on Our Kids’ Childhoods
There are a great many things we regret about our experiences with addiction. One of the most difficult among them is when we miss out on our kids’ childhoods because of our struggles with addiction. Many of us find that our dependence on addictive substances and behaviors is so strong that we make regrettable decisions. […]
Can Our Thought Patterns Worsen Our Mental Illnesses?
Just as our behavioral patterns and regular habits form our lifestyles, our recurring thought patterns and regular mental habits constitute our mental and emotional health. Many of us are perpetuating toxic thought patterns that feed and magnify our existing mental illnesses. Some would argue that for many of us our toxic, self-destructive thought patterns become […]
Dealing with Misunderstanding
As we’re coping with our addictions and mental health issues, one of our greatest challenges can be in dealing with people who don’t understand us or our illnesses. Both addiction and mental illness are common and exist within every community, ethnic group, religious affiliation, sexual orientation and socioeconomic grouping. In other words, they are universal. […]
Bringing Enthusiasm into Our Recovery
When approaching recovery, many of us feel mentally and emotionally spent, exhausted, and totally worn out. We’ve been doing intense inner healing work, confronting our fears and insecurities, conquering our inner demons, and battling our addictions and mental health issues head on. When we’re dealing with this kind of burn-out, it can be natural to […]
Can Better Habits Help Us Recover from Addiction?
We tend to think of our addictions as these colossal, formidable, debilitating forces that control and overpower us, and while they can feel that way to us, they are also contingent on the behaviors and habits we develop and perpetuate. If when we first felt addictive urges, for example, we made a habit of examining […]
The Consequences of Our Addictions
Sometimes critically examining our addictions and all of the consequences they bring with them can help us make the choice to get help and actively work towards recovery. We often don’t want to look at the effects our addictions are having on us. We’re ashamed of all the havoc they wreak on our lives, on […]
How Can We Regain Faith in Ourselves?
Our struggles with mental health issues and addiction can cause us to totally lose faith in ourselves. We have a very hard time believing in ourselves. We don’t have faith that we can get better. We’ve been so self-destructive all these years that we no longer have faith in the choices we make. We worry […]
How Drugs Worsen Our Depression
Many of us who struggle with substance abuse also struggle with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. When the two different illnesses affect us simultaneously, they are often referred to as co-occurring disorders or dual diagnoses. Those of us suffering from these particular issues are aware of the dualistic nature of our illnesses […]
How Our Addictions Limit Us
Of the many reasons why we want to quit our addictions and focus on recovery are all the ways in which we’re restricted and limited by our addictions over the years. When we’re working to heal ourselves from our addictions and mental health issues, we want to be able to feel at peace within ourselves. […]