When suffering from addiction and mental health issues, we often will get to the point where we know we can’t continue on the way we’re going if we want to be happy and healthy. We’ve dealt with harmful, even dangerous consequences. We’ve made choices we regret. We’ve hurt ourselves and the people we care about. […]
Category: Resource Center
How Can I Empower Myself to Reach Out for Help?
We tend to think of our addictions and mental illnesses as being signs of weakness on our part, moral failings that we are ashamed of and embarrassed by. We beat ourselves up and judge ourselves harshly for our struggles. We constantly replay memories in our minds of when we first became dependent upon our drug […]
Preparing Ourselves for Recovery
Addiction recovery involves some of the most challenging work we’ll ever do in our lives. We’re taking on the tremendous task of confronting our deeply rooted pain, facing our fears, and transforming lifelong patterns. We’re facing ourselves, finally, without distracting ourselves or self-medicating. We’re allowing ourselves to feel our pain without filters, without anything to […]
Can We Find the Deeper Meaning Behind Our Addictions?
We usually associate our addictions with being painful and debilitating illnesses that we want to rid ourselves of and heal from as quickly as possible. What we often don’t realize is that our addictions hold a deeper meaning and carry a deeper purpose beyond the self-medicating, the escapism and distraction from our difficult thoughts and […]
Recidivism in Recovery
We think of recidivism as a bad thing when it comes to criminal offenses – it means we’ve reoffended and are facing even harsher punishment. When it comes to recovery, recidivism means we’ve relapsed and are returning to treatment again, sometimes after multiple attempts to get clean. In this case, recidivism is actually a good […]
The Spiritual Test of Recovery
Sometimes it can help us to cope with the many challenges of recovery to view it as a journey, an evolution, and a spiritual test. We’re being tested mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Our willpower, resilience and inner strength are all being tested. How well we succeed has a lot to do with how much […]
The Harm in Being Pessimistic
One of the toxic thought patterns many of us find ourselves perpetuating is a thought addiction to pessimism, a negative outlook that causes us to feel dread rather than positive anticipation, anxiety rather than excitement. We have a pervasive focus on what might go wrong as opposed to what could go right. We think in […]
How Are We Consumed by Our Addictions?
When living with addiction, we are not only consumed by our substance abuse or dependence on certain behaviors, we are also consumed by all of the other accompanying factors that come along with these issues. We can find our lives becoming totally overpowered and overtaken by our addictions and how they affect our lives. Our […]
Thought Addictions
Sometimes our addictions don’t just involve substances, relationships and behaviors, they also involve our thought patterns. We develop toxic thought addictions where we’ve become so attached to certain thoughts that we can’t seem to let them go. As a result, we can develop obsessions and compulsions, intense anxiety and panic attacks, and depression. Our relentless […]
How Does Our Denial Compound Our Unwellness?
Throughout our struggles with addiction, we develop many coping mechanisms that we use in order to help ourselves cope with our pain but that are often means of trying to avoid it altogether. One of those coping mechanisms is denial. We can be in such deep denial about our substance abuse that we somehow manage […]