If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). For some of us, suicide feels like the only way out, the only solution to our deep, relentless inner pain. We feel it’s the only way to relieve the sadness, shame and fear we’re […]
Category: Resource Center
Why Are We Afraid to Do the Work?
When suffering from addiction and mental illness, one of our biggest challenges is the resistance we feel to doing the work needed to recover. We postpone researching treatment centers. We stall on making an appointment with a therapist. We don’t go to support group meetings. We don’t feel ready to begin our recovery, and we […]
How Addiction Makes Us Feel
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Those of us who struggle with addiction have grown accustomed to feeling certain intense emotions. How does addiction make us feel? Our experiences with addiction are different for each of us, and we will […]
Why is Communication So Hard for Us?
Our struggles with addiction and mental health issues can have a profound impact on our close interpersonal relationships, and specifically on our communication within those important relationships. We have a hard time expressing our feelings, our thoughts, concerns, needs and desires. We struggle with feeling good enough and worthy enough to be able to speak […]
Staying Committed to Our Intentions
Part of our recovery work involves setting intentions for ourselves and our sobriety. Our intentions are the goals we have for ourselves, the practices we want to incorporate as regular parts of our routines, the ways we’ll actively work to keep ourselves on track with our recovery. When we set our intentions, we’re often brand […]
Resisting Complacence in Recovery
When we’ve finished treatment, we sometimes want to think that the bulk of our work in recovery is over. While it’s true that we’ve laid the important foundation for our recovery program, the journey of our recovery has just begun. We sometimes think that because we’re no longer in treatment, we can ease up on […]
Exploring Our Fears
As we’re working to heal from our addictions and mental health issues, some of the most important work we do revolves around exploring our fears. Many of us have a fear-based relationship with our fears, where we try as hard as possible to avoid having to think about them, look at them or feel them. […]
Can an Accountability Partner Help Me?
There are certain tools we can use to help us move forward in our recovery, and one of the best tools we can equip ourselves with is an accountability partner. We can ask a therapist, recovery coach, sponsor or trusted friend to be a teammate in our recovery work. They can give us the encouragement […]
Self-Worth and Self-Respect
Rebuilding our sense of self-worth and learning self-respect are hugely important in healing ourselves mentally and emotionally as we’re working to recover. Very often throughout our struggles with addiction and mental illness, we developed patterns of disrespecting ourselves and devaluing our worth. When we’re ready to recover, healing our sense of self and growing in […]
What Do Healthy Boundaries Look Like?
Once we’ve lived with toxic relationships, we start to get a sense of what healthy boundaries would look like for us in more nurturing, supportive, compassionate relationships. We learn from all of the difficult experiences we’ve had. We’ve felt that our boundaries were not respected, and we felt mistreated by the people we cared about. […]