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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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. […]
Reconnecting as Part of Our Recovery
In order to heal ourselves as we’re recovering from addiction and mental illness, we want to repair the disconnectedness we feel in our lives that has greatly contributed to our addictive patterns. We want to reconnect with our inner selves, our internal guidance systems and our intuition. We want to reconnect with our sense of […]
How Can Travel Help Me in My Recovery?
As we’re working to recover, one thing we realize is that our healing journey is inviting us to find ways to love life again, to replace our unhealthy habits and activities with healthier ones, and to learn how to enjoy ourselves without the use of addictive substances and behaviors. We realize that enjoyment, recreation and […]
Addiction and Disconnection
Addiction is often described as being a disease of disconnection. What do we mean by this? When we are disconnected from our inner selves, from our intuition, from our purpose, we suffer a great deal. We struggle with depression, anxiety and other mental health issues. We believe the worst about ourselves and develop limiting beliefs […]
How Can I Learn to Nurture Myself?
Nurturing ourselves is something many of us with addiction and mental illness have a very hard time doing. We have adopted and perpetuated the belief that we don’t deserve to love ourselves and be good to ourselves. Many of us were not nurtured or supported by our caregivers growing up. The neglect and abandonment we […]
Learning to Value Ourselves
One of the most important ways we heal ourselves in recovery is by learning to value ourselves. Very often, throughout our struggles with addiction and mental illness, we do the exact opposite. We devalue, demean and degrade ourselves. We engage in behaviors that are self-harming, destructive and even dangerous. We choose friends and partners that […]
Can We Heal from Mental Illness?
We tend to think about mental illness the same way we think about addiction, that these are illnesses that will always be with us and that we will always be working to recover from. Many of us believe that we are always addicts but that we become recovering addicts, and that we are always mentally […]
Staying Connected to Our Recovery Community
Many of us in recovery know that when we leave our treatment center, our recovery work is far from over. We’ll still have intense inner healing work to do. We still have to revisit our childhoods and retrieve suppressed memories. We have to reprogram our subconscious minds and confront the deeply rooted fears that are […]
Tackling Addiction and Mental Illness Holistically
Addiction is multifaceted, impacting our entire lives and affecting us mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. We develop toxic thought patterns, limiting beliefs and recurring thoughts, as well as crippling mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. These issues are matters of emotional health as much as mental, and they are often considered co-occurring disorders […]