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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
How Can I Attract a Healthy Relationship?
When recovering from addiction and mental illness, one of the things we discover is that the health of our relationships plays a huge part in our overall well-being. We realize that we were so filled with self-destructive ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves that we naturally attracted partnerships and friendships that made us feel […]
Giving Our Children the Freedom to Live Their Lives
When addiction runs in our families, or when we fear addiction might develop in our children, we instinctively want to protect them and safeguard them from harm. We want to do everything in our power to keep the addiction from developing, or if it has already appeared, worsening and further overtaking their lives. When we’re […]
Why Are Boundaries Important?
Learning to set and maintain boundaries in our daily lives and in our relationships is one of the best things we can do for our recovery. When living with addiction and mental health issues, we often don’t know what healthy boundaries look and feel like for us. We’re confused about our needs. Many of us […]
Unconditional Love vs. Enabling
Confronting our children’s addiction is one of the hardest things we’ll ever have to do. We want what’s best for them. We want them to be happy, healthy and whole. Learning they are struggling with addiction can be shocking, troubling and heartbreaking. Our instinct is to want to protect them and to lessen their burdens. […]
How Can We Develop Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is one of the most important tools we can develop when recovering from addiction and mental illness. Self-awareness is the ability to be conscious of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. When we are self-aware, we are able to monitor our self-talk, our choices, and how we interact with other people. When we are not […]
Supporting Our Children’s Healing Without Enabling Them
When our loved ones are suffering, our instinct is to protect them and shield them from harm. We want to take away their pain and prevent them from experiencing yet more suffering. Our intentions are to support our children, but we can fall into patterns of enabling them instead. We enable other people’s addictions in […]