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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
What are Defense Mechanisms?
When we are living with mental and emotional health issues such as depression and addiction, we tend to be living with lots of fear that manifest in the forms of anxiety, worry, pessimism and self-doubt. When we are living in fear, we tend to engage in mostly negative thinking. We become suspicious of other people […]
Mindful Listening to Support Our Children
Confronting addiction in our families can be a grueling and painful process, full of unforeseen mental and emotional challenges. We can feel as though we’ve let our children down and can therefore be filled with shame and regret. We can find ourselves analyzing all of the mistakes we might have made, all of the ways […]
What Does Self-Worth Have to Do with Addiction and Mental Illness?
We often associate addiction and mental illness with having an issue or problem with a particular substance or behavior. We think of depression and anxiety as being related to our current circumstances, losing our jobs, losing a loved one, or being overly stressed. We don’t always realize that our addiction and mental health issues stem […]
How Can We Recognize Addiction in Our Children?
Addiction has a way of sneaking up on us and overpowering us, overtaking our lives and robbing us of our happiness and purpose. While it can be hard to detect, there are some key signs we can be mindful of, that can alert us when there might be a problem. We can learn these signs […]
Navigating Our Cravings in Recovery
One of the greatest challenges to our recovery is the persistence with which we feel cravings to use our drugs of choice. Our addictive substances and behaviors formed such a huge part of our lives and our identities that they often overtook us entirely. It’s not realistic to think that once we’re sober we’ll suddenly, […]
Why is Happiness Important for Recovery?
As we’re working to heal, we learn that recovery is about more than sobriety. Abstinence is an important element of shedding our dependence on our addictive substance or behavior, but we need to tackle our recovery holistically to give us the best chance of being successful. Happiness is one of the most important ingredients in […]