Our addictions and mental health issues often cause us to have an unhealthy relationship with our emotions. We become so afraid of feeling our emotions that we don’t allow ourselves to feel them fully. We’ve developed unhealthy patterns of suppressing, denying and avoiding our thoughts and feelings. We numb ourselves with our drugs of choice, […]
Category: Resource Center
How Do I Fill the Voids Within Me?
Our addictions very often develop from our need to fill the voids we feel within ourselves. We feel unfulfilled and unsatisfied in our lives. We feel lost, empty and incomplete. These feelings are so unsettling and cause us so much anxiety and uneasiness that we feel desperate to escape them and distract ourselves from them. […]
Creative Expression for Recovery
Many of us were creative, expressive and playful as children but stopped expressing ourselves creatively after childhood. Growing up, we explored music, art, dance, drama, storytelling and other creative pursuits. Our classes and extracurricular activities exposed us to different art forms, and many of us were intrigued enough to continue studying them. For a lot […]
How Can We Stop Self-Medicating?
Self-medicating is the process by which we use addictive substances and behaviors to numb the pain of our emotional issues, mental illnesses and difficult life challenges. We use drugs, alcohol, sex and gambling to cope with our anxiety, depression, panic attacks and other mental health issues. We use our go-to drugs of choice to try […]
Connection for Healing
When we’re struggling with addiction and mental illness, one of our greatest challenges is how disconnected we’ve become, from other people, from our families and communities, but even more so from ourselves. We’ve lost our connectedness to our inner selves, to the light that is within us. We’ve become disconnected from our purpose in life. […]
Discovering Our Purpose and Fulfillment
Part of the important work we do in recovery is finding ourselves, rebuilding our sense of self and discovering our purpose. We can find that throughout our struggles with addiction, our sense of purpose eluded us. We didn’t know what we were meant to do with our lives. We were confused about our mission. We […]
How Do Our Toxic Relationships Hold Us Back?
As we’re working to recover, we find that we start to place more value on our inner peace, our sanity and serenity. We realize that a lot of the conflict and turmoil we’re experiencing in our lives is coming from our toxic relationships. We tend to manifest with the energy of our internal environment, so […]
Fear of Confrontation
When struggling with addiction, there are some common fears that many of us suffer from acutely, that fuel and drive our addictive cycles. One of those fears is our fear of confrontation. We’re afraid of facing the truth of our addictions. We avoid the truth at all costs. We’re in denial about how serious our […]
How to Maintain Hope During Recovery
When we finish a treatment program, we’ve begun to build the foundation for our recovery work, but we will need to keep up with it consistently if we want to have lasting results. One of the most important elements of that foundation is the emotional work we do to restore our faith in ourselves and […]
How Can We Break Family Patterns of Abuse?
Far too often, addiction and abuse go hand in hand. Our addictions can make us abusive towards our loved ones, and we try to escape the pain of our abusiveness (or of being abused) with our addictions. We get caught in vicious cycles where we feel unable to escape both our addictions and the abuse […]