An important part of the healing process when recovering from any addiction or mental health issue is learning how to integrate all the different parts of ourselves so that we can heal holistically. We want to reestablish our wholeness and feel complete. We can’t do this when we’re rejecting entire parts of ourselves and refusing […]
Category: Resource Center
How Are Eating Disorders and Addiction Connected?
When we are struggling with addiction, we have formed a dependent attachment to a substance, behavior or relationship. We feel compulsiveness, chemical dependence, neediness and obsessiveness around our drug of choice. Our addictions are evidence of our lack of wholeness, as well as our means of trying to fill our emotional voids. Eating disorders are […]
What We Leave Behind When We Choose Recovery
When we commit to sobriety, we’re taking on new challenges that bring all kinds of new things into our lives. We receive hope and optimism. We are gifted new knowledge about ourselves and our lives. We make discoveries about who we are that propel us forward. In addition to all the new things we receive, […]
Why Do We Isolate Out of Shame?
Those of us living with addiction can find ourselves isolating ourselves from our loved ones, from our friends and family members, from our communities and from the world around us. We isolate for many reasons, one of which can be our deep sense of shame. Why are we so unforgiving of ourselves, especially when we […]
Warning Signs We Might Relapse
One of the most important things we can educate ourselves on when we’re working to recover are some of the signs that a relapse is imminent. While it doesn’t serve us to be overly afraid or paranoid that we’ll relapse, and while it doesn’t help us to assume relapse is inevitable, we can help ourselves […]
What Sobriety Demands of Us
When we make the choice to get sober, we’re being tested and challenged in all kinds of ways, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. The process of choosing sobriety will demand certain things of us. When we accept the challenge and rise to meet it, we discover gifts and skills we didn’t know we possessed. In […]
How Does Negativity Impact Our Healing?
How we respond to the world around us dictates our emotional energy and therefore how we cope with emotional challenges. Our healing depends on how well we can navigate the difficult circumstances and people we find ourselves forced to deal with. Negativity in particular can be extremely overwhelming and stressful, and when we succumb to […]
Things We Share in Common as Recovering Addicts
When we begin the recovery process, we enter an international community of people who have all experienced similar struggles and reached a specific place in their journeys as recovering addicts. There are certain things many of us share in common, some unifying aspects of our experience. Our experiences with both addiction and recovery will be […]
Choosing Sobriety
Living with addiction, we make certain choices repeatedly. We choose to keep using. We choose to prioritize our addictions over our lives, our families and our well-being. We choose not to get help. We choose not to admit we have a problem. We choose to hide in denial and secrecy. When we finally make the […]
How Do I Stop Hating Myself?
Learning to love ourselves might sound like an impossible feat, especially when we’ve been inundating ourselves with self-hatred for so many years. Self-love is something we can’t just wish for, we have to actively work at it. We have to give it our time and energy. We have to view it as a practice and […]