Our emotional difficulties, including our addictions, can make us feel totally overpowered, weakened and defenseless. We can feel completely overwhelmed and overtaken by our struggles. What if there were practices we could implement that would increase our resilience, our feelings of being able to cope with stress and bounce back from challenges? Meditation is one […]
Category: Resource Center
The Lifestyle of Recovery
When living with addiction, we’ve developed lifestyles that not only maintain our addictions but also exacerbate and compound them. Our lifestyles are comprised of everything we do in our daily lives – our routines, our relationships, our thoughts and feelings, and our behavioral patterns. When we’re struggling with addiction, we’re also attempting to cope with […]
Why Am I Haunted by the Past?
Many of us have a very hard time moving on from our pasts. We feel haunted by past traumas, relationships and incidents. Some of us are consumed by the past and feel obsessed about it. We wish we could live our lives again and change things for the better. Why are we haunted by our […]
The Cyclical Patterns of Addiction
Those of us struggling with addiction often find ourselves living with patterns that many of us share in common. There are certain life cycles many of us experience pertaining to our addiction. Addiction is all-encompassing and touches every area of our lives, from our mental and emotional health, to our relationships, to our work. Understanding […]
Creating a Personalized Recovery Program
While there are some common themes in addiction and recovery that many of us can relate to, we are unique individuals with unique stories, gifts, strengths, challenges and weaknesses, meaning that each of us will have our own experience with both addiction and recovery that is unique to who we are. Because no two experiences […]
Does Addiction Only Affect Certain People?
Even though addiction is a common phenomenon in our society, affecting so many of us and our families and communities, there are still many misconceptions about addiction in our mainstream culture. The negative stereotypes surrounding addiction and addicts, coupled with serious confusion and misinformation, cause many people to believe things about addiction that simply aren’t […]
The Importance of Enjoyment in Recovery
Because addiction is such a devastating and debilitating illness, we tend to think of recovery as a very serious undertaking. While it is a very significant endeavor in our lives, incorporating enjoyment into the process is just as important as any of the serious elements involved. In addition to the therapy and deep emotional work, […]
Can Addiction Be Stopped Before It Starts?
Many of us living with addiction were genetically predisposed to it. We were raised in families where addiction ran rampant. We inherited traits and learned emotional patterns that conditioned us for addiction. Could we have stopped our addiction before it took hold? Is there a way to halt addiction in its tracks, before it gets […]
Emotional Attachment to Fear and Pain
Because our difficult emotions are so hard to handle, we would think we wouldn’t want to stay so closely attached to them, but for many of us, we develop a strong attachment to our fear and pain. We cling to them, afraid to release them. Our attachment is so strong that we don’t allow the […]
Feeling Resistance to Recovery
When we’re in recovery, our emotional journey with addiction is far from over. We’ve started doing the emotional work we need to do to heal, but we still have a lot of work to do. For many of us, beginning the recovery process means we’ve just barely begun to scratch the surface of our deeply […]