One of the patterns many of us share is our tendency to blame ourselves for our traumatic experiences. Our self-blame causes us to feel deeply ashamed of ourselves, often for things we could not control and that weren’t our fault. We take the blame away from the people and events that traumatized us and put […]
Category: Resource Center
Can Addiction Start in Childhood?
We often think of addiction as something we face as adults, but when we look back at the development of our addictions over the course of our lives, many of us find that we were beginning our addictive behaviors early on, as children. We can see evidence of our addictions tracing back to when we […]
Learning to Live with Loneliness
One of the most pervasive emotions we deal with when struggling with our addictions is loneliness. Much of the time we’re trying to avoid feeling lonely and trying to escape our loneliness. We’re afraid to be alone, we’re afraid to feel the painful weight of loneliness, and our go-to coping mechanisms for loneliness are often […]
How Can Writing Help Me in My Recovery?
Living with addictions means dealing with some very intense, very difficult emotions, including the sadness, fear and anger we’ve been carrying for many years. When we don’t have healthy ways of processing our emotions, we often turn to substances and addictive behaviors. Writing can be a powerful way to handle our emotions and is a […]
What to Do When You Feel Like Giving Up
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). For those of us living with addictions and mental health issues, we can have times when we are in so much emotional pain and distress that we feel like we want to give up. We struggle with […]
Should I Seek Treatment?
The decision whether or not to seek treatment for our addictions can be a difficult one. When making the decision, we are often confronting some very real fears- the fear of having to face the reality of our addictions, the fear of being judged by people, all the fears we have about ourselves that we’ve […]
Meditation for Navigating Painful Emotions
When we are struggling with addictions, one of the hardest things we’re dealing with is the abundance of painful emotions we feel on a regular basis. We react to our emotions in unhealthy and self-destructive ways rather than choosing healthy coping mechanisms. Many of us have lived through traumatic experiences which can influence us on […]
Can I Recover?
When we are in the thick of our addictions, we often can’t see our way out. We’ve lost hope in ourselves and in the possibility of recovery. We feel despair and desperation, and recovery can feel like a distant, impossible ideal that we will never realistically be able to attain. Can we hope to recover? […]
Separating Ourselves from Toxic Relationships
One of the best things we can do for ourselves in recovery is separate ourselves from the toxic relationships that have been bringing us down. When we are struggling with addiction, we often attract other people also living with addiction. Our relationships are often toxic and destructive, we enable one another’s addictions, and we contribute […]
Learning How to Handle Our Emotions
Learning how to deal with our difficult emotions is one of the most important things we’ll do in our recovery from addictions and mental health issues. Our tendency when dealing with our challenging emotions is to want to avoid them at all costs. We don’t want to feel the weight of their pain. The pain […]