When we have been living with addictions for much of our lives, we can easily lose sight of who we are. Our attachments to substances, behaviors and relationships can cloud our vision, and we lose touch with our identities, our purpose, our connection to our higher power. We can feel like we’ve lost everything. It […]
Category: Resource Center
Connection as a Remedy for Addiction
There are many tools to help us in our recovery from addiction, and one of the most powerful ones we can access is that of connection. We very often feel disconnected from other people and from our higher power, making us feel even more alone. How can we develop a sense of connection, and how […]
Can Therapy Help Me?
Many of us have associations with therapy that are negative, based on our past experiences or on cultural stereotypes around therapy. We may have had an experience with a therapist that made us hesitant to try therapy again. We might have heard other people discount therapy as being useless and a waste of time and […]
Setting Intentions for Recovery
Often when we are thinking about recovery, we don’t know where to start. We think of recovery as an overwhelming process and don’t know how to go about it. To help us work on our recovery, let’s set some intentions for ways we can implement healing in our lives. Reach Out We very often want […]
What Does it Mean to Have an Addictive Personality?
Many of us living with addictions also identify as having addictive personalities. What does this mean, and how do you know if this applies to you? When we have healthy ways of coping with life’s challenges, we can handle our emotions in productive ways. We have emotional independence, and we feel strong in our ability […]
Facing Our Fears
Our addictions, depression and mental health issues are very often manifestations of our fears. The inner pain we feel about our fears can develop into many of the emotional challenges we face, such as our addictive behaviors and toxic thought patterns. Sometimes we focus our recovery on stopping our behaviors, because it is in those […]
How Can I Learn to Appreciate My Story?
Each of us has a unique story, full of the lessons we’ve learned, challenges we’ve faced and experiences we’ve had. Sometimes when we’ve struggled with addictions, we have a very hard time looking back at our life story. We are overcome with embarrassment, shame and disappointment with ourselves. We carry so much remorse and regret […]
Developing Emotional Resilience
Those of us living with addictions and mental health issues can find ourselves struggling with emotional overwhelm – feeling anxious, overly worried and frightened when challenges arise. As part of our recovery process, we can work to increase our emotional resilience by adopting a few changes to how we go about handling things. For one, […]
What Are My Emotions Trying to Tell Me?
Those of us struggling with addictions have a tendency to want to ignore our emotions and avoid feeling them because they can be painful and difficult to cope with. Our addictive behaviors are very often what we use to try to escape our emotions, but when we can look at them closely and figure out […]
Self-Empowerment for Recovery
When we are working to heal from our addictions and mental health issues, we often carry within us limiting beliefs that we’ve developed over the course of our lives that tell us we aren’t strong, powerful or capable. We believe that our illnesses mean we are weak. We believe we don’t have the power to […]