Sometimes when we are approaching recovery, it is relatively easy to identify our behavioral patterns. They’re pretty clear and easy to see. We can pinpoint our go-to drugs of choice and addictive behaviors fairly easily. What can sometimes be harder to identify are the emotional patterns underlying our behaviors. These patterns often drive our addictions, […]
Category: Resource Center
How Do I Stop Feeling Like I’m Not Good Enough?
One thing so many of us share, whether or not we struggle with addictions, is this incessant feeling that we’re not good enough, that we don’t measure up to other people, that we aren’t who or what we wish we were. These limiting beliefs are a part of what connect us as human beings. They […]
Being Honest with Ourselves
Facing the truth of our addictions and mental health issues is one of the most challenging things we’ll ever have to do. It means owning up to our mistakes and the ways we’ve hurt other people and ourselves. It means recognizing our shortcomings and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. It means embracing humility and the […]
How Can I Start Letting People Help Me?
Many of us living with addictions have a very hard time accepting help. We might be prideful and not want to show our vulnerability by asking for help. We might be afraid that people will judge us as weak, or hold it against us that we needed help. People who we hoped would help us […]
Releasing Self-Blame
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 […]
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 […]