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 […]
Category: Resource Center
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 […]
How Do I Know When I’ve Hit Rock Bottom?
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). When we use the term “rock bottom,” we’re referring to that point we reach in our addiction where we simply can’t go any further. The pain of our addiction has become unbearable, life has become unmanageable, and we […]
Healing from an Inadequacy Complex
Many of us living with addictions, depression and other mental health issues also suffer from deeply rooted fears that we are inadequate or not good enough. These fears can be so deeply ingrained within us that they become thought disorders. When we are struggling with an inadequacy complex, it can make recovering from our addictions […]
Accepting Ourselves and Our Addictions
One of the most significant moments in our addiction journey is when we are able to come to terms with our addictions for the first time. Accepting that we are addicts and all that that means for our lives can bring up a whole range of emotions. We often are in such denial about our […]
How is Grief Related to Addiction?
The more we learn about ourselves and our addictions, the more we come to see that our addictions are very often our attempts to escape the pain within us that overwhelms us and that we feel is unbearable. One of the sources of our pain that many of us share is that of grief. Our […]
Embracing the Idea of Emotional Freedom for Recovery
Many of us living with addictions and depression have been living under the weight of our emotional challenges for most of our lives. We feel sadness and fear on a regular basis. We feel ashamed, and we often hate ourselves. When we think of recovery, we might think of it as this impossible, insurmountable ordeal […]