Category: QA

Many of us struggling with addiction find ourselves dependent upon a specific substance or behavior, or a certain combination of them. We often don’t stray too far from this combination or veer too much from it because we develop a comfort level with it, we grow accustomed to it, we know how it affects us, […]

When we’ve grown accustomed to being in relationships while simultaneously struggling with addiction, we often don’t know what relationships could be like when we’re finally sober. We don’t know what kind of partner we’re capable of being. We don’t know what our relationships could look like, how they might function, and what we can expect […]

Those of us living with addiction and mental illness are also often coping with painful tragedies in our lives, traumatic experiences we’re still reeling from, events we don’t understand and can’t wrap our brains around, losses we feel we’ll never be able to recover from. Culturally we’ve been conditioned to avoid thinking and speaking on […]

Our addictions are fueled by a phenomenon called the reward system, where we are driven compulsively to use our drug of choice or to engage in our addictive behavior of choice because we know that once we do, we’ll feel a certain kind of reward. The reward we feel might be a rush of dopamine […]

Our personalities are the culmination of all the habits, patterns, thoughts and feelings that we’ve come to associate with ourselves and that we’ve used to formulate our identities. We tend to think that our personalities are permanent and set in stone, that they can’t be changed even when we’re not happy with them. We come […]

When living with addiction and mental illness, we have a tendency to always feel as though there’s something wrong with us, like there’s always something that needs to be fixed, added or taken away in order for us to be good enough. We feel inadequate as we are, unworthy, and undeserving of love and happiness. […]

Those of us living with addiction and mental health issues often find ourselves in toxic relationships in part because the unhealthiness within us attracts people who reflect that back to us and who compound our issues, pushing us to learn even more about ourselves and gain a deeper understanding of who we are. Unfortunately, many […]

When we’re working to recover, we tend to have our focus set on the end goal, the finish line, the goal of sobriety. Everything we’re working for is for our sobriety. Every change we make, every intention we set, every goal we have, is for our sobriety. We sometimes get so caught up on reaching […]

Whether because of our family patterns, our own insecurities, or our cultural obsession with critiquing people, many of us have a tendency to judge other people harshly, whether we know them well or not at all. We criticize people for their personal choices, for their ways of life, for their addictions and mental illnesses, even […]

When we’re struggling with addiction, our approach with ourselves and our recovery is often one of harshness and strictness. We’re aiming for total abstinence and complete sobriety, and while these might be what we need in order to recover, how we go about accomplishing them can be problematic. We are extremely hard on ourselves. When […]