Category: QA

We usually associate our addictions with being painful and debilitating illnesses that we want to rid ourselves of and heal from as quickly as possible. What we often don’t realize is that our addictions hold a deeper meaning and carry a deeper purpose beyond the self-medicating, the escapism and distraction from our difficult thoughts and […]

When living with addiction, we are not only consumed by our substance abuse or dependence on certain behaviors, we are also consumed by all of the other accompanying factors that come along with these issues. We can find our lives becoming totally overpowered and overtaken by our addictions and how they affect our lives. Our […]

Throughout our struggles with addiction, we develop many coping mechanisms that we use in order to help ourselves cope with our pain but that are often means of trying to avoid it altogether. One of those coping mechanisms is denial. We can be in such deep denial about our substance abuse that we somehow manage […]

When suffering from addiction and mental illness, one of our biggest challenges is the resistance we feel to doing the work needed to recover. We postpone researching treatment centers. We stall on making an appointment with a therapist. We don’t go to support group meetings. We don’t feel ready to begin our recovery, and we […]

There are certain tools we can use to help us move forward in our recovery, and one of the best tools we can equip ourselves with is an accountability partner. We can ask a therapist, recovery coach, sponsor or trusted friend to be a teammate in our recovery work. They can give us the encouragement […]

Nurturing ourselves is something many of us with addiction and mental illness have a very hard time doing. We have adopted and perpetuated the belief that we don’t deserve to love ourselves and be good to ourselves. Many of us were not nurtured or supported by our caregivers growing up. The neglect and abandonment we […]

We tend to think about mental illness the same way we think about addiction, that these are illnesses that will always be with us and that we will always be working to recover from. Many of us believe that we are always addicts but that we become recovering addicts, and that we are always mentally […]

Learning to set and maintain boundaries in our daily lives and in our relationships is one of the best things we can do for our recovery. When living with addiction and mental health issues, we often don’t know what healthy boundaries look and feel like for us. We’re confused about our needs. Many of us […]

Self-awareness is one of the most important tools we can develop when recovering from addiction and mental illness. Self-awareness is the ability to be conscious of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. When we are self-aware, we are able to monitor our self-talk, our choices, and how we interact with other people. When we are not […]

When we are living with mental and emotional health issues such as depression and addiction, we tend to be living with lots of fear that manifest in the forms of anxiety, worry, pessimism and self-doubt. When we are living in fear, we tend to engage in mostly negative thinking. We become suspicious of other people […]