Category: QA

The recovery process brings with it some intense mental and emotional challenges, many of which can be hard to contend with and can make the work we’re doing that much harder. One of these challenges is how defeated we can feel, especially when things aren’t going as well as we would like them to. We […]

Many of us struggling with addiction and mental health issues have developed strong patterns of negative thinking, and as we work to heal, we realize that our thought patterns have a significant impact on our ability to recover. Our negative recurring thoughts become our beliefs, and they become instilled in our consciousness, affecting everything from […]

Sometimes as addicts we engage in behaviors that are toxic and unhealthy, behaviors that reflect our addictions but that we don’t necessarily associate with addiction because they appear to be less dangerous and destructive as the ones we do think of us as problematic. We think because we’re not angry and volatile, violent or abusive, […]

Our sense of self-worth is often extremely fragile and precarious when we’re struggling with addiction and mental illness. We don’t view ourselves with love and compassion. We tend to deny ourselves forgiveness and understanding, especially surrounding the mistakes and regrets we can’t seem to live down. We have a hard time accepting ourselves for who […]

 Our addictions and mental health issues have a way of overtaking our lives and causing us to forget who we are beyond our illnesses. We can begin to feel as though our identities have been reduced to being merely addicts and people who are mentally ill. We have a hard time remembering what it was […]

When we’re working to achieve sobriety and stay on track with our goals in recovery, we can find ourselves totally overwhelmed with all of the different emotions that arise, many of which we’re feeling for the first time. We’re experiencing brand new things, the clarity of sobriety and how scary that can be because it […]

We’ve become so committed to avoiding and suppressing our feelings that we develop all kinds of unhealthy compulsions and defense mechanisms as our misguided, self-destructive attempts of protecting ourselves from more pain. We suppress our feelings and avoid our thoughts. We use denial, secrecy, manipulation, and control as coping mechanisms. We aren’t open and honest […]

Much of our lives revolve around finding ways to avoid feeling our emotions because they’re too painful, too scary to confront, too overwhelming and confusing. We reject our feelings and refuse to accept them as they are. When we do this, we’re not just resisting how we feel, we’re also rejecting entire parts of ourselves […]

Many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness have a hard time being open and honest when it comes to discussing our traumatic experiences. We shy away from talking about them at all. We avoid the subject and change it as quickly as possible whenever it comes up. We keep our traumas a secret […]

Many of us recovering from addiction are also struggling to figure out our relationship issues, our life challenges, our behavioral patterns, and all the complexities therein. We’re still grappling with contentious relationship dynamics, turmoil, instability and insecurity in our closest relationships. Many of us are in relationships with other addicts, and some of the issues […]