Category: Recovery

Those of us living with addiction know firsthand just how destructive it can be. Grappling with addiction can cause us to feel as though we’ve become different people, living entirely different lives, with dysfunctional ways of thinking and feeling, and tumultuous, conflicted relationships. We don’t feel like ourselves. We feel like strangers to ourselves. We […]

For many of us in recovery, we remember a time in the story of our addiction when we thought we’d be able to maintain our lifestyles the way they were and still continue to feed our addictions. We felt like we had figured out a way to manage our lives and still be able to […]

As we work to heal from our addictions and mental health issues, we learn that many of our emotional issues come from the thought patterns we’ve developed over the years. We perpetuate these thought patterns when we aren’t conscious of them, and for most of us, we haven’t become conscious of them yet so we’re […]

The Florida Health Care News website recently published a feature article on Riverside Recovery and our unique approach to addiction recovery treatment. The article, titled “Restoring Health and Hope,” was the product of a collaboration with longtime Florida Health Care News writer Patti DiPanfilo — it highlights our process and raises awareness about addiction treatment […]

Those of us struggling with addiction often find ourselves living with patterns that many of us share in common. There are certain life cycles many of us experience pertaining to our addiction. Addiction is all-encompassing and touches every area of our lives, from our mental and emotional health, to our relationships, to our work. Understanding […]

Abusing and overusing substances such as narcotic drugs and alcohol can cause us to become mentally, emotionally and physically dependent upon them. We feel as though we can’t live without them, and our dependence can very quickly and easily lead to a debilitating addiction. It is not uncommon for us to start to think that […]

The process of learning to handle addictive urges and the temptation of our addictions is much like learning to handle our difficult emotions. We have to become better able to sit through the discomfort and the anxiety they can bring. We have to turn off our default instinct to run from the unpleasantness. We have […]

Our intuition is one of the best internal mechanisms we have for self-protection. Our intuition, and the instincts we develop based on it, alert us to danger, tell us when we need to change course, and show us how to redirect ourselves. Our addictions can cloud our thinking and manipulate our emotions so much that […]

If we allow it to, regret can totally consume us and the pain of it can contribute to our addictions and depression. Our cycles of addiction can bring us more regret as we accumulate years of self-destructing, making mistakes and hurting other people. Regret can be a bitter poison that eats away at our joy […]

When we’re in the grips of addiction, one of the things we’re known to do is distance ourselves from the people trying to help us. We prioritize our addiction, so we push away anything or anyone threatening to get in the way of it. The separation can be especially hard on our loved ones who […]