Our struggles with addiction are often compounded by our battles with mental health issues, particularly depression and anxiety, as well as the different kinds of anxiety disorders we experience such as social anxiety. Our mental illnesses can make coping with our addictions and trying to recover from them that much harder. When we have social […]
Category: Recovery
Believing in Our Future
As we work towards recovering from our addictions, one thing that can help us move forward is to focus on our future and really believe we’re capable of creating a happy, healthy life for ourselves. So often we find ourselves consumed by our pasts, weighed down by the shame we feel and the disappointment of […]
Allowing People to Help Us
When living with addiction and mental illness, there are some fundamental habits we have that can negatively impact our experience with recovery and our ability to get well. One of our most detrimental habits is our inability to allow people to help us. We’re afraid of being a burden on our loved ones. We’re afraid […]
Our Fears Around Having Children
For those us struggling with addiction, the decision whether or not to have children is fraught with some unique fears, on top of the common, universal fears we all experience around parenthood. When we’re making the decision to become parents, oftentimes we’re consumed with fear that our children will inherit our addictions. We worry that […]
Identifying Our Motivations for Sobriety
A major factor in why so many of us struggle with our sobriety is our inability to solidify and clarify within ourselves the specific reasons behind why we need to get sober, the motivating forces behind why we want to get well in the first place. We know our lives have become unmanageable and that […]
Embracing Our Experiences as Gifts
When living with addiction and mental illness, we accumulate layers of challenging experiences that make us question who we are and what our place in the world is. We tend to see our difficulties as a negative thing, especially when they bring us years of confusion and turmoil. As we’re working to recover, though, we […]
Reasons Why We Falter in Our Commitment to Our Sobriety
Sometimes when we relapse and fall back into our old patterns of dependence, it’s because we’ve faltered in our commitment to ourselves and our sobriety. We’ve lost sight of the goals and intentions we’ve set for ourselves to get well. We’ve lost faith in ourselves. Often the reasons as to why our commitment might waver […]
The Role of Self-Hate in Addiction
If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). At the root of our addictions, for many of us, lies an emotional foundation we’ve created for ourselves of self-hate and self-rejection. We don’t feel unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves. We don’t nurture, support or protect ourselves. We […]
Learning to Take Responsibility for Our Emotions
Our addictions and mental health issues have a lot to do with our mental and emotional patterns, and one of the most destructive ones many of us tend to develop is failing to take responsibility for our emotions. We can find our feelings so hard to cope with that we want to place them on […]
Making Sense of Our Pain
The pain we experience in our lives, especially the pain of our addictions and mental health issues, can be so hard to understand, to make sense of and to find clarity around. We feel confused, overwhelmed and perplexed by it. We feel lost, abandoned and alone trying to figure out why we’ve gone through the […]