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 […]
Category: Recovery
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 […]
Being Diligent in Managing Our Stress
As we’re working to recover from our addictions and mental health issues, our stress levels are a crucial thing for us to pay attention to and monitor as part of our everyday recovery program. Excessive stress contributes to our depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. It compels us to turn to our drugs of choice […]
Creating Action Plans for Ourselves
Sometimes when we’ve achieved some success in our recovery, we’re so optimistic that we feel total faith in ourselves. We feel invincible. We feel like we’re on top of the world. We feel proud of ourselves and our accomplishments. When we’re in this place, we sometimes have a tendency to fall back on our goals […]
Exploring Our Beliefs
Many of the emotional issues we have surrounding our addictions are built upon beliefs we’ve been practicing thinking and believing for much of our lives. As part of our recovery, want to examine those beliefs and explore their origins, where they came from, why and how we adopted them in the first place, and what […]
Learning Healthy Coping Skills
Our addictions are very often the coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms we’ve adopted to help ourselves deal with the pain in our lives. We use all kinds of thought patterns, emotional patterns and behavioral patterns as our ways of coping with the stress of everyday life, our complex relationship issues, and the tough situations and […]
Quitting Cold Turkey
When deciding how to quit our drug of choice, some of us make the choice to quit “cold turkey,” abruptly and with finality, without any form of intervention, medical or otherwise, to help us quit. Some of us don’t put thought into it, we just are able to quit for good, in one shot. For […]