Category: Therapy

As we’re working to recover from addiction and mental illness, we want to develop new coping skills to replace all of the destructive, limiting, damaging patterns we’ve been perpetuating over the years. We want to tackle all of the different manifestations of our pain, our addictive patterns and the symptoms of our mental and emotional […]

Many of us who struggle with addiction witnessed the illness in our families and communities when growing up. We may have watched parents, siblings and other family members drink excessively, use drugs or engage in reckless addictive behaviors. They may have included us in their activities, exposing us to their drugs of choice and addictive […]

Self-hypnosis might sound complicated, difficult and elusive, but the truth is we’re always hypnotizing ourselves, each and every day, with the thoughts we think repeatedly and the beliefs we give the most energy to. When used consciously and with mindfulness, self-hypnosis can be applied to any challenge in our lives and can help us establish […]

When it comes to addiction recovery, there are many things we fear – the difficult symptoms of withdrawal, having to give up our dependence on our drug of choice, harsh judgments from other people, feeling alone in this new journey we’re taking. One thing many of us fear is entering treatment and getting professional help. […]

One of the things that holds us back the most in our recovery are our lingering feelings of self-hatred, insecurity and self-rejection. We’re still feeling down on ourselves for being addicts, for all the mistakes we’ve made and ways in which we’ve hurt ourselves and others. We feel ashamed of ourselves. We don’t love and […]

We might not usually think of compassion in terms of addiction and mental illness, but the more we learn to have compassion for ourselves and others, the more we can help ourselves during the very challenging recovery process. Our addictions are often coping mechanisms for our pain, the pain of our mental health issues, and […]

An important part of the recovery process is getting to know ourselves better and therefore getting clearer on our values. When we’re embroiled in our addictions, we tend to lose sight of who we are and what values are important to us. We forget what principles we want to lead our lives by. We’re so […]

When we make the decision to get sober, many of us will seek professional help with our recovery program. For many of us, entering treatment is a scary and overwhelming undertaking. We might still be suffering from depression and other mental health issues. We might feel resistance to doing the work, partly because our addictions […]

As we’re working to recover from our addictions and mental health issues, examining our fears with a therapist can help us greatly in our healing. We are sometimes so clouded by our toxic thought patterns and so distracted by our life circumstances that we have a hard time looking at what is driving us in […]

Along with our addictions and mental health issues, we often develop emotional patterns that contribute to our unwellness. One of the most destructive and debilitating of these emotional patterns is our tendency to compare ourselves to other people. We compete with other people and feel easily threatened by them. As addicts, we compare ourselves to […]