Making Difficult Emotions Even Harder to Cope With Many of our emotional challenges are made more difficult by our unhealthy coping mechanisms. We can be very self-hating when it comes to how we handle our thoughts and feelings. We beat ourselves up for feeling sad or anxious. Instead of practicing forgiveness and compassion, we judgeRead More
Our intuition is our internal guidance system. It leads, guides, and protects us, but we often ignore the things it’s trying to communicate. We get distracted by everything else in our lives, and our addiction is the ultimate distraction. Our drug of choice consumes our waking hours to the point where nothing else even mattersRead More
Choosing Conscious Reprogramming A major component of our recovery is shifting how we think and speak about ourselves. When we are self-hating, we’re much more likely to want to escape our emotions using addictive substances and behaviors. We turn to our drugs of choice for solace from all of our self-inflicted pain. We become dependentRead More
Any time we’re undertaking a lofty goal, there is the potential for feeling burned out. Big projects consume a great deal of our time and demand a lot of energy. It’s entirely reasonable to find yourself getting overwhelmed and losing motivation. The same is true for our recovery work. We put so much of ourselvesRead More
Recovering from addiction is an experience that often includes intense emotion. We all know the highs and lows of drug use, the inner turmoil, the moments of anxiety, and panic. In these moments, we can find ourselves feeling overwhelmed. We don’t know how to cope with our intense emotional responses and thought patterns during theseRead More
Self-Love: An Unattainable Goal? When we’ve felt self-hating and self-rejecting for so long, it can seem virtually impossible to finally love and accept ourselves. Our addictions are often a manifestation of the insecurities, self-doubt, and fears that we’ve developed over the years. As we’re beginning to heal ourselves, we learn that self-love is an importantRead More
At one point or another, many of us find ourselves taking a closer look at the overall trajectory of our lives. We begin to analyze where we are versus where we want to be. We take stock of everything we’ve experienced, what we’ve accomplished, and how far we are from reaching our goals. In recovery,Read More
What is Remission? Addictions, like any other illness, have cycles and periods of variation that impact our experience with them. Addictive patterns aren’t always consistent, and how we feel can change drastically from one phase of our addiction to another. One of these phases, which can bring us a great deal of confusion and turmoil,Read More
Addiction Thrives On Self-Neglect Our addictions feed off of our self-neglect and self-abandonment. The more we neglect our needs, the more unstable we are mentally and emotionally. With an unstable mental and emotional life, we become vulnerable to addictive substances or behaviors. When we’re using, we feel like we’ve reached some semblance of stability. Self-neglectRead More
Once in recovery, it’s easy to assume that our many issues and challenges will be resolved. We expect treatment programs to magically heal us as soon as we enroll. We’re impatient to feel normal again and reintegrate back into our lives. The truth is, we can continue to be impacted by many of the sameRead More