When in recovery, we know that our greatest challenge will be to keep ourselves sober, but we don’t always recognize all of the emotional components that our recovery work will entail. We don’t always understand just how much our emotional challenges can impact our happiness, our peace of mind, our self-control, and our willpower. WeRead More
Living with addiction often means we grow accustomed to having to live with certain emotions that can be intense, overwhelming, and overpowering. Sometimes we assume that those emotions are unavoidable and that there’s nothing we can do about them. Other times we try relentlessly to rid ourselves of them. The emotional ramifications of addiction canRead More
Many of us struggling with addiction live in denial and secrecy about the lives we lead. When we deny our addictions, it’s often because we’re afraid to admit we have a problem. We worry about what people will think of us. We fear their judgment and criticism. We fear they will reject us. When weRead More
We tend to associate the recovery process with all the daunting and overwhelming challenges we’re being faced with and all the sacrifices we’re making, namely having to let go of our drugs of choice, as well as the unhealthy relationships that fueled our addictions. We think of the recovery process as being an arduous andRead More
When we struggle with addiction, our drugs of choice are the coping mechanisms we use to manage and often avoid and suppress our emotions. One of the most painful emotions we encounter is that of anger, especially when someone has deeply hurt or wronged us. It can feel impossible to forgive someone who has woundedRead More
When we’re struggling with addiction, we can feel disheartened when we’ve come to believe that nothing can make us quit. We know that it has to be our decision to get better, and we might not feel ready to make that decision yet. We might be scared of failing at our recovery. We might beRead More
Behind the painful and difficult symptoms of our addictions, our substance use and dependence issues, are the deeper meanings as to why we’ve developed our addictions in the first place. There are underlying issues that we sometimes fail to look at. We aren’t always mindful of the fact that when we come to depend onRead More
Self-abandonment is the act of neglecting ourselves and our well-being, of turning our backs on ourselves, of hating and rejecting ourselves. Many of us have grown so accustomed to abandoning ourselves that we don’t realize we’re doing it. We think that the ways in which we’re treating ourselves are normal, acceptable, and even healthy. WeRead More
As we’re working to recover from our addictions, sometimes we hope that the negative emotions of our turbulent experiences with addiction will be a thing of the past. We want to believe that we’ve done the majority of our hard work, and that we’ll no longer have to be so challenged by our emotions. We’dRead More
Sometimes when we are having a hard time getting or staying sober, our instinct is to think that we’ve done something wrong, or that we haven’t applied ourselves diligently enough. We beat ourselves up for not trying harder, for not working tirelessly, or for having any emotional resistance to our recovery. We may not considerRead More