Many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness also consider ourselves to be empathic, meaning we’re highly sensitive to other people’s emotions and can feel them alongside them. Our empathy can make us wonderful friends and confidantes. We’re known for being supportive of people and wanting to help them get through their many challenges.Read More
As the loved ones and friends of addicts, we often feel inclined to want to help them so much that we end up taking more responsibility than we should for their recovery. We see them not doing the work they need to do in order to recover, so we step in, hoping we’ll inspire themRead More
When living with addiction, many of us tend to be in such deep denial about it that we are unable to admit we have a problem. We refuse help when it’s offered to us and resist the idea of change. Oftentimes this comes from a place of fear. We’re afraid to do the hard workRead More
Our Recovery: Improving Our Mental and Emotional Health For those of us living with addiction, our life experiences can be a source of shame and self-hatred. Our identities as addicts make us feel down on ourselves, insecure and self-condemning. Part of our recovery is working to improve our mental and emotional health, and a hugeRead More
One of the hardest things we have to do when trying to have a healthy relationship is disclose the fact that we’re addicts. Many of us are so afraid of this difficult disclosure that we avoid relationships altogether. We push people away when they try to get too close to us. We isolate ourselves andRead More
When we’re struggling with conflict and unresolved issues in our relationships, couples counseling is one of the healing tools we can try, to help us with our conflict resolution patterns, strengthen our communication skills, and deepen our connection. When one or both of us is living with addiction, the counseling dynamic can be impacted inRead More
When we struggle with addiction, we associate our addiction with a dependence on a particular substance or behavior. What we sometimes come to discover is that we’re not only addicted to our drug of choice and the patterns we’ve developed over the years, we’ve also come to be addicted to the drama of it all,Read More
If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). We use our addictions in many different ways, often as coping mechanisms for our difficult life issues and as our means of self-medicating from our mental and emotional pain. Our drugs of choice can become our go-to remedies forRead More
As the loved ones of people struggling with addiction, we can find ourselves feeling obligated to constantly be there for them and support them, as they’re trying to quit, as they’re dealing with intense personal issues, even as they go through patterns of relapse. We don’t want to give up on them, and we don’tRead More
Dissociation is one of the many mental health issues that can accompany addiction. Dissociation can exacerbate our addictions and function as co-occurring disorders alongside them. When we’ve dissociated ourselves mentally and emotionally, we often will experience disconnected, fragmented thoughts, as ways of self-identifying. We might be delusional and imagine things that aren’t real. We mightRead More