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
Many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness are also empathic, meaning we feel other people’s feelings alongside them and have a tendency to absorb their energy, whether that energy is negative or positive. For many of us, this can mean we’re impacted strongly by other people’s depression, anxiety and other mental health issues,Read More
Focusing on Replacement Habits As we’re working to recover, we discover that many of our habits are harmful to our health and detrimental to our sobriety. We want to break these habits, and we often work on doing this by focusing on them because now that we’re practicing mindfulness, we’re observing ourselves do these badRead More
As we’re working to heal from our mental health issues, we learn more about how to control our thought patterns so that we’re not causing ourselves mental and emotional pain, sabotaging our recovery and keeping ourselves sick. One powerful way to control our thoughts is by using the practice of detaching from and observing ourRead More
For those of us struggling with mental health problems and addictions, one of our greatest challenges lies in figuring out how to manage our difficult emotions. We don’t have a healthy relationship to our feelings, and we haven’t learned healthy tools to help ourselves cope with them and navigate the many challenges they can createRead More
One of the things we learn as part of our recovery is to have faith in a higher power and to turn our problems over to it whenever we can’t solve them for ourselves. The act of surrendering any problems that are out of our control to our higher power can bring us a greatRead More
Sometimes as we’re healing, we feel emotions that can overwhelm us so much and be so debilitating that they feel as though they are detracting from our recovery. When we feel helpless, when we feel powerless and out of control, when we’re consumed with fear, we can feel like we’re going backward in our recoveryRead More
For many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness, our faith in a higher power is something we’ve been able to rely upon in difficult times, to hold us steady as we undertook emotional journeys and overcame life hurdles. Our faith gives us comfort, peace, and solace. It reminds us we’re going to beRead More
When we’re hit with addictive cravings and temptation, we can feel overwhelmed and overpowered, scared we’ll relapse and fall off the wagon, retreating back into our addictive patterns. Sometimes the onslaught of the accompanying challenging emotions – fear, shame, insecurity, self-hate – can be so forceful and overwhelming that they contribute to the temptation we’reRead More
Addiction is sometimes considered to be an illness of disconnection with the remedy therefore being one of connection. When struggling with addiction, we tend to disconnect in various ways. We become disconnected from our inner selves by treating ourselves with self-hatred and judgment. We disconnect from other people when we isolate ourselves, when we chooseRead More