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
If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). There are many different kinds of therapy to take advantage of in our recovery, some more conventional while others are more holistic. One form of therapy we might not be familiar with is grief counseling. This particular kind ofRead More
How we handle our emotions are the result of the emotional conditioning we’ve been programmed with, from our families, from our culture, and from the messages we absorb from all around us. Many of our emotional responses are based on this emotional programming that we’ve adopted over the years. Our emotional patterns are often subconscious,Read More
How we think and feel about ourselves is one of the most important elements of our recovery and is a crucial part of the inner work we need to do in order to heal ourselves. How we self-identify can literally make or break our recovery. If our self-identification is based on self-hatred and self-rejection, ourRead More
The recovery process asks us to change so many things about ourselves, and the work we do can be overwhelming, to say the least. One thing that can be challenging at first, but which becomes easier over time, is the idea of learning how to regulate ourselves to help ourselves stay sober. Self-regulating is learningRead More
As we’re working to help ourselves recover, there are countless healing approaches we can try to boost our recovery work and give ourselves an even better chance of succeeding. One of these approaches is the concept of self-regulating, where we monitor and assess our behaviors and choices in order to help ourselves stay sober. ToRead More
Remembering Who We Are Recovering from addiction means working towards sobriety and/or abstinence while also working to heal from all of the psychological effects of our addictions. We’ve been mentally and emotionally so impacted by our addictions that our sense of self can become entirely defined by them. Our self-identity revolves around our addictions andRead More
A major part of our recovery work involves making changes to our relationships, particularly the ones that have been challenging or unhealthy for us. We have to examine which relationships are supportive of our recovery and which are contributing to our addictive patterns and mental health issues. Our relationship assessment will ultimately prompt us toRead More
An important part of our recovery is our commitment to the goals we set – our goals to get sober and stay sober over time, to change our unhealthy habits and develop new ones, to repair our broken relationships, and to heal our mental and emotional health issues. Our goals can be positive sources ofRead More
Sometimes preventing relapse feels like the hardest work we’ll ever do in our lives. We’re consumed with fear of all the horrible consequences that will befall us if we relapse, many of which we’ve already experienced, so we’re all too familiar with the pain and hardship relapse can bring with it. On top of that,Read More