So much of recovery is about creating a healthy routine and surrounding yourself with healthy people. It’s nice to have a break from regular life when you travel, but if you are recovering from addiction, taking time away from your routine and your social support may be risky. However, overcoming addiction is about having more… Continue Reading How to Stay Sober While Traveling
Making the transition from treatment back to your regular routine can be a difficult one, full of brand new mental and emotional challenges. We can be filled with fear that we’ll relapse. We can be hit with the anxiety and depression that can come during difficult transitions. We can feel suddenly very alone and isolated… Continue Reading Transitioning Out of Treatment
Making the decision to get professional help can be one of the hardest things we’ll ever do but also one of the best things we can do for ourselves to improve our chances of recovery. Entering treatment requires a level of courage and self-awareness that can take us a long time to develop. Very often… Continue Reading Entering Treatment
When we are starting out in recovery, many of us choose to be linked with a sponsor. We can find sponsors through our support groups, treatment centers, therapists or other trusted support systems. When we are paired with sponsors, they are usually in recovery for the same addiction types we’ve struggled with. They have firsthand… Continue Reading How Can Having a Sponsor Help Me?
For many of us, there are certain life skills we haven’t learned and developed over the course of our lives because our addictions have caused us to neglect ourselves. Many of us have sacrificed ourselves and our wellbeing for the sake of our addictions. Learning important life skills can help us greatly in our recovery… Continue Reading Learning Life Skills
Recovery support group meetings are an excellent way to connect with others in recovery. When we are first starting out on our recovery journey, we can feel very lost and alone. We can forget just how many other people are living with similar issues and struggling in similar ways. Our isolation can make us feel… Continue Reading Why Should I Go to Meetings?
Anger and addiction are closely related. Occasional anger is normal and sometimes healthy. If we see someone being treated cruelly or unfairly, anger is an appropriate reaction. However, expressing anger constructively isn’t easy. Some people are prone to angry outbursts that are destructive and usually make matters worse. Most people go the opposite way and… Continue Reading 5 Ways to Deal with Anger in Addiction Recovery
Conventional forms of therapy such as traditional talk-therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tend to focus mainly on working with the mind, and while our addictions have a mental component, they also are very much related to our emotions, our hearts and souls, and our spirits. Many of us believe that at our core we are… Continue Reading The Spiritual Element of Recovery
The recovery process is challenging one – emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. One of the most important parts of the process is that of rediscovering ourselves. Our addictions and mental health issues can cause us to completely lose sight of who we are. We’ve isolated ourselves, distanced ourselves from loved ones, broken relationships. We’ve lost… Continue Reading The Process of Self-Discovery
Many of us have learned to cope with our loneliness by doing whatever we can not to have to feel it. We use relationships to stave off the loneliness. We stay in unhealthy, toxic, even abusive relationships, sometimes because we’re afraid of being alone. We try to fill the silence so we don’t have to… Continue Reading Embracing Loneliness