An unhealthy ego is at the root of many of our emotional challenges, including our addictions and mental health issues. When our ego, or sense of self, is wounded from trauma, we often struggle to understand our feelings or manage them in healthy ways. We create a poor self-image for ourselves, and our self-perception is…
Valentine’s Day is a holiday where you celebrate love with the people that you love. You may have thought that you loved drugs and alcohol but it ended up being a poisonous relationship that left you sick. It is important that you find sober ways to enjoy yourself on Valentine’s Day that do not involve…
When working through the reintegration process, we’ll want to treat ourselves with as much patience, compassion and understanding as we possibly can. We’re dealing with new forms of stress that we’ve never experienced before. We’re approaching our old lives with huge changes in our consciousness and our awareness. We’re thinking and feeling things we never…
Upon leaving treatment, we’ll be entering a particularly challenging time that will test our strength and our resilience. We’ll be leaving the safety of a sober living environment where drugs and alcohol are prohibited, making it impossible to pick up our drug of choice and giving us the extra security of knowing that we can’t…
Many of us struggling with addiction continue our patterns for years before we realize we simply can’t live like that anymore. We’ve been perpetuating toxic and dangerous cycles full of self-hatred and self-destruction. When we’re mid-cycle, we tend to think we’ll be able to manage. We find ways to get away with all the self-harm.…
One of the biggest challenges in our recovery begins when we’ve completed treatment, when we’re no longer being supervised in an environment with no access to our addictive substance or behavior of choice. When we return home and are starting to reintegrate back into our regular lives, a potential threat to our sobriety is the…
There comes a point in many of our lives when we realize how much we’ve been holding ourselves back. We’ve allowed relationships to control us. We’ve let our limiting beliefs dictate the action we took, or didn’t take, in our lives. We didn’t make the changes we knew we needed to make to be healthy…
When we allow our fears and our pain to get the better of us, we lose our ability to think positively. Our negative thinking taints everything, from our self-perception, to our hopes for the future. When we are consumed with negative thinking, we create a self-image based on self-hate, and when we feel so negatively…
We grow up with all kinds of limitations, from our families and the ways they raised us, from our societies and communities, and perhaps most importantly, from our own fears and limiting beliefs. Our limitations can make us feel stifled, constrained, pressured, controlled and forced. They can come in various forms: our family trying to…
Being in a recovery treatment program can provide us with the community and companionship we’ve been missing while living with addiction. When we’ve been isolating ourselves, ending relationships and struggling emotionally, community is often the last thing we think we need. Sometimes we’re prideful and determined to prove to ourselves and others that we can…