People living with bipolar disorder often find it hard to find others who understand their condition. As a friend or loved one, you may not have a deep understanding of the disease or the symptoms it produces. You may be unsure of what you can do to help or do enough to help the person…
One of the things that keeps so many of us from choosing recovery is our fear of the withdrawal symptoms we’ll experience when we stop using our drug of choice. Sometimes we’re so afraid of these symptoms that we assume we won’t be able to survive them. Instead of reaching out for help, many of…
Helping is when you aid someone to get on the right track in their recovery and persuade them to get treatment. Enabling is when you are unknowingly supporting someone’s addiction thinking you are protecting them from getting in trouble with the law or other consequences. It is important to know the difference between helping and…
While being glum is a major symptom of depression, it takes a lot more to have a mental health diagnosis of depression. You may know someone showing the symptoms without realizing they are depressed. It is important to be aware of all of the actions that you or someone else shows so that you know…
We often associate codependence with romantic partnerships that are full of neediness, attachments and obsessiveness. Codependence is when we’ve developed an unhealthy dependence and attachment on something or someone outside of ourselves. We are often seeking validation from other people in our lives. We feel so unhappy and unsatisfied with ourselves as we are that…
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). When we are living with addiction, we are often also struggling with mental health issues, what are often called co-occurring disorders that function alongside our addiction and compound them. Very often our issues are overlapping, and the unhealed…
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…
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…
Living with addiction and mental health issues, we have a tendency to focus on the symptoms of our illnesses – our behavioral problems, our emotional issues, our toxic thought patterns. What we often forget to look at, however, are the fears underlying our self-destructiveness. We sometimes fail to see that it is usually our fears…
Helping other people in recovery through sharing of ourselves is beneficial to them, but it is also powerfully healing for us as well. We stand to learn so much, about ourselves and our lives, about our strengths and our gifts, and about the recovery process and all it can entail. Addiction can cause us to…