Attending Your First 12 Step Meeting Deciding you are ready to attend your first 12-step meeting, of alcoholics anonymous or narcotics anonymous, is a commendable action but often comes with some healthy levels of anxiety as you embark on a new environment. There is...
12 Step Meeting
Waking Up to a New Day
When you wake up in the morning, you have an opportunity. Whether you are in rehab or at home, you can choose to start each day on a positive note. Take a few moments and feel your feet on the floor, feel your body breathing. If you used heroine, you could have died...
Why Do We Self-Sabotage?
Self-sabotaging is when we get in our own way, perform self-defeating acts, or in today’s lingo, shoot ourselves in the foot. Self-sabotaging prevents us from achieving a goal we’ve set. It’s about setting ourselves up for failure. Although there are millions of ways...
Rigidity Versus Opening Up in Therapy
You’ve met your therapist, and perhaps been to a few sessions. The subject keeps coming back to your past, and you tell the therapist, I don’t want to talk about my past, I want to deal with the present situation I’m in. Perhaps your therapist specializes in Eye...
Tips on Resiliency in Recovery
The news is fraught with incidences of tragic and horrific events on a national and local level. When something difficult hits home, like the death of a loved one, a serious disease like drug addiction and alcoholism, many people react to these circumstances with a...
When Things Don’t Go Your Way
Sometimes it can seem like everything in your life is going haywire. If you’re a new age type, you might say of these times that Mercury is in retrograde. Mercury in retrograde is blamed for everything from technological bugs, business deals gone awry,...
Romance at the Rehab
What better place to find a love partner than in the safety net of a rehab for addiction, right? You know you’re at the rehab for a very important reason—to treat an addiction, and in doing so, to save your life. While attractions can naturally happen at the rehab,...
Silver Linings in Recovery
From your perspective, silver linings in recovery might seem like a ridiculous notion. Your personal story of substance abuse, and its consequences is enough to sink the proverbial Titanic. In fact, even though you’re in recovery, you feel as if you’re on the ship....
Dealing with an Annoying Person
You know about tolerance, but that person at the rehab is nonetheless driving you crazy. We all come across annoying people either at our workplace, at the recycling center, in the classroom, group therapy or the town meeting. They carry on and on about the matter at...
Why Do I Need a Sponsor?
You may feel great right now. You’re in a rehab, or actively attending fellowship meetings for an addiction. Everything is on the up and up, so you ask, why do I need a sponsor? People in recovery can at first be in a bubble. They don’t expect things to get harder,...