addiction recovery
Recovery from addiction is a life-long process that often begins with treatment in an addiction treatment center and continues with outpatient support in the form of cognitive behavioral therapy, 12-step program involvement, and other peer support.
Posted under Recovery
Toxic Relationships Can Kill Your Sobriety
Completed rehab and newly sober? Congratulations! Through your hard work and determination you are in that most coveted goal: recovery. Doesn’t it feel great to finally be clean? No more hangovers so bad you have to drink just to cure it. No more blacking out and winding up somewhere you have no memory of going to. No more DUIs and altercations with the law. No more… Wait – what about your friends? Here’s the bad news. Returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, is more than a foolhardy idea. It can totally kill your sobriety. How so? Read on.
Posted under Book Reviews
Stay Close: A True Story of Addiction, Love, Despair, and Hope
By Meghan O’Dell
Addiction invaded our home in 1991. It slithered in and sat down at our dining room table, grew large and fat, fed on our misery, laughing, mocking us with its power. It claimed Jeff when he was just a fourteen-year-old boy. I did everything I could think of to save my son, but in the end I could do nothing, not really, to extricate him or to free our family from addiction’s claws.
This is one of Libby Cataldi’s many gripping, vivid descriptions of the way her son Jeff’s addiction affected her family. In Stay Close: A Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction, Cataldi chronicles her family’s descent into drug addiction and eventual rise into hope and recovery.
Posted under Recovery
How to Compartamentalize Your Life in Recovery
When everyday problems and stress tie you up in knots and threaten to derail your carefully constructed life of newly-achieved sobriety, it may help to spend a little time to sort things out. Compartmentalizing tasks, problems, even free time, can reduce the pressure you feel and make your life seem less overwhelming. In business, it’s known as time management, but compartmentalizing easily translates to any occupation or way of life that can benefit from simplification. When you compartmentalize, you separate things – tasks, issues, problems, etc. – into distinct categories, divisions or blocks.
Here are some ways to help put order back into your life. Continue Reading
Posted under Recovery
Common Fears about Getting Sober
By Suzanne Kane
Whether you’re an alcoholic or alcohol-dependent and thinking about getting clean and sober, you’re bound to worry about what that kind of life would be like sans alcohol. There are commonly held fears about sobriety that should be put to rest once and for all. Here are some of the frequently heard comments about being sober.
Posted under Recovery
Easy Does It Books: The Recovery Book Store
By LeAnne Bagnall
Taking that first step is always the hardest. You can’t go wrong with seeking information, and the amount of knowledge to be learned is boundless. Easy Does It Books is that first step. This warm and welcoming corner of Belmont Heights has been providing the Long Beach community with addiction recovery literature for over 12 years.
At Easy Does It Books, there is no hush-hush about the “taboo” subject matter—alcohol and narcotics recovery, eating disorders, food addiction, sex drives, and abuse support. Its library of information will enlighten all types of readers, making them more cognizant of the tumultuous hardships caused by the human condition and turning them into self-motivated activists.
Posted under Recovery
Completed Rehab and Now You Hate Your Life? What You Can Do to Get Back on Track
You made it through the ordeal of detox, then treatment and are now in recovery. You probably had your doubts while going through the process. It may even have been worse than you could have dreamed. But you made it. Congratulations. Now, however, things don’t seem as promising as you hoped they’d be. In fact, you hate your life. It’s not fun anymore. It’s too much work. You start to think maybe you’ll go back to drinking and/or using. What can you do to stop this train before it becomes a wreck? Continue Reading
Posted under Addiction Therapy
What to Do If You Are Have a Problem with Your Therapist
Entering treatment for drug or alcohol abuse includes participation in ongoing counseling and either individual or group therapy conducted by licensed substance abuse or addiction therapists. In fact, treatment is tailored to each client’s individual circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all treatment program.
Posted under Community Programs
Twelve-Step Programs and Recovery
By Leslie Thompson
When a drug addict or alcoholic decides to break their addictive habit and become sober, this decision is the first step in a long, uphill battle against their vice. Selecting an appropriate substance abuse program is critical for an addict because it can very well determine how successful that individual will be in reaching sobriety. One of the most popular forms of treatment is the twelve-step program.
Posted under Psychotherapy
Transactional Analysis
Developed by Dr. Eric Berne in the late 1950s, transactional analysis is a type of social psychology with applications in counseling, education, organizational development, and psychotherapy.
Transactional analysis, commonly referred to as TA, is based on these primary concepts:
1. People have three parts (or ego-states) to their personalities.
2. These ego-states converse with each other in transactions.
Posted under Psychotherapy
Rational Emotive Therapy
Rational emotive therapy focuses on helping patients resolve behavioral and emotional problems. It was developed in the 1950s as one of the first types of cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT. Rational emotive therapy promotes the belief that when a person becomes upset or depressed, the emotions are caused by his or her own belief system and not the actual event that occurred.
The Addiction Primer
Everything you need to know to help a loved one struggling with addiction, from the writers and editors of Everything Addiction.
