Alumni
Staying Motivated in Long-Term Sobriety
As human beings, we’re naturally going to “fall off the bandwagon” every now and then. We’re going to make mistakes, get lost, take a few steps back and find our way again – and it’s all part of the journey. Even those who have experienced 10 excellent, sober years may find their recovery motivation start…
Read MoreHow to Have a Sober St. Patrick’s Day
St. Patrick’s Day is known for going to pubs and drinking pints of beer with your friends. If you are in recovery, on the other hand, you should not feel like you need to miss out on the fun because you can longer drink. You can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by remembering what the holiday…
Read MoreHow Weather Can Affect the Severity of Alcohol
If you are too hot or too cold and you are drinking, you will not be aware of your own body’s temperature. This can cause you to develop a lot of health problems whether it is heat stroke from being in the sun for too long or you freeze to death. It is important that…
Read MoreContinuing to Build Your Spirituality in Long-Term Recovery: 12-Step Programs
12-Step programs have helped thousands of people strengthen their recovery over time, and much of it is because of their focus on spirituality. Those in active addiction often find a void that they’re trying to fill: a sense of loneliness, anger, discomfort, pain, or something else that is causing them despair. It is often through…
Read MoreMaintaining Recovery Long After Treatment: Key Elements to a Lifestyle of Sobriety
Living a life of sobriety is easily one of the most rewarding paths you could take. You’ve spent so much time working on bettering yourself, and you can probably list many of the steps that you’ve taken over the past year (or years) that have lifted you up in recovery. A lifestyle of sobriety is…
Read MoreCould You Be Sabotaging Your Sobriety?
A common assumption for those who’ve completed treatment is that they’ve got everything figured out. They’ve made it through a year, or two years, or twenty years or more of sobriety thus far, so they shouldn’t have to worry anymore about relapse, right? Well, not quite – recovery is a lifelong process, and that doesn’t…
Read MoreAcceptance, Gratitude and Strength: Positive Messages Received in Recovery
When we’re in the throes of addiction, we often lose sight of what’s real. We become confused about our sense of purpose in life, sometimes with the belief that substances are all we’re meant to seek out. We may lose aspects of our lives that were once near and dear to our hearts – such…
Read MoreFinding Our Purpose
A universal part of the human experience, whether or not we’re living with addiction and mental illness, is the existential crisis of not knowing our purpose in life. When we’re recovering from addiction, we often feel an acute sense of overwhelm and pressure when we experience this kind of crisis. We already feel like failures…
Read MoreCelebrating Sobriety
We live in a culture that glamorizes substance use but stigmatizes addiction. We celebrate drinking alcohol and using drugs, but we demonize addicts. Our mainstream culture, our popular media, our music, television, movies, video games, social media and entertainment all trivialize and normalize excessive drinking, drug use and addiction. We’re brainwashed to think that a…
Read MoreCreating Healthy Habits in Recovery
A successful, lasting recovery depends on our willingness to shed our unhealthy habits and replace them with new, empowering ones. Living with addiction, we’ve developed all kinds of habits that fed our insecurities and self-hate, that perpetuated our cycles of self-destructiveness and self-sabotage, that exacerbated our addictions and kept us living in pain and fear.…
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