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Conflict Management in Early Recovery

It appears to be internationally accepted advice for addicts fresh into recovery not to get involved in emotional and romantic relationships for a period of up to two years. The reasoning behind this suggested discipline lies in the hope that as you come into recovery […]

Exercise Addiction

Regular physical activity plays a crucial role in health maintenance and disease prevention. However, excessive exercise has the potential to have adverse effects on both physical and mental health. While the scholastic and empirical discussion of excessive physical activity focuses on obsessive and compulsive exercising…how […]

Complacency/Self Sabotage

Complacency sounds like this, "now that everything is better I can stop doing the things that made my life better in the first place". Like a person that suffers from depression, once they start taking anti-depressants they start feeling better. The depression lifts and they […]

Emotions during addiction recovery

Happy, sad, grumpy, excited, nervous, giddy – these are all things we feel at one time or another and none of them are forever.  Despite the fact that emotions are transitory, we have this sense that they are permanent conditions and we end up spending […]

Cocaine Use: The Side Effects

Cocaine has very serious effects, but not just on the person using the drug, the damages inevitably reach all the people close to user such as family, friends and employers. Three key aspects of cocaine consequences are: How the drug-use damages relationships with loved ones […]

SELF DISCIPLINE

Coming out of an addiction and into a new normal happens in phases. We do not simply put the chemicals down and then find ourselves as a central figure in our perception of what normal really looks like. We come out of the fog of […]

Enabling is not helping !

How many of us have asked ourselves: “If I stopped helping my addicted loved one, what would happen to them? Would they fall apart, would they starve or, even worse, overdose?”   If you question whether your help is really hurting an addict, this article […]

Identify Signs of Codependency

This condition appears to run in different degrees, whereby the intensity of symptoms are on a spectrum of severity, as opposed to an all or nothing scale. Please note that only a qualified professional can make a diagnosis of codependency; not everyone experiencing these symptoms […]

Addiction: The Social Disease

Stanton and Archie Brodsky wrote this piece in 1976 for the Addiction Research Foundation publication (now defunct), Addictions, which was subsequently reprinted by the recovery publishing house, Hazelden! Building on their approach in Love and Addiction, Stanton and Archie analyze how addiction, rather than being an […]

A Look at Cross Addiction

Waking from a fitful sleep, Sandra couldn’t believe her eyes – or her head, for that matter. She had a pounding headache and felt nauseated, but that wasn’t the worst of it. As her blurred vision began to clear, she slowly started to realize where […]