Addiction Recovery Archives - Page 7 of 9

Can Love Cure Addiction?

Posted on August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It’s known that love is the greatest emotion of all of them – but can can love cure addiction, one of the most tenacious illnesses there is? In a way, it can – or in the very least, there is a convincing argument for love being a central part of the best treatment for addiction.

Addiction as a lack of connection is a theory that says that most cases of addiction are due to a deep disconnect between the person struggling with addiction and the rest of the world. When someone loses hope for finding a role in the world – whether in society in general or just at home – then addiction becomes something to bond with and soothe the pain over. Just as chronic pain is sometimes linked to addiction, so can emotional pain become a gateway to a destructive habit.

The Relationship Between Addiction And Isolation

Addiction correlates strongly with feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and guilt. These are all signs of a person who is struggling to find a reason to exist, and is having an existential crisis – typically one that revolves around a lack of belonging. Belonging, to the human psyche, is essential. As much as we glamourize the idea of the lone wolf, the lone wolf is a dead wolf. The pack is what survives, and at the heart of every human being is our instinct to exist and survive among others.

This is why rejection hurts, physically. The pain we experience through rejection – and the fear it instills in us – is part of our inner instinct to fear ostracizing and social rejection. We want to fit in and be a part of society, because that was the only way our ancestors survived. That begs the question: Can love cure addiction and allow us to find that place in society?

Can Love Cure Addiction? Treatment Though Love

Everybody spends a considerable amount of their time figuring out what it is they’re supposed to do, what it is that drives them. The answer is each other. For the most part, what we strive for the most isn’t just self-fulfillment, but status and relationships. We want to be with certain people, be friends with certain people, or be admired by certain people. We value the opinions of others and listen to them. They help shape our self-esteem, and, ideally, they help keep the ego in check without pummeling it into self-doubt and loathing.

In other words, we want to be loved. Typically, we would like a family that supports us, accepts us, and helps us grow. We want a relationship with a person who loves us unconditionally, and is just different enough to keep things interesting and entertaining for the two of you. We want to be respected by our offspring, and typically seek to raise them to have the potential to do better, so we can be proud of them. We want a great many things, but they all usually have something to do with someone else.

When we think about the question, “Can love cure addiction?” the idea then is that when we give a person all these things – a healthy social environment in which they can thrive and pursue the kind of life they want to pursue – then addiction with mostly fall to the wayside. People will abandon drugs and instead work for their families, to be productive, in order to feel proud of their achievements and happy with their lives. This is still true for introverted personalities, as well – even introverts need friends. They just tend to seek out less friends, and bond with them more closely and in different ways.

And when people can’t bond, they turn to drugs. No one wants to be addicted; everyone struggling with addiction is a prisoner of a disease, the hard part is figuring out what toolset they should be using to pick the lock on their cell door.

More Than Just Emotions

Many veterans came back from the Vietnam War and gave up the heroin. Others developed post-traumatic stress, and never felt quite at home again. Some never got off the drugs, and died. While there’s a lot of merit to the idea that isolation and, ultimately, emotional dissatisfaction is behind a lot of cases of addiction, it’s not fair to say that everyone struggling with drugs is simply missing the love and support they need to quit. While the answer to “Can love cure addiction?” is yes, that won’t be the case for everyone.

There are countless cases of families banding together to help their loved one get better against all the odds – one recent case that comes to mind is that of Patrick Cagey, a former high school athlete who turned to prescription drugs after a knee surgery spelled the doom for his dreams at athletics. However, after confessing his heroin use and getting clean at a 30-day drug treatment center, he vowed to get his life together, finding balance through the support of his family, his girlfriend, the 12-step program, the gym, and a potential career in physical therapy. Then, one day, he began to start slipping again, and his father found him overdosed.

Drug treatment comes in many forms, and for a good reason: addiction happens for many reasons. Some people may just need love and the answer to, “Can love cure addiction?” is a resounding yes. For others, medication is more important to saving their life. Our responsibility to others around us suffering from addiction is to understand that real way to deal with this illness is by finding out what works best for you – and that means trying everything, before settling for any one way. The alternative is too dangerous.

Here are a few ways in which addiction treatment can be offered to those seeking long-term recovery, and a way to cope with life:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy
Dialectical behavior therapy
Group therapy
Sober living community
Medication-assisted treatment
Family behavioral therapy
Long-term follow-up
Co-morbidity treatment
And more.

One thing will always be true – addiction cannot be beaten without support. It is true that isolation can and always will sabotage a person’s journey towards beating an addiction forever. We rely on each other as humans to survive, and in addiction treatment, the support of family and friends is important in order to give us the place and the validation we need to know we’re doing the right thing, and still have value in life.

And if some research is true, then severe physical addiction – the kind of dependency that forms and cannot be unhooked through therapy, support and connection – is still less of a problem, and we need to continue to advocate for a world where addiction is no longer met with stigma, fear, and misunderstanding.

Staying Sober – Running Against Addiction

Posted on August 22, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It’s been done before – replacing one high through another, far healthier kind. Running to cope with addiction isn’t just a matter of getting away from your problems – it’s about chasing new goals, achieving dreams, and, as science may tell you, it’s about staying sober and teaching your brain to associate new things with pleasure.

For many, exercise has become the key to defeating addiction. But it’s not quite as simple as turning one obsession into another, or simply taking the drive of addiction and turning it into the tenacity to run a marathon.

Staying Sober Through Exercise

Running and exercise have a track record of being proven ways to deal with addiction, but their success depends entirely on you and your passion to get moving. While general exercise to bolster your physical health, and maintain a strong body is recommended in any case, coping with the day-to-day stresses of addiction recovery through sports and training is different from simply exercising enough to take care of your health. The clear differences are:

Exercise with a goal: Exercise, or physical activity, is healthy and necessary. The human body isn’t designed for an entirely sedentary lifestyle – even if you end up spending most of your day in a chair staring at a screen or working a counter, you need to spend some time moving every day. This can be as little as turning some of your commute into walking/cycling rather than riding, and taking a few minutes every few hours to stretch a little.

But to train is different – training means having a goal in mind, something to work up to. It means losing weight, or gaining it, or reaching a personal record, or improving your technique for a sport. It’s not just about maintaining physical health, but about achieving something for yourself, entirely through your own efforts and thanks to the support of those around you – a perfect outlet for staying sober.

Training to make sense of life: When you discover a passion for exercise, you discover what it means to work on something you love. That means not just working towards a certain goal for the sake of the goal itself, but because you actively love putting in the hard work and the effort to reach that goal.

Directing passion in life will help you better understand yourself. Many people struggle with addiction because they lack the support in life to do what they want to do, and to chase after the dreams they have. They also struggle because they find themselves put down, either by others or by themselves, and the pressure of feeling worthless has them paralyzed.

Getting off an addiction and working through the emotions of early recovery while chasing after goals and self-improvement is a magical combination – it allows you to, perhaps for the first time ever, truly get to know yourself. Your boundaries, your personality, your shortcomings and, most importantly, your strengths and best qualities.

Translating passion into results: Addiction eats away at a person’s self-esteem, often either feeding off depressive thinking, or becoming a factor in the emergence of depressive symptoms. Exercise, and any constructive passion or healthy coping mechanism, will help you make a clear change in life. Aside from helping you define yourself, it also helps you discover your true potential and learn to trust in your ability to achieve your own goals, and empower your efforts in staying sober.

Cope: Addiction is a coping mechanism, in one way or another. When an addiction develops, this is because the brain has made a powerful association between certain substances/actions, and immense amounts of pleasure or relief. Depressants like alcohol, stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, and opioids like heroin all share the quality of addictiveness due to how our brains seek out pleasure as a sign of being “on the right track” of something in our best interest. When things get bad – when we lose a job, when a relationship breaks down, when the stress mounts and piles up and we find ourselves buried under worries – then addiction becomes a prime coping mechanism.

Going on recovery eliminates addiction, and that leaves a gaping hole. Depending on how long you’ve been addicted, it can take a while before you cut the association between pleasure and relief, and drugs. Using training as an alternative to help you keep your mind off the stress or channel your frustrations is far more constructive and beneficial in the long-term and helps in staying sober after the recovery process as well.

Your Brain on Training

Perhaps the biggest benefit of physical activity as a new coping mechanism in your fight against addiction is that it speeds up the mental recovery from drug abuse. It can even be preventative towards the development of an addiction. Certain substances, especially very harmful ones like cheap methamphetamine, can cause serious damage to the brain.

Research has shown that aside from affecting the brain and making new connections between exercise and pleasure, training affects the speed at which the mind repairs itself, partially reversing the effects of methamphetamine use.

Staying Sober In Your Own Way

In the end, running – and exercise in general – is part of a large collection of possible paths for healing. But that means understanding the context of what you’re doing, and having a healthy attitude towards it. Look at it this way – if what you truly enjoy doing is cooking, and it’s something that lets you shut out the worries of the world and actively focus on the art of your craft, then that is a great way to deal with addiction by giving you an outlet to unleash your stress and your emotions and develop your creativity, putting your brain to the test.

However, if you end up going to the kitchen every time you get depressed to make yourself a plate of cookies or a delicious, yet high-calorie soufflé, then you’ll quickly turn one problem into another.

Practicing responsibility and understanding the difference between what makes a coping mechanism positive, and what makes it negative, is critical to establishing a lifestyle that allows you to heal and move past the consequences of your addiction, regardless of how you choose to go about that lifestyle. Is painting your thing? Meeting new people in book clubs? Limiting yourself to a small circle of friends while focusing on a large writing project? Visiting local gyms and competing in sports or martial arts?

Whatever your passion is, using it as a major outlet against the potential stress of recovery to help reshape your life while staying sober and make a major change in who you are as a person is important. It’s not just about making a distinction between your old days and the new you – it’s also about crafting your own identity through positive accomplishments and associations, rather than feelings of shame or another kind of negativity. It’s also about challenging yourself, pushing yourself to find new limits and rediscover the boundaries of what you used to think you could do while practicing sober living.

The Four Things You Need For A Successful Recovery From Addiction

Posted on August 17, 2017September 11, 2017 by JohnAdmin

There are many reasons addictions are hard to break. For one, an addiction is a relationship between your brain – the very hardware of the mind – and a substance. The smell, the taste, and any other associated memory of that substance can trigger feelings of euphoria, of intense want and, in some cases, need. A small fraction of people is genetically inclined towards physical dependence to such drugs. They develop a fast relationship to the high and require medical assistance for a successful recovery from addiction.

Drugs – particularly those synthesized from nature and turned into concentrated stimulants and depressants – are incredibly hard to resist because they’re designed to create a powerful high and leave you with a deep longing.

Yet beyond the physical, there’s also the mental aspect of drug use. While drugs are incredibly dangerous due to nature of the black market and due to the relative ease with which someone can overdose, addiction is a smaller risk for drug users than most people realize. Only about a tenth of people who try a drug become long-term “problem users”, or addicted, as defined by the UN. Others give it a go, have their fun, and quit the habit without it ever becoming an issue.

Drugs are dangerous, and they’re deadly in the long-term. Most drug users eventually realize this. Yet it’s those who fall into the cycle of addiction who can’t simply “give up” the habit, and the reason is two-fold. But most people who go in and out of rehab seek drugs as a form of medication – as part of a deeper issue, a greater problem. In other words, ending with a successful recovery from addiction isn’t the hard part.

The hard part of recovery is figuring out why you were so drawn to drugs in the first place, and figuring out what the best way is to enrich your own life and cut out the need for that artificial high. Here are four things that are absolutely necessary for recovery – because without them, you’re less likely to be able to address the issues feeding the addiction.

1. Mended and New Relationships

Relationships are the bread and butter of being human. From our very first few days in this world, we rely on our relationships to other human beings for our safety, survival and sanity. We need parents, to connect with and call our own. While Freud’s concept of the three-person relationship between mother, father and child is somewhat outdated, it’s self-evident in modern-day psychology that parents are vital for the mind of an infant.

In time, socializing with other children is important as a way to keep developing and figuring out, slowly, what it means to be a person in society. We learn about roles, differences in gender and individuals alike, and we develop biases and opinions. We mold a self-image based on how others perceive us, and in turn, how that makes us feel about ourselves.

Fast forward in life, and past puberty the distinctions between people become clearer and more drastic. Preferences in social interaction become apparent and cement themselves – some people lean more towards introverted traits, others prefer to be more extroverted. Yet even the most introverted of individuals shares contact with a close few confidants, people whom they trust the most, through whom they can get the interactions they need in life in order to feel secure.

This concept plays an integral role in successful recovery from addiction. Without others, we grow insecure, restless, and worst of all: lonely. When addiction causes us to lose the people we love and care about, it only pushes us further down the depressive hole that drug abuse creates. For many, experiences like that feed notions of self-deprecation.

No matter how much some people insist that man is an island, the truth is that we’re but one small island in a global archipelago. Regardless of how many other islands you’d prefer to socialize with, having people that matter to us in our life is important for successful recovery from addiction. Create a support network of friends and loved ones, whether through meeting new people or by mending broken relationships. This is one of the reasons a sober living community is a good option for recovery; It gives a place for like minded individuals to support each other and build lasting friendships throughout the recovery process.

2. Mindfulness in Life

Mindfulness is the simple yet difficult act of purposefully focusing on something. Its usefulness in addiction – and life in general – is highlighted by the fact that it allows us to reign in our thoughts and perceptions of life. Controlling how you feel about things can help you cope with emotional devastation by helping you take on a different perspective, one that helps you move on and feel strong enough to keep on living.

Mindfulness also helps you keep bad habits in check by introducing newer ones, crafted and kept fresh in your life through constant discipline.

Most importantly, however, mindfulness lets you keep depression and anxiety in check. It lets you contradict your more negative thoughts and fight against that inner urge to overthink and overcomplicate. Mindfulness allows you to realize that some things are a lot easier and simpler than you may have first given them credit for – it helps you rationalize away unnecessary fears that can impede a successful recovery from addiction and embrace chance as something good, rather than something to fear.

3. Management for Stress

Stress is unavoidable in life. From career troubles to family issues and more, there are countless reasons to be worried about something. But we can’t let that stress drive us to despair, or paralyze us in life. Managing stress – creating an outlet for it, and learning how to function and live despite the many blows life deals – is integral to successful recovery from addiction. If you can’t deal with stress, then the potential for a relapse grows exponentially in the face of any challenge.

Don’t fear stress. Stress isn’t just a potential for problems – it’s a potential for growth. But overcoming stress is impossible if you’re buried in it – finding ways to let loose and recover every now and again from life’s challenges lets you keep your levels manageable.

4. Finding Meaning For A Successful Recovery From Addiction

We all need purpose – something to do, something to strive for, something to achieve. Some of us find our lifelong purpose early on and stick with it. Others haven’t found a singular purpose, but follow goal after goal, looking for meaning in life through accomplishments and achievements. Others yet spend their entire time looking for the meaning of their life, and get so caught up on the search that they never really have the chance to create any meaning for themselves.

Whichever way you prefer to phrase what keeps you going – whether it’s family, or love, or ambition – you need something to hold onto in your mind when things get dire, even if you can’t commit to it as the purpose of your life.

With these four things – stress management, mindfulness, connection and purpose – your journey to successful recovery from addiction will become more than just about staying clean. It’ll be a journey about finding contentment, and happy living.

Why Does Relapse Occur?

Posted on August 15, 2017August 16, 2017 by JohnAdmin

In drug addiction, a relapse is a moment in time when the urge to use again overcomes your ability to commit to sobriety. Because of how it forces you to betray your own long-term self-interest, the first and foremost emotion felt after a relapse is anger.

It’s normal – anyone struggling with sobriety while truly doing their best to stay sober will be extremely angry with themselves after a relapse. Then, the guilt sets in, followed by disillusion and cynicism.

However, while no one in recovery really wants to relapse – just like no one wants to end up being chained to drug use – relapses continue to be common. Most cases of drug recovery lead to at least one relapse before the first year of continuous sobriety is achieved.

But instead of being angry at yourself for what you might perceive as betrayal, it’s better to try and understand why relapses happen. That way, you can examine yourself and figure out what you need to do differently – and most importantly, it’ll help you be at peace with yourself.

Why Relapse Is Common

The prevalent theory is that relapse is part of addiction’s nature as a chronic disease, an unavoidable truth for most people going into recovery. Regardless of whether you believe that addiction is a chronic brain illness or a different type of mental challenge, it doesn’t change that relapses in recovery are very common.

Relapses occur because someone in recovery isn’t automatically equipped with the toolset needed to combat the stress of sobriety, and life, right after having a primary coping mechanism ripped away from them. It takes time to build the stress management needed to deal with living, it takes time to cope with the things you have done as an addict, it takes time to heal relationships, find new ways to define yourself, and figure out what your own personal meaning of a fulfilling life is.

It takes time, and until that time has passed and these things have come to fruition, the chances of a relapse are high. That is because while everyone in recovery is fighting in earnest, drugs remain to be an extremely powerful influence, a very addictive way to easily deal with life’s problems. And without drugs, life in recovery is difficult, hallmarked by struggles and learning experiences. They’re not a sign of weakness, but a part of the process. Relapsing should never be seen as a failure, but as a step in sobriety. Just like how athletes experience injuries and setbacks, struggling to stay sober while fighting an addiction can sometimes mean you find yourself using again. When you do, all you can do is stop, and figure out a better way to keep yourself from doing that again.

Relapse Warning Signs

A relapse doesn’t just happen – most of the time, there are symptoms that com before. You need to recognize these symptoms and see them as signs to evaluate your recovery and make some needed changes.

The first and foremost symptom is feeling nostalgic. It’s alright to look back on your past and feel alright with what you’ve done – but it’s not alright to romanticize your days as an addict, or think about how just one drink wouldn’t hurt. Always remind yourself of the harm that your addiction caused, and understand the slippery slope – if you start down it, there’s no stopping the force of gravity and dangerous lack of proper friction.

Another dangerous factor is when you find yourself veering off the path of recovery. There’s a difference between not going to meetings anymore because you’ve reached a balanced point in your life after years of being sober, and just quitting your therapy and treatment a few months after rehab. If you find yourself not doing what needs to be done to stay sober, then stop, take a breath, and reevaluate your priorities. Remember why you want to stay clean, and try to figure out why you didn’t want to go on with recovery. We do things for a reason, not just out of the blue.

Other warning signs include being defensive about aggressive or paranoid behavior, and becoming overly cynical. It’s normal to be in something of an emotional rollercoaster throughout the first few months of recovery – but be careful about just how much your mood and emotion affects your judgment.

Making Relapse Less Frequent

Relapses occur, but they most certainly don’t occur for no reason at all. There are triggers that cause relapses, and avoiding them can be very difficult, especially early on. Something as simple as getting in touch with an old friend can cause you to go down a spiral of destructive thinking, and reminiscing. The influence that your memories has on you in early recovery is very strong, so avoiding any connotations and connections to your old life is paramount.

This means places, people, and even other things such as sounds and sights – get into some new music, make new friends, and try to find hobbies that bring you into different parts of town.

Sobriety is about freedom, and cutting yourself off from activities, places and people isn’t exactly an act of freedom. However, it’s temporary. Ultimately, the goal of addiction recovery is for you to be at peace with the past and with yourself – and to live a life where drugs don’t matter anymore. By then, you may also be content enough with your life to feel ambivalent about many old triggers.

As a final disclaimer, it’s important to account for the cases of addiction recovery without relapses. Relapses are common, but not universal, and there are cases of recovery where people simply make the decision not to use again, and then stop using.

While everybody in addiction recovery should endeavor to abstain from drug use from day one, and do their best in that task, most stumble and fall a few times before they learn how to run and fly. That doesn’t make you weak for relapsing, or someone else stronger for not. Different genes, circumstances and scenarios mean no two cases of addiction can be accurately compared for metrics like strength and willpower. All that matters is the end result – and the end result of every story of recovery is sobriety, as long as you don’t give up. It’s not a race. It’s a journey.

Yoga-ing & Recovering

Posted on July 24, 2017August 16, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Addiction recovery is a complicated road, made ever more twisted and convoluted by the many paths it can be composed of. Two people struggling with sobriety from the same drug addiction could go through entirely different programs and come out the other end fulfilled and determined to stay clean. Yet there are many who feel skeptical about alternative approaches to addiction recovery, particularly in the fields of mindfulness, meditation and yoga.

However, a little research and a lot of examples go to show that the physical and mental aspects of a yogic lifestyle – or even just the casual adoption of yoga as a regular exercise program – influence those struggling with sobriety, and people in general.

Scientifically, that influence has been under scrutiny, particularly as researchers consider the validity of fitness and mindfulness therapy – therapeutic exercises that challenge patients to focus on something, and forego distraction. The proposed benefit of such a therapy is increased self-control, improved self-esteem and a lower likelihood of episodes of depression and anxiety.

In its simplest context, mindfulness is the ability to better focus on what you feel is most important. So how does that translate into recovery from addiction?

Mindfulness & Addiction

Addiction is a disease of the brain, yet exactly what that means matters. Some scientists argue that there is evidence of addiction being a neurological affliction – it changes the way the brain works and looks, affects your state of mind, and becomes a chronic illness highlighted by a high relapse rate and the challenges of staying sober, even after detox and rehab.

Others assert that addiction is a learning and development disorder, because it’s mostly (but not entirely) rampant among youth, and is otherwise tied to mental disorders such as depression and anxiety.

Either way, addiction is a condition wherein a person is compelled to use drugs to cope with something, from a certain type of behavior to a feeling of shame, or a past trauma. Even among those who developed addiction due to unfortunate genetic circumstances or to fit into a social circle, long-term addiction will have a largely negative impact on your life, and can send you down a spiral of self-loathing and depression.

Even at the root of every cause of addiction, there lies a dysfunction. No one turns to an addictive substance without having a compelling reason to, not with the existing common education on the danger of drugs. Kids today don’t turn to drugs because they love the health benefits, but because there’s a need for them, perhaps as a social lubricant, as a ticket to a feeling of belonging, to bolster their self-esteem and reduce their anxious inhibitions.

Adults do the same thing, covering up what they don’t like about themselves and their lives with a drug. People in fields of immense success are under pressure day and night. In every life, we all carry around a little bit of unhappiness, and some of us carry around much more than others.

When it comes to addiction, rehab is typically the first step out of this hole. Residential treatment facilities offer detoxification and tips for early recovery to teach someone how to cope with what they’re going through. After the initial shock of detox and the passing of withdrawal symptoms, people dealing with addiction will often feel a wave of fear, depression, anxiety or pessimism overcoming them. All issues that might have been brought up over their time as addicts were previously suppressed, and sobriety forces them all out.

When such issues see the light of day and the initial coping mechanism is forbidden, people can turn bitter and angry. They begin to regret, to feel guilty. Overcoming those emotions – realizing that it’s okay not to have something, or to let go, or to make amends and move on – is key to long-term sobriety. These emotions can’t be drowned out by partying, drugs, friends or spirituality – they’ll always return in full force, ready to knock you off your feet. And so, they must be resolved.

Yoga for Recovery

That is where mindfulness & yoga come into play. It’s relatively easy to lose yourself in a maelstrom of negativity when dealing with the emotional consequences of an addiction. Mindfulness exercises teach you to focus on a simple, inconsequential concept or point of reference to avoid overthinking, worrying, and panic. Mindfulness is expressed by making a conscious choice to reject a negative thought, and instead focus on the positive possibility. It’s useless to make a fuss over things that haven’t happened yet – such as fearing that your family will reject you despite your recovery because of what you’ve said and done in the past – instead, mindfulness allows you to calm your mind and take away the power that pessimistic thought and depressive thinking holds over you.

This concept – the ability to control how you think, to deny a line of thinking and instead convince yourself to turn it all around – is directly related to the usefulness and meaning of yoga as a tool for addiction recovery.

Understanding Yoga

Yoga as a school of thought is ancient, and its teachings refer to eight limbs – concepts that describe what yoga is meant to do. Each of the eight limbs gives you an overall idea of what you should aim for in a meditative session, and they help you understand why yoga is an excellent choice to calm the mind and introduce better focus and stability in recovery:

Yama: the essential moral values of yoga, including non-violence, honesty and non-avarice, or the absence of senseless greed.
Niyama: the goals of the mind, or certain virtues that should be strived for, such as contentment, a clear mind, contemplation of spirituality, self-reflection and persistence in life.
Asana: the actual movement of yoga, described as a series of poses and posture meant to be “steady” and “pleasant”, eliminating the shaking of the body through focus.
Pranayama: the focus of breath, both continuous and in a series of suspended inhalation and complete inhalation.
Pratyahara: the process of slowly cutting out the outside world to focus entirely on the yoga itself, and your thoughts.
Dharana: this is the point in practice where you concentrate on a single concept, subject, or thought in your mind, returning to it when you drift, and remaining in focus.
Dhyana: once you have a point of focus, Dhyana is meant to be the contemplation of that focus – thinking about a subject or concept and exploring every imaginable perspective, point-of-view, description and personal conclusion.
Samadhi: this is the last step, a point in your practice wherein every aspect of yoga flows together to leave you completely entranced and focused only on whatever it is you decided to commit yourself to in that session.

More than a form of exercise, yoga is an expression of mindfulness – and one that can steel your mind and help you develop immense focus and self-contentment. There is a bit of spirituality in there – contemplating the self may also mean contemplating the universe, and practicing a bit of personal philosophy and soul-searching – yet there is no need to believe in a higher power to practice yoga.

All you need is a posture or position that might challenge you, and the time to make that position comfortable, while focusing entirely on a single, relevant thought. Returning to this thought repeatedly, or coming up with new points of focus, allows you to quickly quiet your mind and think of something more constructive when negativity and depression strikes, and the urge to use grows.

In Recovery, Family Involvement Matters

Posted on July 20, 2017August 16, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Drug recovery is a long dark road, and without a few lights along the way to help you keep the path illuminated, you’re bound to trip and fall on your face in a few very painful ways. However, you can’t just rely on yourself to bring those lights onto the path – it’s the people around you, who are supporting your efforts, that help you see forward and glimpse what might loom ahead in the far distance of your road.

It’s important for us to have the light of others in our life. We humans aren’t meant to survive long-term solitude – we can live and even thrive when left alone to some capacity, but beyond a specific amount of time, we simply begin to fall apart. That’s what it means to be lonely.

The People in Your Corner

Loneliness isn’t just a symptom of finding yourself stuck on an uncharted island after being the sole survivor of a horrifying plane crash – it’s far more mundane, and much, much more common. We can be lonely in our everyday life, even as we spend the entire day speaking to others and faking real connection. Much like beauty, loneliness is in the eye of the beholder – if you find yourself unable to connect with family, unable to form friendships, unable to find any joy or meaning in the relationships you’re in, then you’re bound to be lonely no matter how densely populated your area is.

That loneliness can lead to dark, negative thoughts. We begin to question ourselves – our mind, naturally, assumes that because we’re social outcasts, something is inherently wrong with us. We begin to feel trapped by thoughts that we can’t express or talk about with others, and we relate to depressive emotions, feelings of worthlessness. It becomes a downward spiral. With or without drugs, being lonely is one of the worst feelings to have.

Combatting that loneliness, and finding actual friendship in the process, is considered by some to be central to drug recovery as well. By finding and befriending people, we can relate to, and by becoming a part of a group – a family, even – we begin to realize important truths about ourselves. We begin to see a side of ourselves that might’ve been forgotten, or was never there. And in drug recovery, reconnecting and truthfully becoming a part of the family again is important in maintaining that feeling of self with which to strive for sobriety.

That’s what it means to have people in your corner – regardless of whether you choose to find professional treatment, a support system is vital during recovery to keep you on track, motivated, and remind you why you’re going through the pain of maintaining your sobriety.

Family Is More Than Blood

Most blog entries out there focus too much on family, without clarifying that family doesn’t have to be related to you. There are many people out there with complicated family histories, many of whom would rather not return to such a household. Whether it’s a case of verbal and physical abuse, domestic violence or psychological torment, there’s no abject need for you to reconnect with the people who have done you harm, just for the sake of reconnecting with them.

Instead, surround yourself with people who truly care about you. Best friends, close colleagues, old pals – make new friends or reconnect with those you lost along the way. It won’t be easy at first – it never is, opening to others and trusting them with your friendship and your true feelings – but the rewards of a real bond between people are immeasurable.

Part of learning to come to terms with yourself over the course of drug recovery is learning that you can afford to cut out the people in your life that do you nothing but harm. There’s no need to stick around friends or family members that abuse you, out of loyalty or any other reason. Instead, take the opportunity of recovery as a chance to make drastic changes in life, by purposefully avoiding the people and places that are bound to bring you back into negativity and self-loathing, and by surrounding yourself with people who motivate you, inspire you with their drive and progress, and remind you wordlessly to never give up, even in the worst of scenarios.

You Owe Them (and Yourself)

Given the consensus and agreeable literature, it’s virtually undisputable that responsibility and accountability play huge roles in the successful recovery of struggling drug addicts – but that doesn’t mean they are preventative measures for addiction. Instead, by purposefully making ourselves accountable to others – by taking on the responsibilities of a sibling, a parent, or a partner – we prove to ourselves that we’re capable of doing important things, and being important people to those who really matter to us.

Recovery is about more than just owing up to your mistakes or making up for the harm you may have caused in your days as an addict – it’s about making positive choices not out of punishment or because of repentance, but because you owe it to yourself to feel better about yourself, to feel good and enjoy life without having to mask the emotional weight of your worst moments with the numbing feeling of inebriation.

That’s the only responsibility someone has when struggling with sobriety and recovery – the responsibility to get better, for themselves, and for those around them. Utilizing that as motivation – the will to be someone you can be at peace with, someone who provides for their family, lifts the mood and inspires people to be a bit more confident and excited about living – can help you get through a few rough patches in life.

Of course, recovery is so much more than just wanting to get better – but without a fiery passion for a drug-free life, your recovery won’t get very far. The struggle of staying sober is amplified when our motivation is shot – make sure to have daily reminders of what it means to live in a family again, from making new friends at rehab to living in a friendly sober living community, to returning home and soaking in the love even in the most trying of times.

Yes, Addiction Recovery Is Frustrating (But Worth It)

Posted on July 10, 2017July 13, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Drug addiction is a two-fold monster. It takes control of your body and your mind – but separately, and in different ways. Addiction can be both physical and emotional, and the repercussions of this disease mean that it is not just an enemy to combat, but it is a friend, someone who stands by your side and whispers sweet lies to you, comforting and distracting you from the ongoing struggles you continue to face because of your friendship.

Breaking the addiction is hard. It’s very hard. That much is blatantly obvious simply by the number of people who struggle with addiction.

However, no one ever said this would be easy. Recovery from addiction is hard, but it’s meant to be. An addiction is something that changes you, and it can go deep, repressing emotions and hindering your own personal growth (and cognitive function) as a negative coping mechanism. Tearing yourself away from that and into the total opposite is like forcing all that missed growth onto yourself, withstanding it, and coming out the other end a changed person.

Why Addiction Keeps Coming Back

When some people hear that addiction is a disease, it sparks in them an irrational anger – “addiction is a matter of responsibility”, they might say. “Addiction is a matter of weakness, and insecurity.” The country’s official stance is that addiction is a matter of mental illness and neurobiology – your brain chemistry changes immensely under the recurring influence of drugs, to the point where your concept of pleasure is skewed and distorted. Fixing that takes time, not just time for your body to detox every trace of a drug, but time for you to emotionally and neurologically recover and develop in another direction.

However, there is a kernel of truth to the ramblings of those who say that willpower lies at the center of addiction prevention: willpower lies at the center of recovery. You must genuinely want to get better to even start getting better.

That won’t guarantee that you won’t relapse, though. Relapse rates are high early on in recovery, especially for substances with an immensely high addictiveness, such as heroin and other opiates. The fact that many people relapse on these drugs doesn’t mean most people are spineless and incapable of controlling themselves – it’s a testament to the sheer power of drugs. It’s also proof that recovery is something you cannot give up on.

That much needs to be repeated – you cannot give up. In many cases, an addiction can resurface or constantly fight to get back into your life, and you need to show equal tenacity in your fight to stay clean, sober, and find a way to live without drugs.

A lot of that is about self-empowerment and finding ways to make yourself accountable towards others – but a lot of it is also about learning to forgive yourself for a relapse, forgive yourself for intrusive thinking, and learn to start being grateful of the progress you’ve made rather than being angry at your own missteps.

Long-Term Sobriety Requires Transformation

You can’t break an addiction without change, that much is obvious. But long-term sobriety – being both emotionally and physically sober and maintaining abstinence – that requires a transformation.

Addiction is part of a greater problem, sometimes either because of the addiction itself, or as a problem that existed before the addiction began. When someone struggling with addiction falls deeper and deeper into their habit, they’ll continuously find themselves in situations where their habit makes things worse. What might have started as a stigmatized pastime could turn into broken relationships, a lost career, the loss of friends and the destruction between an addict and their bonds towards family.

Before you know it, addiction can have destroyed your life. Some people hit rock bottom and bounce back, taking the revelation as an opportunity to get their life together. Others find that moment to change earlier. Yet in many cases, addicts begin to develop symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental conditions as part of a continued state of hopelessness.

On the other side of the coin, there are many who turn to addiction to cope with existing issues. Common factors for addiction include cases of depressive thinking, as well as childhood trauma and other examples of abuse. When certain mental scars become too painful to bear, an addiction can develop as part of an attempt to self-medicate the pain with certain substances – including actual painkillers. It’s not a given, but it’s common enough to make self-medication a troubling cause for long-term drug addiction.

Treating an addiction is then about more than just learning to live without a certain substance – it’s about completely altering the way you think, treating a person’s perspective on life and themselves, tackling the way they confront personal issues and helping them establish a more concrete, positive concept of the self. Someone struggling with addiction doesn’t just need a detox and month-long rehab, but full-blown therapy to help them understand their condition and take control of their life again.

You Don’t Need to Be Alone

Your recovery from addiction is a personal matter, and it’s a journey only you will be able to undertake. However, while it’s your responsibility to get better, and up to you to make the choices you need to make to fortify yourself against the dangers of an addiction in the future, it’s never ever wrong to ask for help.

It’s possible to tackle recovery alone, but so few manage to because it’s also very challenging. You need encouragement, and sometimes you need reassurance, either through the inspirational stories of others in recovery, or through the motivation that a dedicated support group can offer you.

You don’t just have to distance yourself from the people and places of your past when confronting addiction – you’ll have to find new people, new places, and come to terms with the old through reconciliation and earnest forgiveness. And yes, it’ll all be frustrating, with its share of setbacks and missteps. But the key to long-term sobriety isn’t just being sober – it’s continuously being sober, no matter what.

Living With An Attitude Of Gratitude In Recovery

Posted on June 19, 2017June 19, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Emotional energy matters immensely, precisely in recovery. Being unnecessarily bitter will only hurt you, and hurt your chances of finding pleasure in life without the need to cling to old, dark habits. Addiction feeds on emotions – it feeds on your thoughts, on your insecurities and your anxieties. Addiction will corrupt your pleasure center in the brain and associate any emotional salvation with another hit, another shot, another drink. It’ll take away the joy in life and replace it with a dangerous and toxic relationship, one that destroys all other relationships and usurps your entire life.

Beating it requires more than going through a set of distinct treatment steps, or visiting a therapist for the sake of some quota, or making a non-commitment towards group therapy. You must take matters into your own hands, cultivate your emotional energy towards saying no to your addiction. At some point in your recovery, you must ask for help. Seek motivation. Find inspiration. Watch as others crush their goals and find it within yourself to wake up, stand up, and follow your recovery schedule every single day.

And through a path like that, a path where you reject the extremes of shame and hubris and replace them with humble gratitude, where you actively deny the way addiction has been controlling your life and decide instead to take control of your attitude and your perception, then you’ll achieve not just a state of sobriety, but a long-term emotional reason to be sober. A reason to reject addiction and decide that there simply is no need for that sort of manipulative pleasure.

Your emotional energy – your attitude – is up to you. Life, can throw a great many things at you, and often they won’t necessarily be your fault. Often, we get addicted to things not because we really want to, but because that’s the way things played out. But it’s up to us, our attitude, and the choices we make in recovery to overcome addiction and feel like things are where they should be.

How to Cultivate Gratitude

There are a great many ways to cultivate gratitude and create an atmosphere of happiness towards others and the progress you’ve achieved. Being grateful and being happy isn’t necessarily the same thing, but the two are very much linked. The first step to being positive about your path in recovery is to clear your mind and confront the issues that bother you most.

You can’t ignore the source of pain. You can ignore pain, work through it, and achieve things despite it, but it’s unwise and foolish to ignore its source. Whether because of addiction or as part of the factors creating your addiction in the first place, many people struggling with drug recovery have a long history of unresolved emotional tension and trauma. You should confront that, come to terms with it, seek help in finding how to be at peace with your past, and decide for yourself what you must do to be happy with you are despite what you might have done, or what might have happened to you.

It’s a hard step, but you can’t get very far without it. Once you’ve come to a point where you see your past for what it is – in the past, not to be changed, but only to be reflected upon – then it’s time for the next step.

Start with the simple things. Addiction often robs us of the ability to appreciate the pleasant things in life. It drives people towards nihilism, depression and self-absorption. Take a day to look at the sun setting. If that’s not your thing, then plan a lazy Sunday for yourself with a delicious breakfast and some time in bed. Then take note of current events and upcoming festivals that might interest you. Go to an animal shelter or a sanctuary and volunteer. Work at the soup kitchen. Help a friend move into their new place. Offer to help at local community efforts. Look for opportunities to repay the people who have struggled to stay alongside you all this time by doing little things for them, acts of kindness, and gratitude.

Happiness & Sobriety

The relationship between happiness and sobriety is that one is the key to the other, and it’s often difficult to tell in what order that concept works best. It depends on the context, more than anything – some of us want to achieve sobriety, and hit that point in our lives where we feel truly freed from the shackles and oppression of the addiction that surrounded us. Others feel that it’s important to be happy – to seek to be content, and fulfilled, and always strive towards loftier goals – to remain sober in the long-term.

Both ideas are valid. Both ideas are true. What determines which is more important to you is up to where you stand in time, and what you’re struggling with. But at the end of the day, being happy for yourself, for others, and taking in the massive journey and all you’ve learnt is important for you to be able to conclude that chapter in your life.

If you linger on shame, guilt, hate, anger, sorrow, and so many of the emotions that mold addiction and the cage it traps people in, then you stat teetering at the edge, looking towards the abyss, feeling yourself slip with every second into old, treacherous habits.

But if you don’t cling onto those emotions – if you have the strength to look past them, and watch your old struggles be a thing of the past – then you can confidently take on the rest of your life knowing that new challenges await, and they don’t have to be entangled with the ugliness of addiction.

Gratitude is key. Through gratitude for others, gratitude for your fortune, gratitude for all the times you made the right call and persevered through harsh times, you’ll be able to carry on without a heavy heart or reservations and lingering feelings. You can effectively end your recovery arc. While they say that recovery is a lifelong process, addiction can be nothing more than an echo of days long gone if you’re willing to put it all behind you.

Letting Go Of The Shame, Guilt That Chains You To Addiction

Posted on June 15, 2017June 12, 2017 by JohnAdmin

There’s a sad tendency to conflate addiction with shame, personal responsibility, and willpower. To many, the notion of succumbing to addiction is one that declares you weak and damaged. It tries to pummel you into a position of victimhood and powerlessness, one where your condition is a result of your own shortcomings and mistakes, and solvable only through others.

This is not true. Addiction is an illness, and many of the factors that determine addiction are uncontrollable and have nothing to do with choice. All it takes is one mistake, in a bad moment, at a bad place, and a cascade of events can lead into one of the worst chapters in a person’s life.

Whether you get addicted is not a matter of character or personality. There is no such thing as an addictive personality, and your addiction is not a result of your own flawed principles or actions. However, coming to terms with that – and overcoming the message of shame attached to addiction – is a hard yet necessary step for a successful recovery into long-term sobriety.

Before we go into how important attitude is in recovery and how beating the notion of shame and victimhood is often central to long-term sobriety and a feeling of content, we must go over the mechanics of shame and its role in perpetuating the cycle of addiction that so many people remain trapped in.

What Is Shame?

Shame is linked to perception, not action. This is what makes this such a challenging thing to counter in a person’s psychology. When fighting shame, you must not just realize that you haven’t done anything, but you must find a way to overcome the judgment and prejudice of those around you, because they may in fact make you feel a certain way regardless of your circumstances or the context of your situation.

It’s true that addiction is about the loss of rational agency, and self-control – but that’s not something to be ashamed of. The very way in which addiction functions belies that it overcomes a person’s self-control by attacking the brain. Addictiveness is determined by a person’s emotional state and the actual physical addictiveness of a substance relative to that person.

Alcohol is more addictive to some than it is to others, for example, and when someone with a tendency towards alcoholism gets addicted, they may in fact have less of a history of drinking as their other peers yet are still trapped by a growing need for alcohol as their primary source of pleasure and satisfaction.

The role shame plays in this scenario is that, rather than go beyond the blame game, people try to find some reason for their addiction that allows them to channel their frustrations – and they often find themselves. This only perpetuates their condition, because it robs them of the emotional state needed to effectively combat addiction, and reverse the effect it has on the brain.

Addiction Is Not a Matter of Personal Responsibility

Addiction happens. It can happen to almost anybody. It happens to high school kids in a bad crowd. It happens to the regular worker who drops off at a bar after every shift’s end. It can happen to teachers, athletes, loving parents, talented artists, empathic activists and even to the most dedicated and willful of journalists.

When you find yourself trapped in addiction, the cause of that situation is not a matter of personal responsibility. However, your ability to fight it is.

The simplest analogy is a trip and a fall. Tripping happens to the best of us. We don’t wish for it – we just make a little misstep and fall on our face. But once we’re down there, once gravity has had its way with us and reminded us of the dangers of losing balance in an unfortunate situation, it’s entirely up to us to get back up. If we choose to stay down, then our situation is our fault – because we’re not fighting to get back up on our feet. But if you choose to fight – if you decide you’re not giving up, if you tell yourself that you’re going to keep struggling until you’ve “made it” – then no one can tell you that you have something to be ashamed of.

Choosing to break an addiction requires personal responsibility. It requires strength. It requires will. It requires wanting to stop using, from the bottom of your heart, then dedicating yourself to that task, despite any setbacks and the potential for continuous failure before success. And yes, it requires humility, and often, the ability to ask others for help. The path to recovery is one you’re going to be walking, but it’s a good idea to ask others for help in that walk.

The Choice to Fight Is Never Weak

If you’re struggling with overcoming addiction, then congratulations – you’re strong. It takes strength to do that. To struggle. To keep on looking for alternatives, treatments, and ways to continue your recovery. From residential treatments to sober living homes, there are many ways to do recovery. Finding yours – even if it’s in the hands of group therapy, and other group-related activities rather than an individual pursuit – is always admirable.

Even if you find that asking others for help in recovery somehow means giving up on your own ability to fight addiction, then remember that at the end of the day, asking for help is just that – help. It’s not asking someone to walk the walk for you – you still must take every single grueling step, you still must swear off the drugs, you still must take up the responsibility to pay your dues, work on your new habits, achieve your goals, go to your meetings, and adjust to your new life. That’s not giving up – that’s a full-fledged battle. Don’t be ashamed by your past – take satisfaction in the fact that you’re actively overcoming it.

Words Are Powerful

Some people find that the very word “addict” is associated with guilt and shame so strongly that they decide the best course of action is to entirely boycott it – cut it out of the terminology, and never again label themselves or anyone else in the process of recovery an “addict.”

If you’re uncomfortable with calling yourself an “addict,” and you’d like to distance yourself from the term and what connotates it, then do so. And remember to do so for everyone else. Addiction is a large problem – it affects roughly 23.5 million Americans, and they all struggle with finding a way out of their situation. The path to recovery is a little different for everyone – but shame and guilt are things found in the hearts of almost everyone who’s had to struggle with addiction.

Adjust Your Recovery Lens For Better Focus

Posted on June 8, 2017June 6, 2017 by JohnAdmin

We live in a world where it’s common to find the quickest possible solution to everything. While we’re obviously inclined to go for what works best and fastest to solving our problems, we’ve built up a sort of need for instant gratification when it comes to information and results. People are progressively getting worse at doing things that require patience and time – or more correctly, the average person’s mind is losing the ability to concentrate long term, and stay on task.

When most of us are running around with a pocket device capable of answering almost any question in seconds, we sort of become used to that sense of speed and efficiency. It’s gotten to the point that when a website takes longer than a few seconds to load, it’s going to severely suffer in traffic simply because people will close the tab and not bother coming back, instead of visiting the faster competitor.

That’s all well and good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong about being able to find out within seconds what the best method is for removing wine stains from a woolen carpet. But there are some things in life that will just never be solved with that kind of an attitude – there are some things that will never bow down to the whims and hunger for instant gratification. Good things take time, hard work, and any shortcuts you’re bound to find are going to hurt you more than they’ll do you any good.

The prime example for most people is weight loss. Despite starting to shrink, the weight loss industry is huge for a reason – people will pay large sums of money to find easier, different solutions from the one we all know work best: exercise, eat healthily and eat less. Some people legitimately can’t afford better food, or they’re struggling with a medical condition that predetermines their obesity or renders them physically disabled. But most people just want an easier solution.

For recovering from addiction, the simplest advice is the toughest to swallow: put the work in. Put the work in – that’s the only way you’re going to beat this. Put the work in – regardless of how you treat your addiction, you should shut off any scatterbrained behavior and focus. Go to your meetings, speak to your therapist, meet your weekly or monthly goals. If you’re struggling with that – and most people do – then learn to focus your focus.

The Power of Focus

The focus is basically your ability to channel everything into a single goal. When you’re focused, you’re single-minded – you cut out unnecessary distractions, avoid multitasking, and devote yourself to your task. But focus often only lasts so long. Most people fall out of focus, lose themselves, and get distracted. With addiction, the ability to focus becomes even harder as patients are expected to cope with all the emotional changes coming their way.

It’s a long-term application. The focus is the ability to stay motivated, to remember to hit the gym, to follow your schedule and do the things you’ve set out to do. When we falter in our self-discipline and get soft, we allow excuses to filter into our mind, and we start to go down the road of a relapse.

At a certain point in addiction, there’s no question that while willpower helps, it’s still rather powerless to the factors of addiction. But after rehab – when the drug is out of your system, and when you’re on the road to addressing the emotional issues caused or nurtured by your addiction of choice – your ability to prevent a relapse is largely your responsibility.

That doesn’t mean you should be ashamed for failing to stay sober – most people fail at least a few times before they truly overcome an addiction. But the only way you’re going to do that is to continuously get back on the horse and focus on the road ahead.

Training Your Focus

Focus, determination, will and motivation all go together and are all important for your successful recovery. In fact, they’re important for any goal in life. Being an addict doesn’t make you a lesser person, or any less human – you’re a person just like anyone else, and an addiction is ultimately a challenging adversary.

Therefore, learning to better focus in life and maintain your motivation – even after a setback – is an extremely powerful skill. And the best way to train it is through mindfulness. Mindfulness activities are best described as meditation – focusing on a single thought or idea to train your ability to concentrate for extended periods of time.

Some sports and activities are perfect active forms of meditation – for example, artists and writers like building their ability to focus and creatively flow by simply writing or painting in an ad-lib fashion. Others prefer exercises like jogging, lifting or sparring as “active meditation”. When you work on your ability to focus for longer periods of time, you hone your ability to stay motivated, to slip into a calm state of mind, to get away from negative or intrusive thoughts by “meditating” in your own way.

Working together in a group is another wonderful way to channel focus. Sober living environments are particularly effective for building permanent habits because working alongside others on your road to recovery means sharing in the collaborative and competitive aspects of self-improvement – through sports, through group activities, and through trips and adventures you’ll learn to communicate and rely on others, to rely on yourself, and to put aside any distractions and focus on the collective goal.

When Focus Is Truly Challenging

The ability to focus isn’t something universal, sadly. There are cases where negative thinking and addictive temptation can’t be escaped or combatted with mindfulness or focus – because you’re constantly flying around in your own head. Adult attention deficit disorder, for example, is one reason why people suffer from an inability to maintain their focus.

If you feel like you’re having an exceptionally tough time to shut off your thoughts or concentrate on a task, alone or in a group, then it’s best to consult a professional and see whether you could be diagnosed with ADD or a related mental disorder. In some cases, mindfulness is a fantastic way to improve your focus despite the ADD, and even without medication, you can learn to use focus to get away from the chaos of life.

In other cases, medication may be a perfect way for you to improve not just your ADD, but your addiction as well. There is a link between attention deficit disorders and the development of addiction, and literature to support that treating one can affect the other.