5 Life Skills You’ll Need in Recovery and Where to Learn Them

From navigating arguments to managing your finances, early recovery is often a crash course in the real world. It’s often said that people with substance use disorder stop maturing at the age they were when they started using. If you were addicted to drugs or alcohol throughout your teens or young adulthood, you probably missed on out on learning essential life skills. 

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7 Addiction Facts a Lot of People Don’t Understand

Substance abuse. Recovery. Relapse. We’ve all heard these terms, but sometimes it’s hard to understand the facts behind them…unless you’ve walked a mile in those shoes. Riddled with misunderstandings and myths, chemical dependency remains a mystery to many people. Addiction does significant damage to a person’s physical health, mental health, and overall well-being, not to mention the harm it does to family and friends. With so many people impacted, it’s important to dispel any confusion surrounding this disease and its’ far-reaching consequences.

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Addiction Recovery and Procrastination Habits

Let’s start with a definition. Procrastination is an automatic, negative, problem habit of needlessly postponing and delaying a timely and relevant activity until another day or time. It always involves a negative emotion that ranges from a whisper of affect to panic. The process always includes a diversionary activity. It practically always involves procrastination thinking, such as “I’ll fix the problem later.”

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Finding the Courage to Grab Your Lifeline

He was famous in his field: a psychiatrist and professor at the local Ivy League university. A flyer initially drew me to one of his lectures.
As he spoke, it felt like my mind was exploding into millions of revelations. He spoke about things I’d always suspected, but had never known much about. And he showed, through studies and his own experience treating patients, how it worked. And it did work. I felt hope start to rise within me.

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Using Spiritual or Religious Beliefs when Fighting Addiction

Advocates of the 12 Steps and a spiritual way of life have been saying for decades that faith and belief are cornerstones to recovery. However, agnostics and atheists still have a hard time accepting the notion that spirituality must be a part of recovery. So, what does the science say? The facts are quite clear. Persons with strong religious beliefs report higher levels of life satisfaction, greater happiness, and fewer negative psychosocial consequences of traumatic life events.

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Inviting Change

If you have someone in your life who is using substances in a problematic way, you may often wonder what you can do to help them decide to change. You may be frightened or mad at them for making bad choices. It’s also likely you have absorbed the cultural message that there isn’t anything you can do to help because that would be enabling or that the only way they will change is when they bottom out. Science, however, offers some different options about how to help someone change…

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5 Habits that Will Help You Stay Sober Through Hard Times

Getting sober doesn’t exempt us from the ups and downs of life. Everyone is still subject to experiencing the struggles, hardships, successes, and setbacks that come with being human. Anyone who is clean and sober will undoubtedly experience periods or moments in which the desire to drink or use comes back. This is to be expected.

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This Philosopher Says Addiction Stigma Prevents Recovery

Thousands of people are unnecessarily dying because we misinterpret how those struggling with addiction think, according to a philosopher, German Lopez.

After a year of reporting on the crisis, Lopez claims the stigma against addiction “is the single biggest reason America is failing in its response to the opioid epidemic,” and to overcome that stigma, we need to first understand it.

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Finding Happiness in Recovery

We all want to be happy, but happiness doesn’t always come easy – especially when we’ve relied on drugs and alcohol for that perceived “happiness” in the past.  Leaving behind a life we’re familiar with can be scary and challenging at first, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be satisfied and fulfilled with a new, sober lifestyle.  Just ask Justin Kan, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who recently gave up alcohol completely and has never been happier.

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Addressing Emotional Abuse in Addiction Recovery

What is emotional abuse, exactly?

Emotional abuse is defined as is the ongoing emotional maltreatment or emotional neglect of a child or person. It is mostly expressed verbally by:

Criticizing
Disapproval of another person’s action(s), or
Constant expression of dissatisfaction

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