Problems are often temporary – the name of the person who breaks your heart today will be a dim memory at some point. Pain is real at the time and difficult. Don’t isolate. Find a safe person to talk with.
Life is beautiful, precious, valuable and worthwhile – right? How can suicide seem like the best or only choice? If you’ve never been there yourself, it can be hard to believe anyone could get that down.
Ever feel like you’re a fat slob, a lazy bum, or just a bad person because you abuse opioids, get lost in meth, binge on food or have spent 2 days gaming? I’ve heard many a person say these things about themselves in my counseling office as they struggle to make better choices.
You’ve just spent 4 hours on FB and are feeling depressed, empty, bored or anxious. Or, you’ve binged on a dozen donuts and feel sick and disgusted. Or, you can’t stop going to the porn sites and your spouse is furious.
Learning how to be social in recovery, especially in early recovery, can provoke anxiety. Our guest blogger is providing some great tips to feel more comfortable in social situations.
Guest Blog by Michelle Peterson, RecoveryPride.org
Put a rat it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.
The Holidays are HERE and when families get together there is joy and struggle. We want things to be perfect, loving, happy. But, sometimes old buttons get pushed, painful patterns of communication come to the surface, again, and feelings get triggered that lead to the “excuse” to cope by drinking or using another substance. There’s an old saying that our parents install our emotional buttons and our children and close loved ones push them. I think of emotional buttons that get pushed as opportunities for healing. Yeah.
I know, pot affects people differently so if your experience is that it enhances reality, fine. At the age of 20 I smoked daily for a year and it was the most unproductive, wasted, sleepy year of my life. I was able to take care of my son, clean the house and nap a lot. I remember the realization that sluggishness was not how I wanted to live each day, quit and felt mentally clear. But it took awhile!…
Guest Blog by Michelle Peterson, recoverypride.org
Drug and alcohol addiction doesn’t discriminate, impacting people from all walks of life and spanning age groups from the pre-teens (or even younger) to senior citizens.
Does smoking pot affect your IQ? Yes, if you start smoking under the age of 18. A study from New Zealand’s University of Otago of 1,000 people IQ tested and followed from 18 to 34 showed that people who smoked and became dependent by 18 had an average drop of 8 points. Unfortunately, quitting didn’t remove the problem researchers reported. (Modesto Bee, Tue. 28, 2012)