• The Importance of Family in Addiction Treatment

    While recovery is ultimately an individual journey, having the support of family can make a huge difference in your success. Not everyone has family to support them, and not everyone’s family is supportive. But if you have family willing to walk with you, it’s important to know how your addiction affects them, as well as…

  • How to Battle Bullying

    Every September for the past 30 years, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has sponsored Recovery Month. This important national observance is aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of mental and substance use disorders and celebrating the people who get up each morning and bravely continue the journey of recovery.

  • How Internal Family Systems Therapy Helps Heal Addiction

    Addiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Beneath the behaviors, there are often deep emotional wounds—trauma, shame, pain, fear—that we try to numb or avoid. These experiences don’t just disappear. They settle inside us and often show up in ways we don’t fully understand. That’s where Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, comes in. Internal Family…

  • Tapping into Resiliency: How to Be Okay With the Holidays in the Age of COVID

    By Christa Banister It’s no secret that 2020 has been one for the history books.  In addition to being an election year, which is certainly eventful enough all by itself, we’ve all been forced to adapt in unimaginable ways.  Now with the holidays rapidly approaching, many traditions will be forced to undergo an adaptation of…

  • Facing Family Togetherness

    By Jessica Smith, BSN, RN As the holiday season approaches, I am reminded of the oft-quoted line in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Holidays have a way of bringing out both the best and worst in people. We enter the season with childlike…

  • Recovery for Partners of Sex Addicts

    By Nancy Greenlee, MAPC, LCPC “I am hurt, and I’m devastated. Being married to my husband is like doing yoga on one leg,” a recent workshop participant said. “I’m trying to hold things together, but I keep crashing down.” She made an excellent analogy of what sexual betrayal, relapse, and lack of recovery can be…

  • Why Success in Achieving New Year’s Goals May Depend on Your Friends

    It’s here – the one month of the year that focuses the most on weight loss, diet renewal and becoming a “new you.” In January, you’ll be bombarded by articles, deals on gyms and diet foods and experts promising you the bikini body by summer. But there is one thing perhaps just as important as…

  • Ho, Ho, NO: Finding Real Joy This Christmas

    By Laura Parrot Perry Note: The following post originally appeared on the blog In Others’ Words. The author, Laura Parrott Perry, is a mother, an art teacher, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and an advocate for fellow survivors. It is reposted here with her permission.

  • Practical Tips for a Healthier Holiday Season

    Most of us consider the holidays to officially start right on Thanksgiving Day and end at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s. In actuality, they start right before Halloween and end at the buzzer on Super Bowl Sunday. That’s because the season of eating and excess starts typically with the acquirement of pounds and…

  • The Subtle Cues of Communication

    “You cannot ‘not’ communicate.”

  • Mothering and Codependency: A Catalyst for Personal Growth

    If I had been more honest with myself and diagrammed my family when my children were young, I would have made myself smaller than anyone else. What I learned through my own ACA/codependency recovery was that if I kept doing that, I was not, in fact, serving my children nor myself nor my husband. Trauma…

  • Partners of Sex Addicts Struggle with Loneliness and Isolation

    By: Dr. Georgia Fourlas, LCSW, LISAC, CSAT, Clinical Director of Rio Retreat Center Workshops Partners of sex addicts often find themselves feeling alone and isolated. First, the feelings of loneliness come when the addicted partner acts out. Although the partner of the sex addict is not always able to identify what is wrong, they often…