During the holiday season, it's nearly impossible to turn on a television or walk into a store without being bombarded with images and videos of holiday joy and cheerfulness. While the intention of these messages is to spread joy, the constant reminders of happy times can have the opposite effect on those who struggle with the holidays. If you experience depression during holiday seasons, then you aren't alone. Holiday and depression can be twin sides of a coin, but the good news is there are ways to cope and enjoy recovery from holiday depression and anxiety. The following are a few helpful tips and tools for how:
During the holiday season, it's nearly impossible to turn on a television or walk into a store without being bombarded with images and videos of holiday joy and cheerfulness. While the intention of these messages is to spread joy, the constant reminders of happy times can have the opposite effect on those who struggle with the holidays.
In our last post, we briefly talked about the people in your life who have to know about your addiction recovery. Today, we talk about something a little harder to determine: the negotiables.
>After embarking on the addiction recovery process, it’s difficult to know how much you should share with the people around you. We don’t want to make the mistake of oversharing and being awkward or a burden on those around us. On the other hand, keeping secrets can strain relationships and be unfair to those around us. It can even impede recovery. So here’s a quick guide and some advice.
When a loved one returns from an addiction recovery program, we struggle to know how to interact. Strained relationships, and misunderstandings between the recovering individual and his or her loved ones can lead to isolation that severely impairs healing and regrowth.
Healing broken and impaired relationships is a central part of recovery from addiction, and it can require making a series of deep, heartfelt apologies to those who are closest to you. Doing your part to say that you are sorry for any pain you caused, however, is a little more nuanced than you might think. There are a variety of ways that we say that we’re sorry to one another, many of which actually do not make for an apology at all. These not-quite-apologies are commonly referred to as “non-apology apologies,” “fauxpologies,” and “nonpologies.” Here are some common ways that we say we’re sorry without actually making a sincere apology.
For any individual, addiction is a trying challenge in life; one that has the potential to shake a person to their core. This is not only true of the individual who is addiction, however, but also the families of addicts who love and care for them. Of all of these familial relationships, though, the most complicated and difficult might be the one that addicts have with their children. Parenthood is an incredible responsibility that gives many people a higher purpose in their lives. However, addiction can complicate this paternal bond, as addiction is a disease that has the potential to rewire the very brain processes responsible for our behavior. Here’s some more information about the corrupt connection between addiction and parenthood...
Watching a loved one struggle with addiction can be an absolutely trying experience. Seeing someone that you care so much about feel their lives slip beyond what they can control on their own is an experience that few people can understand until they've seen it happen. However, these times in life are not the times to wallow in despair. Instead, realize that this is the time in life where this person that you love needs you now more than ever. In order to end the epidemic of addiction, we must all do our part in helping the people we care about in the recovery process, and that means doing whatever we can to prevent a relapse. Here is some information on how to do just that...
Addiction affects families as well as individuals. It detaches the addict from the family unit, deteriorating trust, safety and security. It also creates fear, guilt and resentment among family members. Healing the family is crucial for the long term success of the addict as well as the success of the family.
