Topic: early recovery

There’s not much point in pretending that all those years of dousing the brain with toxins hasn’t left its mark.

For most of us, personal risk management boils down to inserting a process of logical reasoning between the desire and the action.

“All my friends drink,” someone says. There’s a reason for that.

You might say the drug itself may not be that dangerous, except to our patients. 

Newcomers had a tendency to focus their attention on the drug that brought them to treatment, ignoring others they happened to have been using.

Insomnia is at the top of the list of common problems for both active addicts and the newly recovering, and sleeping meds can pose risks.

In most cases, the intrusive thoughts associated with addiction (cravings, disturbing images, etc) go away during the course of recovery.

At the end of each day, make a list of what went right. Focus on that rather than the things that didn’t.

After years in the drug world, it may not be easy for someone new to recovery to fit comfortably into the larger society. It helps to find people such as yourself– who used to use drugs but no longer do– to relate to.

Ultimately, what replaces addiction in recovery is life, in all its glory.