Blog & Announcements

It’s hard living with a loved one with a substance use disorder. You may have put up with years’ worth of bad behavior, including lying, stealing, violent behavior, manipulation, and general unreliability. You may find that even when your loved one gets sober that you still have trouble forgiving them for everything they put you through when they were actively addicted.

If you want to repair and preserve the relationship, it’s necessary to forgive them at some point, so you can move on, but that can be a huge challenge. It’s hard to let go of the hurt. The following tips can help you forgive a loved one for their sake and yours.

Remember That Forgiveness Is Not Approval

One reason people find it hard to forgive is that they feel like forgiving someone is the same as condoning their behavior, that it’s like saying that they really didn’t do anything wrong after all. That’s not what forgiveness is about.

Forgiveness is nearly the opposite. It’s saying, “You certainly did something wrong but I’m not going to continue being angry about it.” Forgiveness is not approval and it’s not forgetting. You should certainly retain the lessons you learned from your loved one’s addiction, but in forgiving them, you let go of your resentment.

Remember That Forgiveness Is for You as Much as Them

Your loved one may want your forgiveness and even ask for it but that doesn’t mean forgiveness is only for them. In fact, forgiveness is primarily for you. Holding on to anger and resentment is bad for you. It’s a form of chronic stress that impairs your immune system, disturbs your sleep, and generally makes you less happy.

Resentment also means you are continually reaffirming your status as a victim in this situation since you still feel harmed by the person’s past actions. Forgiveness means taking responsibility for your own mental state, leading to greater freedom and well-being.

Try to Understand Addiction

If you’ve never experienced addiction for yourself, it can be very hard to understand from the outside. Every bad thing your loved one does seems like a choice--something they deliberately do to you. It’s easy to take their actions personally and hard to forgive. However, as you learn more about addiction, the role of choice in addictive behavior appears to shrink significantly.

Addiction often causes structural changes in the brain that optimize your thinking for drug or alcohol-seeking behavior while ignoring collateral damage. The roots of addiction are also complex, involving genes, childhood environment, and mental health issues. Being angry at someone for a substance use disorder is like being angry at someone for having diabetes. It’s not something anyone chooses.

Listen

In addition to understanding addiction better in general, it’s important to understand your loved one’s particular experience. For that, listening is important. Becoming a better listener is a whole skill in itself but the basics include giving your loved one your full attention, reflecting back what they say, “So, what you’re saying is...” and trying to put yourself in their place.

That means suspending judgment at least temporarily and trying to imagine what it must have been like for them to struggle with substance use and related behaviors. Often, you’ll find that their experience has been far worse than yours, which will engage your compassionate instincts.

Talk to a Therapist

Forgiveness isn’t something you have to work through on your own; you can always enlist the help of a therapist. Your therapist can help you untangle the difficult emotions you feel related to your loved one--love, hurt, anger, sadness, fear, concern, compassion, resentment, and so on. You may be having trouble with your own feelings including guilt, shame, and anger towards someone you’re supposed to love and care for.

Validating these feelings is just as important as understanding what your loved one has been through. It may also help to participate in family therapy as part of your loved one’s treatment. Many programs like to involve the families in treatment as much as possible. It helps untangle unhealthy family dynamics, improve communication, and educate families on the recovery process.

Seek Social Support

If therapy isn’t an option for you, or even if it is, you may consider attending a group like Al-Anon or Nar-Anon for families of people with substance use disorders. Forgiveness is a common theme of these groups and you can talk things over with people who have had many of the same experiences as you’ve had.

Maintain Healthy Boundaries

As noted above, forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. In fact, remembering how bad things got can give you ancentive to maintain healthy boundaries with your loved one. Part of the ongoing resentment is the fear that you’ll be hurt again. If you are able to insulate yourself from the consequences of your loved one’s substance use, you will be better able to forgive their past behavior.

Be Patient With Yourself

Finally, be patient with yourself. Often, the anger and resentment you feel towards a loved one with a substance use disorder is a habit of mind built over years of pain and disappointment. You can’t expect to let it all go overnight. The point of forgiveness is to allow yourself to be free from that anger and resentment but if you criticize yourself for being slow to forgive, you only add to your own pain. Give yourself time. The important things are that you want to forgive and that you’re actively working on it. 

Forgiveness can be hard. It feels like you’re condoning your loved one’s past behavior or leaving yourself vulnerable to being hurt again. In reality, you’re letting go of an unnecessary burden, even if you have to do it one brick at a time.

At The Foundry, we know that recovery is stronger when you have the support of friends and family. That’s why we promote family involvement and building a strong recovery community as well as addressing the underlying causes of addiction. To learn more, contact us today at (844) 955-1066.

For most of us, interpersonal conflict is one of the biggest sources of stress in our lives, perhaps second only to financial stress. In fact, interpersonal stress and financial stress often overlap. People starting out in recovery typically identify stress, and interpersonal conflict in particular, as a major trigger of drug and alcohol cravings. The early days of recovery following might also have more conflict than you’re used to.

As you try to make some big changes in your life, some people will resist. However, you have to live your life and maintain healthy boundaries if you want to stay sober. The following tips can help you resolve conflict, reduce stress, and generally reduce the amount of friction in your recovery and your life. 

Be Aware of Your Tendencies

As with most aspects of emotional intelligence, being more self-aware will help you resolve conflict more effectively. Many people tend to avoid conflict, even when doing so makes them worse off, while others tend to create and escalate conflict unnecessarily. It’s always good to be aware of your own tendencies, learn to take a step back, and ask yourself objectively if there is a problem you need to address.

Acknowledge a Problem

If there is a problem, the first thing is to acknowledge it, even if you don’t know how to resolve it or you don’t feel like you can handle it. If there is a real problem, ignoring it won’t make it go away. Just because you aren’t yet sure how to deal with it doesn’t mean a resolution isn’t possible.

Proceed Calmly

Don’t try to resolve conflict while you’re feeling overly emotional, whether you’re feeling angry, scared, hurt, sad, or whatever else. When you’re feeling that way, you will be focused on expressing yourself. That’s fine, but it also makes it harder to listen and consider the other person’s point of view and you are more likely to say or do something to make the situation worse. Give it a day before you try to work out the problem with the other person. If that’s not possible, take a few deep breaths, let yourself calm down, and try to proceed objectively.

Listen

The first step in actually resolving the conflict is to listen to the other side. Any satisfactory solution will have to be based on mutual understanding. It’s hard to listen to someone you feel is your adversary but it’s a crucial step. You gain information and often the other person will become more reasonable if they feel like you’re listening and taking their considerations seriously.

Conflicts often begin with a communication from the other party, such as an angry phone call or a demanding email. You might feel ambushed. As noted above, let yourself cool off before responding. Take some time to think about what the other person really wants or needs. Often, they are under pressure too, and understanding that will be important for resolving the conflict.

Define the Problem

Having a clear understanding of the problem is necessary for a good solution. You can move toward a clear understanding by practicing reflection. This is when you summarize the situation as the other person has explained it to you. This shows you were listening and taking them seriously and it also helps resolve any potential misunderstandings. Often, just clearing up miscommunications is enough to resolve a conflict. If not, you can at least start with an agreed understanding of the facts.

Find Common Ground

As noted above, it’s hard to listen and have an open discussion with someone you view as an adversary. Most of the time, your disagreements will be with people who are actually on your side--relatives, coworkers, friends, and so on. Although you may want different things in this specific situation, it’s important to remember that you’re not actually enemies.

Even if someone isn’t actually on your side--and perhaps especially when they’re not--finding common ground is a great way to start working toward a solution. Agreeing on facts, as noted above, is good. Even better is if you can identify any aspects of the problem that are not actually in conflict. 

Be Willing to Compromise

There’s an old saying that the sign of a good compromise is that no one is happy. That may not sound reassuring, but sometimes you have to be prepared to make sacrifices to achieve your larger goals. Know which aspects of the conflict are most important to you and which are secondary and be willing to compromise on those secondary aspects. Also, keep the context in mind. For example, it’s typically not worth sacrificing a friendship over a minor argument.

Work Toward a Solution, Not Vindication

While working on a solution, don’t get too hung up on being right. Being right or getting credit are typically not worth very much in the scheme of things. Wanting vindication, wanting to have things your own way, and so on, typically just get in the way of a resolution. Stay focused on what outcome you want and don’t get distracted by the cosmetic stuff.

Be Ready to Forgive

When you have finally reached a solution or resolved an argument, be willing to let it go. If you don’t let it go, then the problem hasn’t really been resolved. If you tell the other person that you are satisfied with whatever compromise you decided on, continuing to complain about it, even if you’re just silently resentful, is essentially like reneging on an agreement. That’s bad for your own mental health and it’s bad for the relationship.

Conflict is inevitable and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nor does it mean that the person you’re in conflict with is bad. It’s normal for people’s legitimate needs and desires to clash from time to time. With a little patience and empathy, conflict can usually be resolved satisfactorily, if not perfectly. 

At The Foundry, we know that a strong recovery from addiction is about far more than just abstinence from drugs and alcohol. That’s why we focus on skills such as emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, family relationships, and building social support as part of a holistic approach to addiction recovery. To learn more, call us today at 844-955-1066.

Many people starting out in recovery face a dilemma when it comes to friends: They want to distance themselves from their old associates who are drinking and using drugs but then they struggle with loneliness, which, in some ways, is almost as bad. Having a strong support network gives you a feeling of belonging and reduces stress.

It’s one of the most important factors in a strong recovery. However, few people actually have much practice making new friends as adults. The following tips can help you make the kind of friends that will help you stay sober.

Have the Right Attitude

First, you have to have the right attitude. Mainly that means being willing to take some risks in terms of going into unfamiliar situations and reaching out to others. If you’re naturally outgoing, this is not a big deal, but if you’re reading a post about making friends, you may need to prepare yourself to step outside your comfort zone. Keep in mind that if someone isn’t interested in being your friend, you shouldn’t take it personally.

We all have our reasons or lack thereof for who we’re friends with. Think of it this way: If you talk to enough people, you will eventually make some good friends. Also, keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need your new friends to be sober; you just need them to respect and support your sobriety.

Find Good Situations

The other part of the new-friends equation is to put yourself in circumstances where you are more likely to make friends. The best circumstances are those where you are in frequent contact with the same people and you all share a common interest or value. Frequent contact allows you to build familiarity and trust, while sharing an interest gives you something to talk about and possibly collaborate on. The following are examples that typically provide both of those elements.

Treatment

People often say they meet their best friends in treatment and that shouldn’t be surprising. You spend a lot of time with those people and you all share certain core experiences around addiction and trauma. Being open about these struggles is cathartic and it’s often a bonding experience. The only thing is that people often travel to attend treatment so you may have to make an effort to keep the friendship alive after you all leave and go back home, but it’s well worth the effort.

12-Step Meetings

The next logical place to make sober friends is at a 12-Step meeting. These aren’t quite as intense as treatment since you typically won’t be living in the same space as your group members, but you do share similar experiences and a commitment to staying sober, just like in treatment. The more regularly you go to meetings, the more quickly you will get to know people, and the sooner you will make new friends.

People just starting out in recovery often go to a meeting every day, or even several meetings a day. The environment is typically welcoming and supportive, making it one of the easiest places to make new friends.

Try a Meetup

If you want to meet people who share your interests, try looking for things that interest you on meetup.com. This is a site that lists special interest groups in your area by subject. There are groups for art, music, film, sports, wellness, finance, languages, travel, dance, careers, and so on. These groups often meet regularly and they aren’t too big so it’s not hard to talk to people.

Join a League

There are many reasons to be physically active in addiction recovery. Regular exercise is one of the best things you do for your physical and mental health and it can also be a great way to make friends. Joining a recreational sports league is one of the most fun ways to exercise and it’s a great way to get to know people without a lot of awkward conversations and even more awkward silences.

If you’re not a team sports kind of person, there are other ways to be social with exercise. You can join a running or biking group. Exercise classes are also great, whether you’re into spin, yoga, or boxing. 

Take Some Classes

Most people didn’t find it too hard to make friends in school since you see the same people every day for years and most of them are near your own age. The closest experience most of us have as adults is work. While, for some people, work might qualify as a shared interest, for most people it doesn’t.

Furthermore, most of your coworkers, even your “work friends” have their own lives and families to worry about and may not be interested in making new friends. However, you can take classes as an adult. And unlike when you’re a kid, you don’t have to take a class in anything that doesn’t interest you.

You can take an exercise class, as noted above, a cooking class, an art class, and so on. You see the same people for weeks or months, you share at least one interest, and you may get to work on a project together. It's a great recipe for making new friends.

Use Your Existing Network

Finally, make sure you’re using all the resources that are right in front of you. Your friends and relatives probably know people you would hit it off with but it may not occur to them unless you ask. Making friends through common acquaintances is good because those people have already been vetted, in a way, and you already know someone who can introduce you.

This is especially helpful if you are living in an unfamiliar area--say, for example, if you are staying in a sober home after attending treatment out of state. You can ask the people you live with and your friends and family back home if they happen to know anyone in the area. Most won’t, but you might get lucky.

Making friends in recovery takes some initiative and perseverance but it’s mainly a matter of talking to a lot of people and putting yourself in the right position. If you find situations where you see the same people a lot and you share interests, it should only be a matter of time before you make some good friends. The main thing is to be patient; friendships have to develop on their own schedule.

At The Foundry, we know that no one recovers from addiction alone. Connection is the key to a long recovery. We promote social connection and healthy relationship skills through group therapy, family therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and various activities. To learn more, call us today at (844) 955-1066.

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health problems in the world and it often goes with addiction. The National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, a survey of more than 43,000 people, found that 15 percent of people who experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year had at least one co-occurring substance use disorder--more than twice the prevalence of substance use disorders in the general population.

Conversely, nearly 18 percent of people with a substance use disorder in the past year also had an anxiety disorder. As with any mental health issue, treating anxiety concurrently with addiction is crucial for staying sober long-term, as is taking care of your mental health. The following tips can help you manage anxiety while recovering from a substance use disorder.

Therapy

Anxiety is the mental health issue most likely to be dismissed as no big deal. People might just tell you to relax or calm down or you might even tell yourself that. However, an anxiety disorder isn’t just a matter of being nervous. It often has a physiological component and sometimes requires medication. Often, anxiety has roots in childhood environment or dysfunctional belief patterns and you need help fixing the problem. The following tips are meant to augment therapy, not replace it.

Don’t Avoid Anxiety

When you’re prone to anxiety, your natural tendency is to avoid situations where you might feel anxious. This is particularly true of people who experience panic attacks. Unfortunately, this strategy only shrinks your sphere of comfort to the point where you might be afraid to even leave the house. As hard as it may be, the thing to do is intentionally expose yourself to things that make you anxious in a graduated way.

It’s like doing a workout for your ability to handle anxiety. Your therapist can help you create a plan for doing this in a structured way but you can also look for opportunities to engage in activities that might make you anxious but not too anxious.

Deep Breathing

In the short term, deep breathing is one of the best ways to manage anxiety. There are two reasons it helps. First, focusing on your breathing brings your attention into the present moment, to the sensations you feel when you breathe. You’re not focused on the future or whatever thoughts are making you anxious. Second, taking slow, deep breaths is physiologically calming.

In particular, the long, slow exhale stimulates your vagus nerve, which activates your parasympathetic--or “rest and digest”--nervous system. Although any slow, controlled breathing will calm you down, research suggests that taking six breaths per minute, or one full breath every 10 seconds, helps synchronize respiratory and cardiac rhythms, optimizing calmness and wellbeing.

Grounding

As noted above, one of the ways deep breathing helps calm you down is that paying attention to the sensations of the breath grounds you in the present moment. You can use this principle with pretty much any sensation though. For example, you can pay attention to just the sensations in your feet or just pay attention to ambient sounds. You can go through all the senses systematically. The more you engage with your immediate environment, the less you worry about the future.

Exercise

Exercise is great for addiction recovery in at least a dozen ways. High among those is that it helps reduce stress and anxiety. There are a number of ways exercise helps accomplish this. It increases levels of endorphins in the brain, as well as the feel-good neurotransmitter, serotonin. Exercise also increases blood flow to the brain and creates structural changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis, which is connected to areas of the brain involved with identifying threats and fear.

These structural changes make your brain less reactive to stress and anxiety. Research suggests that 20 or 30 minutes of moderately intense aerobic exercise each day is ideal for improving mental health, but really, any exercise should provide some benefit.

Get Enough Sleep

As with exercise, there are plenty of reasons to get enough sleep in addiction recovery and in life, generally. A major reason for anyone with anxiety issues is that too little sleep worsens anxiety. We’ve long known that anxiety leads to insomnia, but it appears the reverse is also true. Research suggests that sleep deprivation leads to more symptoms of both depression and anxiety.

One study suggests this is because sleep deprivation leads to maladaptive activity in the brain’s anticipatory responses, leading to more rumination and worry. Sleep deprivation also weakens the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which acts as a brake on anxiety. Therefore, it’s crucial to sleep at least eight hours a night. If you have problems with insomnia, talk to your doctor or therapist.

Cut Down on Caffeine

Current research suggests that, on the whole, moderate consumption of tea or coffee isn’t bad for you and it might even have some mild health benefits. However, if you have problems with anxiety, it might be a good idea to cut down on caffeine. The physiological effects of caffeine are identical to those of anxiety.

Even if a few cups of coffee don’t directly lead to an anxiety or panic attack, they raise your baseline of arousal, making you more vulnerable to stress. Furthermore, caffeine has a half-life of between four and six hours, so even if you cut off your coffee at noon, you might still have a lot of caffeine in your system at bedtime. This may keep you awake and cause you to sleep less deeply when you do fall asleep. As discussed above, insomnia and sleep deprivation significantly increase symptoms of anxiety.

Anxiety issues can be challenging to deal with because they are rooted in our primitive survival instincts. They often don’t respond to reason, which can be terribly frustrating. Overcoming and managing anxiety starts with a good therapist. After that, it’s a matter of challenging yourself to get comfortable with anxiety and finding techniques to help you manage it.

At The Foundry, we know that addiction is about far more than physical dependence. Most people have co-occurring mental health issues that need attention if recovery is going to last. That’s why we use a variety of methods to foster mental health, including evidence-based treatment methods, outdoor activity, mindfulness meditation, and healthy lifestyle changes. To learn more, call us today at (844) 955-1066.

Having a growth mindset is one of the best ways to enhance your recovery from addiction. As discussed in a previous post, a growth mindset can help you feel less resistant to change, make you feel more confident about the good possibilities for your life, and help you transform the many challenges you will face in recovery into opportunities to grow as a person. 

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to change from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Our ideas about our abilities and potential are largely molded by our childhood experiences. If we’re frequently told by our parents or teachers that we’re stupid, lazy or whatever else, we often accept those assessments as limits to our possibilities.

Psychologist Carol Dweck, who developed and popularized the idea of fixed and growth mindsets, found that even well-meaning parents who praise their children as smart or talented may be doing them a disservice by reinforcing the idea that we’re all hardwired with certain abilities. Breaking out of this conditioning can be hard but it is possible. Here’s how. 

What Are Fixed and Growth Mindsets?

First, a brief description may help clarify what we’re trying to accomplish by moving from a fixed to a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is believing that whatever you are now is basically how you’ll be the rest of your life. If you’re good at playing the violin, for example, then you’ll probably get a little better but if you’re not good at it, then you’re just “not musical” and you shouldn’t bother.

The same is true of anything, whether it’s math, sports, socializing, thinking creatively, or anything else. The fixed mindset tells you to stay in your lane, do things you’re already good at, and don’t embarrass yourself by trying something new.

The growth mindset, on the other hand, operates on the fairly common-sense assumption that we get better at things we practice. We may not be very good at sports or the violin--or getting through a day without a drink--right now, but with consistent effort, we can certainly get better. That’s not to say you’ll ever be the best at something--few people ever attain that status--but you can certainly improve on the things that matter most to you and your quality of life.

Notice Your Thinking

Whenever we have a challenging emotion, there is typically a thought behind it, even if we don’t notice. Fear is often a result of fixed-mindset thinking. For example, a loved one suggests you talk to a therapist or consider getting treatment for your substance use and you feel a sense of panic, perhaps followed by anger. What was the thought behind that? Was it, “I can’t live without drugs or alcohol”? “I can’t go off to treatment alone”? There are many possible thoughts for which the subtext is “I can’t handle this.” 

However, treatment is not a test; it’s an opportunity to get help. You can’t fail at treatment or therapy; you can only fail to engage. The belief that you can fail or be exposed as somehow inadequate is only in your head. The first step is to become aware of these assumptions and challenge them. You may catch yourself saying something like “I can’t speak in front of groups,” perhaps because you believe you’re shy or inarticulate or whatever else.

However, in reality, plenty of people with varying personalities and skills are able to become effective at speaking in front of groups. Notice any thoughts or words that imply your abilities are fixed and make a conscious effort to challenge them.

Reframe Failure and Frustration

Too often, we take frustration or initial failure as a sign that we have no talent for something. In reality, every new thing is difficult and frustrating and you will have some failures. The challenge is to push through that initial frustration until you can acquire the minimum skills to start making real progress. One way to do this is to reframe failure and frustration.

You may have heard the expression, “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” Failure is just a part of the learning process. The important thing is to learn what you can from it and try again. This is an especially important lesson in addiction recovery since relapse is fairly common.

Similarly, don’t take frustration as an indication that you lack aptitude. Frustration is merely a sign that you’re having to push beyond your current limitations. What’s frustrating today will be easy later.

Remember Past Growth

When we’re born, we basically can’t do anything. We can’t talk, walk, read, stand, spell, feed ourselves, or do arithmetic. We can’t even focus our eyes. Pretty much everything we do all day that we don’t even have to think about took years of daily effort to master. Yet many people don’t even make it through a month of 12-Step meetings because they say it’s too hard or “not my thing.”

As adults, we take for granted the difficulty of most of our routine skills and so we doubt our ability to master comparatively easy new skills. Keep in mind that everything is hard at first but it becomes easier with practice.

Adjust Your Expectations

Related to the point above, we often underestimate the time and effort it will take to get good at something, often by orders of magnitude. For example, many people have had the experience of having had two years of Spanish in high school but then they take a trip to Mexico and they can’t even order lunch. So they throw up their hands and say, “Well, I guess I have no talent for languages.” 

However, consider what it took to learn your own language. For the first four years of your life, your brain is optimized for learning language. Everyone around you only speaks in your native language and tries to help you learn it. You desperately want to learn to speak in order to meet your basic needs and desires. And yet, how many four-year-olds speak their own native language with much fluency?

From that perspective, it’s not surprising that your two years of high school Spanish didn’t make you fluent. Often, we have to accept that reaching our goals is going to take a lot more work than we had originally estimated. It doesn’t mean you lack talent or ability; it just means you’ll have to do more work than you expected. 

View Challenges as Opportunities

Finally, practice viewing challenges as opportunities. Challenges are threatening to people with a fixed mindset because they are opportunities to fail. If you feel threatened by something, it could be that you fear it will expose you as weak, stupid, or somehow inadequate. People with a growth mindset view challenges much differently: They see opportunities to get stronger.

When you feel threatened by a challenge, pause and think, “Whether I succeed this time or not, it will certainly be an opportunity to learn and grow.” If you take this attitude toward challenges and even seek out new challenges, you will grow much faster.

It’s hard to change your mindset, especially since it was probably formed in childhood. However, the first step is knowing that change is possible. Everything we think or do changes our brains in some small way. If you make consistent efforts to change your brain in ways that encourage a growth mindset, you will start to notice all the possibilities that come with it.

At The Foundry, we want to help you recover from addiction, but we don’t stop there. We want you to have a more joyful, healthier, and more fulfilling life overall. We use a variety of evidence-based methods to help our clients grow and become the best versions of themselves. To learn more, call us today at (844) 955-1066.

Most people with a substance use disorder know about shame. It may be the central feature of their emotional lives. If you struggle with substance use, you likely feel shame on several levels. There may be shame resulting from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, whether as a child or as an adult. Research continually shows that abuse, trauma, and PTSD are incredibly common among people with substance use disorders. Many people carry shame from those situations, even though they weren’t to blame. 

Substance use disorders can also lead to shame in themselves. Addiction can override your moral judgment to the point where you’re willing to manipulate or deceive your loved ones to get what you want. You may act impulsively and recklessly while drunk or high, causing harm to yourself and others.

You may feel shame because of the stigma of substance use and you may feel shame about having to ask for help. Shame is common and it’s also one of the most corrosive emotions. Like any wound kept hidden, it only gets worse with time. The following are some suggestions for coping with and healing shame.

Acknowledge Shame

The first step in dealing with shame is to acknowledge what you’re feeling. It’s not always obvious that what you’re feeling is shame. Sometimes you experience it as anger, irritability, defensiveness, procrastination, or depression. It may take some introspection to realize shame is behind some persistent challenging emotions. You can dig down into these emotions by asking why. Why do you get angry when a loved one suggests you talk to a therapist? Why do you get defensive when certain topics are raised? 

Shame likes to hide. There’s a good reason people often say after telling an embarrassing story, “I wanted to crawl in a hole.” You want to protect yourself from those who would deride you. Unfortunately, when you feel shame, you are the one deriding yourself and so shame takes on different forms. 

Observe Shame Nonjudgmentally

When you are able to identify shame, try observing it without judgment. This can be incredibly hard because no one likes how it feels. Your natural reflex is to push it away or think of something else. However, that only makes the feeling stronger because you continue to fear it. Instead, allow yourself to feel it. Where do you feel it in your body? Does it feel like fear? Disgust? What thoughts are associated with it? Make sure you’re not feeding the shame with self-criticism; just experience it as it is. 

Is It Shame or Guilt?

It’s also important to distinguish shame from guilt. Guilt is a useful emotion. It’s our conscience letting us know we’ve let ourselves down in some way. Feeling guilt prods us into fixing our mistakes and improving our behavior. The important distinction is that guilt applies to our actions and shame applies to our inherent value.

When you make a mistake, perhaps you’ve made a rude comment to a friend, guilt says, “That was badly done; I’ll have to apologize and be more careful in the future,” but shame says, “I’m a horrible person and I’m always going around hurting people.” 

The irony is that shame actually makes you less able to improve your behavior. It implies that you’re permanently, inherently bad, rather than affirming that you’re capable of growth. If there is something you feel ashamed of, something you perhaps did as a result of addiction, try transferring it to the guilt category.

For example, instead of thinking “I’m an awful person for stealing from my parents,” change it to “It was wrong to steal from my parents and I’m determined never to do that kind of thing again.” 

Is It Something Else?

Shame has other functions as well. For example, an overt display of shame can signal remorse to the people around you. If you’re beating yourself up, they feel more inclined to let you off the hook. In this case, shame performs a social function, preserving your connection to the community after you’ve done something bad. Of course, after a certain point, this no longer helps. 

Shame may also be a way of keeping yourself stuck. You may feel like you don’t deserve to be happy because you’re so rotten. Conveniently, this also spares you the effort of trying to make positive changes in your life. After all, you can’t fail if you don’t try. The thought of failure or really any kind of change may be so frightening that even living with shame seems preferable.

Develop Compassion for Yourself

To move past shame, start by developing some compassion for yourself. We are often much harder on ourselves than we are on anyone else. In fact, if we treated others the way we treat ourselves, we’d probably be ostracized or locked up.

When you have identified some source of shame, take a step back and try to regard yourself the way you would a friend. Imagine a friend telling you they were ashamed of whatever it was that you did, or whatever happened to you. Imagine reacting with compassion, knowing that although your friend isn’t perfect, they deserve to be happy. Try extending that same feeling to yourself.

Try Opening Up

Finally, try opening up about shame. This is what really allows you to heal. As noted above, shame wants to hide but that only makes it worse. If you don’t yet feel like you can open up to someone you trust and care about, consider opening up in therapy.

Your therapist has probably heard it all and anything you say is confidential by law. Often, just saying it out loud to someone helps, but your therapist can also help you work through your feelings. Group therapy is also a great place to open up because you will probably discover that some other members of the group have had similar experiences and you will no longer feel alone.

If you’re not quite ready to talk about your feelings of shame with anyone, try writing about them. Just acknowledging them and exploring them in some detail will probably make you feel better, and perhaps prepare you to discuss it with a therapist.

Shame is a destructive emotion because it convinces us that we’re bad, that we’re weak, that we’re unlovable, and that we don’t deserve anything good in life. The good news is that shame can’t live in the daylight. The more you are able to acknowledge and share feelings of shame in appropriate circumstances, the less it will control your life. 

At The Foundry, we know that trauma and shame are often at the core of a substance use disorder. That’s why our program focuses on treating trauma with proven methods, including dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT, EMDR, mindfulness meditation, trauma-informed yoga, and other methods. To learn more, call us today at (844) 955-1066.

Beneath everything else, recovery from addiction is not about abstaining from drugs and alcohol but rather about improving the way you relate to yourself and the world. There are many ways in which our own minds can cause us problems. We have intrusive thoughts, we worry too much, we have inaccurate beliefs about the world, and we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves. One very common way we make ourselves miserable and limit our own progress is by having a fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset.

Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

A fixed versus growth mindset is a concept developed and popularized by Carol Dweck. In her research, she noticed that some children were more tenacious in solving problems and she discovered that the main thing that differentiated these children from those who gave up easily was that they had what she termed a “growth mindset” while the children who gave up quickly had a “fixed mindset.” 

The difference between these two mindsets is simple: If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that you’re basically born with certain talents and capacities, such as intelligence or social skills or athletic skills and so on, and there’s not much you can do to improve your performance in any given area if you’re not especially talented in that area. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that with a bit of effort, you can improve your skills and grow as a person.

The reality is, of course, somewhere between these two. Talent is certainly a real thing. Few people will reach the heights of Lebron James or Elon Musk no matter how hard they work. On the other hand, many--perhaps most--of us have too little confidence in our ability to make meaningful changes in our lives. In other words, most of us would be much better off if we made an effort to adopt a growth mindset. That’s especially true for anyone recovering from addiction.

A Growth Mindset Reduces Resistance to Change

Resistance to treatment is a common problem. Many people have what AA people call “terminal uniqueness.” This is sort of the idea that “I’m not like everyone else here, so I don’t have to engage with treatment the way they do.” This typically stems from a need to protect your sense of identity. Everyone else is an “addict” while you are basically a decent person who hit a rough patch. To participate fully in treatment is like admitting that you got lost somehow and you can’t find your way back. 

To a person with a fixed mindset, this is a serious threat. It implies that this edifice of self you have constructed has a faulty foundation. You want to reject any evidence to the contrary. However, to someone with a growth mindset, the idea that you might need help is much more palatable. You’re not broken on some fundamental level; you just have some weak points you need to strengthen and you know that you can get stronger with persistent effort.

A Growth Mindset Opens Up New Possibilities

When you’re first considering the possibility of treatment or just starting out in recovery, it can be very hard to imagine a better life. You are probably at a low point, or else you wouldn’t be considering a major life change. All of your future possibilities are colored by your present circumstances. This is especially true if you have a fixed mindset. That’s because when you try to imagine living a happier, more fulfilling life, you’re trying to imagine living that life as the person you currently are.

You may think, “How am I supposed to live a good life when I can barely get out of bed, when I can’t get through the day without drugs and alcohol, when I’m constantly tormented by anxiety, and so on?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask when you don’t believe in the possibility of growth.

If you have a growth mindset, it’s easier to imagine that a better life is possible, even if you aren’t yet sure how. You may still be aware of all the obstacles in your way but perhaps you can also remember overcoming other obstacles that once seemed insurmountable. You may not be able to imagine living a better life as the person you are now, but you can imagine living a better life as the person you can become.

A Growth Mindset Turns Challenges into Opportunities

Perhaps the greatest advantage of a growth mindset is that it turns challenges into opportunities. There is no shortage of challenges in addiction recovery. In fact, every stage of recovery--detox, treatment, therapy, transitioning home, continuing with your recovery plan, and so on--offers a different set of challenges. 

If you have a fixed mindset, every challenge is just an opportunity to fail. You have your little set of skills and qualities and if those don’t equip you for the challenges you face, then you’re just out of luck. People will see that you, as a person, just don’t measure up. 

However, if you have a growth mindset, your model of challenges is completely different. Instead of seeing them as the rocks that sink your ship, you see them as weights that make you stronger. A challenge is an opportunity to learn something about yourself. It’s a chance to learn new skills and expand your ability to persevere. Every new challenge recovery presents is an opportunity for growth and will prepare you to overcome even bigger challenges down the road.

Adopting a growth mindset is one of the best ways to become more robust to the challenges that you will face in addiction recovery. It makes you less afraid of change, it makes you better able to imagine a happier life without drugs and alcohol, and it makes every new challenge into a chance to grow. 

At The Foundry, we know that getting sober and staying sober is probably the hardest thing you will ever have to do. We also believe that abstinence from drugs and alcohol is only one outcome of a process that will increase your overall quality of life, including your mental and physical health, and your relationships. For more information about our treatment program, call us at (844) 955-1066.

You’ve probably heard the AA aphorism, “One day at a time.” The idea is that thinking about staying sober for the rest of your life is too much to think about. It’s too overwhelming. You get caught up in thinking “What if this or that happens?” “How am I going to stay sober for the rest of my life?” and so on. “One day at a time” is a mantra that has helped many people through hard days. 

Sometimes “One day at a time” becomes “one hour at a time” or even “one minute at a time.” That’s fine. In fact, the more you narrow that time horizon, the closer you come to that classic dictum of happiness, “Live in the present moment.” This is good advice for anyone, but especially anyone with a substance use issue. Ruminating about past mistakes or worrying about possible problems are typical features of major depression and anxiety disorders, respectively. Living in the present spares you from having to carry the weight of the past and future but it can be hard to do. The following tips can make living in the present easier.

Focus on the Process

For many people, the biggest obstacle to living in the present is that we feel the need to plan for possible problems. This is especially true of people who tend to be anxious. Prying your attention from your worries feels a bit like taking your eyes off the road when you’re driving. 

To overcome this resistance, focus on the process rather than the end result. Living in the present doesn’t mean you give up on the idea of progress but rather understanding that progress can only happen if you act on the present. So, for example, you can be engaged in writing down some recovery goals and some steps to get there. You’re planning for the future, but you’re actively engaged in that particular activity. 

Write Things Down

One reason we often don’t live in the present is that we have something we feel is important that we have to remember. Maybe you have a meeting after lunch or you’re supposed to call your mom, or you have a great idea for your friend’s birthday present, and so on. If you have to devote mental energy to remembering those things, they will take away your focus.

Instead, just write them down. If it’s an appointment, writing it down on a calendar or planner is always a good idea, but just writing a reminder on a sticky note is usually enough to get it off your mind.

Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation simply means setting aside a certain amount of time every day to deliberately practice being in the present moment. It could be as little as five minutes or it could be as long as you want. The exercise is about accepting whatever you experience in the moment without judgment and without your mind wandering off to the past or future.

Your mind will inevitably wander off, especially at first. When this happens, just notice that it happened. Just noticing brings you back to the present because you become aware of what your mind is doing. 

Use a Grounding Technique

A grounding technique is when you deliberately notice sensations in order to ground yourself in the present. You can do this as part of mindfulness meditation or just any time during the day when you find yourself preoccupied with worries or otherwise unable to concentrate. A common grounding technique is the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. You notice five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

This engages all of your senses and the mild complexity of the task keeps you cognitively engaged. However, you don’t have to go through this whole exercise to ground yourself. You can engage with any sensation. For example, you might notice the sensations in just your feet or you might notice the sensations of your breathing. 

Forget About the Clock

Anyone who has ever had a job knows that the last 10 or 15 minutes of the workday are the longest. When you’re busy, you forget about time and focus on what you’re doing. When you start looking at the clock, you get restless. Time creeps by. You wish it were 20 minutes in the future and you were on your way home.

The same thing happens any time you’re too focused on the time. Part of your brain is always pulling you away from your task at hand to check the time. Try forgetting about the clock. If you have to do something at a certain time and you’re afraid you’ll get carried away and miss it, set an alarm. 

Accept Your Emotions

Another major challenge to staying present is when the present feels pretty bad. Either you’re in physical pain or discomfort or you are experiencing challenging emotions. It’s normal to want to escape that situation, even if you’re just imagining how nice it would be if you didn’t feel so miserable. 

Ironically, pushing away negative feelings only makes them stronger. The purpose of pain is to let you know that something is wrong. If you try to ignore it, it keeps tapping you on the shoulder. However, if you accept your discomfort and can be present with it without judgment, it typically becomes more tolerable.

This is especially important for anyone recovering from a substance use disorder because drugs and alcohol often serve as an avoidance mechanism. If you can look challenging emotions straight in the face and accept them for what they are, they have less control over you.

Living in the moment improves the quality of your recovery and your life in many ways. You’re more engaged in what you’re doing and you’re less bothered by rumination and worry when you live in the present. However, it does take practice. Focusing on the process rather than the outcome you want, practicing mindfulness, and periodically grounding yourself through your senses are great ways to spend more time living in the present.

At The Foundry, we know that recovery from addiction is about treating the whole person. That’s why we incorporate mindfulness meditation and trauma-informed yoga into our treatment program, along with evidence-based therapeutic methods and positive lifestyle changes. For more information, call us at 844-955-1066. 

If you look at any quality addiction treatment program, you’ll notice several things many of them have in common and one of those things is exercise. It’s becoming much more common for regular exercise to be an integral part of addiction treatment. Experts also frequently recommend that your post-treatment recovery plan includes regular exercise.

However, this can be challenging for many people, especially those who are busy or don’t really think of themselves as athletic. The following is a look at why exercise is one of the most important lifestyle changes for recovery and how to more easily make exercise part of your daily life.

Why Exercise Is Important

First, if you want to motivate yourself to exercise more, it helps to understand why you’re doing it. Otherwise, it just feels like a chore. There is now quite a bit of research supporting the role of exercise in recovery, both in terms of physical and mental health.

Physical Health

Heavy substance use is hard on your body. Its exact effects depend largely on which substances you use the most, but overall, you may suffer from malnutrition, increased cardiovascular risks, and more frequent illnesses due to poor immune function. If you want to recover your health as quickly as possible, it’s important to eat a healthy diet and get regular exercise. 

Exercise--especially aerobic exercise like walking, running, swimming, and biking--improves your cardiovascular health pretty quickly. It also helps you maintain a healthy weight and reduces your risk of type two diabetes, as well as reducing your risk of infections and cancer. Exercise may not totally offset the physical damage of substance use, but it gets you going in the right direction.

Mental Health

Perhaps more importantly, exercise boosts your mental health. It improves your mood by increasing levels of endorphins, serotonin, and BDNF, a neurotransmitter that grows neurons. It also causes structural changes that help you react better to stress. It’s thought to be this change, along with improved sleep, that is most responsible, for the health benefits of exercise.

The improvements in mood reduce your risk of depression and anxiety symptoms, which in turn reduces your risk of relapse. Given that most people with substance use disorders also have co-occurring mental health issues, it’s hard to overstate this particular benefit of exercise for anyone trying to stay sober.

How to Build an Exercise Habit

It’s one thing to know that exercise is good for you and it’s another thing entirely to actually do it. The following are some tips for going from “not an exercise person” to someone who exercises daily without really thinking about it.

Find Something You Like

First, find something you actually enjoy. According to research, the best exercise for mental health is a moderate-intensity aerobic exercise that lasts for at least 20 minutes, at least three times a week. However, that doesn’t matter at all if you aren’t willing to do it. It’s crucial not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You will get some benefit from staying active, even if it’s not the scientifically validated “best” exercise. Walking is great. So are gardening, boxing, yoga, dancing, and fencing. 

There are two divergent strategies that work pretty well: Either pick something you don’t mind doing and can just participate in mechanically or perhaps even socially, like walking; or pick something that really fires your interest and is complex enough to keep you engaged, like high-skilled sports or martial arts. 

Pick a Regular Time

The next thing is to pick a regular time and stick to it. Instead of picking a regular clock time, though, attach your exercise to an activity you already do every day or almost every day. So, for example, you get out of bed every day--ideally--so you can connect your exercise habit to that. The goal is to have one daily activity lead directly into the next so that you don’t have to exert any willpower to do it. Be patient though, it will probably take a month or two for the new behavior to become automatic.

Start Small

One of the most common mistakes people make when they decide to start exercising is that they go hard right away like they’re in a training montage. You actually want to do the opposite. You want to start out easy so you don’t resist building the habit. In the beginning, building a habit is the most important thing. At first, you may just want to put on your exercise clothes and leave it at that.

Or you may walk for five minutes. You want to have the feeling that exercise is just something you have to cross off your list, not something you have to brace yourself for and grind your way through. You can build the intensity later.

Build Gradually

When the habit is pretty well established, then you can begin to increase the volume or intensity. You may start to do this automatically just out of boredom. Five minutes may feel too easy so you start walking for 10 minutes. Building gradually accomplishes two things: You are less likely to get exhausted and burned out and quit after a few weeks or a month, the way 90 percent of people give up on new year’s resolutions.

Second, it keeps you from getting injured, which interrupts both your fitness progress and your habit formation. Also, being injured is painful. There’s no rush and, over the course of months and years, consistency beats intensity every time.

Reward Yourself

Finally, set up some kind of reward for doing your exercise, even if it's just patting yourself on the back. This is especially important to remember on bad days. So, for example, you intended to run a mile but you felt terrible and ended up walking most of it. That’s fine. We all have bad days. The important thing is to congratulate yourself for showing up and doing the work rather than chastising yourself for not doing it as well as you would have liked.

It may also help to schedule some rewarding activities after your exercise. For example, you might tell yourself, “Ok, after I exercise, I can have dinner, or watch TV, or go hang out with my friends.” This gives you something to look forward to and immediately associates something positive with exercise.

At The Foundry, we know that lifestyle changes like social support, a healthy diet, and regular exercise are the foundation of a long recovery and a healthy life. That’s why these are incorporated into our holistic treatment plan along with meditation, yoga, and outdoor activities. To learn more about our approach to addiction treatment, call us at (844) 955-1066.

Recovery from addiction isn’t a steady progression. There are times when you are super focused on it and make a lot of progress and there are times when you are distracted, indifferent, or depressed and can’t be bothered. Motivation is never constant. Many people find they are motivated and engaged early on when they still remember vividly how bad life was when they were actively addicted, when they are most hopeful that life can change, and when they are making a lot of progress quickly.

However, as recovery gets easier, it can also get boring. You forget what the big deal is and it’s harder to see progress from day-to-day. When you get complacent, you are in danger of backsliding. The following tips can help you escape your recovery rut and start making progress again.

Review Your Recovery Plan

The first thing you should do is have a look at your recovery plan and see to what extent you are still following it. Instead of just looking down the list and mentally checking boxes, spend about a week actually keeping track, in writing, of how you spend your time. You may be surprised by the disparity between how you think you spend your time and how you actually spend it. When you find some way that you’ve deviated from your recovery plan, try to correct it. 

For example, you may discover that it’s actually been a while since you’ve been to a meeting or that your daily exercise has become weekly exercise. The whole purpose of a recovery plan is to help you stay physically and mentally healthy, maintain some accountability, and stay focused on recovery. It’s easy to start cutting corners when recovery gets less challenging and that can lead to trouble.

Pay Special Attention to Self-Care

Self-care is an especially important part of any recovery plan and it’s something many people find easy to neglect. It includes things like eating healthy and exercising, but it also includes things like taking time each day to relax, spending time with supportive friends, doing fun things, and getting enough sleep. We often sacrifice these things when we’re busy or stressed, but that’s when we need them the most.

Relapse is a process that typically starts with emotional relapse, and emotional relapse is typically caused by poor self-care. Fortunately, at this stage, it’s pretty easy to turn things around if you focus on self-care. Make sure you’re following your recovery plan, that you’re eating healthy and exercising, sleeping, taking time to relax, socialize, and have fun, and so on.

Talk to a Therapist

If you’re following your recovery plan and you still feel stuck, it may be time to talk to a therapist. Ideally, you’ll already be seeing a therapist regularly for at least the first year of recovery, but that’s often not the case. If you get to a point where you feel stuck, like you’re not seeing progress, or maybe you are seeing progress but you still feel awful, it could be that you have some co-occurring mental health issues that need to be addressed. At least half of the people with substance use disorders have co-occurring mental health challenges including anxiety disorders, major depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and others.

These issues tend to drive addictive behavior and it’s very hard to stay sober with an untreated mental health issue. Even if you did have therapy as part of treatment, it’s possible that the issue persists or that something new has come up. If your mental health issue is well-controlled, your therapist may be able to help you figure out why you feel stuck.

Change Something

Having a regular routine in addiction recovery is a two-edged sword. On the positive side, a regular routine reduces uncertainty and stress, it helps you automate healthy decisions, and it helps ensure you’re giving adequate attention to your recovery priorities. On the downside, it can get boring. You feel like you’re just living the same day over and over without much challenge or engagement.

If it’s the monotony of your daily routine that’s dragging you down, change something, anything. It doesn’t have to be something big. In fact, too big of a change can be stressful and distract from the productive parts of your routine. But there is plenty of room for tinkering. You might decide to take a different route to work or text a friend you haven’t seen in a while. Maybe you can go on a media diet or read a book that’s outside of your usual tastes. A change in perspective can make a big difference.

Take On a New Challenge

Along similar lines to making a change, it may be time to take on a new challenge. The point of recovery is not that it’s supposed to be challenging for the rest of your life. It’s supposed to get easier with practice, allowing you to do more in other areas of your life. If you’re sticking to your recovery plan and managing your mental health challenges, maybe you’re just bored and need something to do.

Maybe it’s time to get a job or take on more responsibility at work. Maybe it’s time to pursue another goal, like going back to school or learning a second language. Striving toward meaningful goals may be the next step in your recovery and feeling bored or restless may indicate it’s time to take that step.

Volunteer

Finally, it may be time to change the way you engage with recovery. When you’re first starting out, you need a lot of help and support. Later on, you don’t need so much help but it’s still important to stay engaged with your recovery community. That might mean taking on a more active role, like volunteering.

There are plenty of opportunities to help out at 12-Step meetings. Even if you don’t volunteer in any official capacity, you can get to know new people and help them feel welcome. This strengthens the group and it strengthens your own recovery.

Recovery from addiction doesn’t stay the same all the way through and you can run into problems if you try to resist these changes. On the one hand, you have to keep paying attention to the basics, the things that work. On the other hand, you have to be responsive to changing circumstances and your own growth. 

At The Foundry, we know that recovery doesn’t end after 30 days of inpatient treatment. That’s why we include three to six months of partial care following treatment, to help clients transition back to normal life and deal with new recovery challenges. To learn more, call us today at (844) 955-1066.