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Compassion is simply feeling someone else’s pain and sincerely wishing to relieve it. In a previous post, we looked at how compassion benefits addiction recovery. Compassion allows you to forgive yourself for your past mistakes and form stronger bonds with other people. Perhaps most importantly, greater compassion leads to greater happiness.

Concern for helping others rescues you from your own fear and rumination and gives you a sense of purpose. However, you may not know how to be more compassionate, or even if that’s possible. We all know people who seem like they were born to watch out for other people, whether they’re first responders or preschool teachers.

You may think, “That’s just not me.” However, we’re all more adaptable than we believe. With persistent effort, you can become more compassionate and enjoy the benefits that come with it. Here’s how.

Keep an Open Mind

For some people, the benefits of compassion are obvious but others may be more skeptical. They may see kindness and compassion as forms of weakness, believing self-reliance is the only true form of strength. The good news is that you don’t have to flip the compassion switch forever.

You can try it out and see how you like it. Like most things, it takes a bit of work to make compassion a habit but you can try out compassionate thoughts and behaviors without too much effort.

Practice Gratitude

Most of the time, when we resist the idea of compassion, it’s because we feel like no one has done much for us, so why is it our responsibility to help others? However, no one makes it very far in life without help. We’re born helpless, so if you’re alive, someone had to keep you alive for at least a little while.

Other people have helped you along the way, whether you realize it or not. The first big step toward being more compassionate is understanding and feeling grateful for the help we’ve received, even if it was small. 

You can easily cultivate gratitude in two ways. First, keep a gratitude journal. Every day, just write down three things that you were grateful for that day. Eventually, you will start noticing things as they happen and feeling more grateful.

Second, write a gratitude letter to someone describing what they did for you and what it meant to you. Then you can deliver the letter if you want. These practices are not only the foundation for compassion, but they have also been shown to make you feel happier and more optimistic.

Start With Compassion for Yourself

When developing compassion, it’s typically easiest to start with yourself. Even if you don’t like yourself very much, at least you genuinely desire your own happiness. Many people struggle with guilt and shame as they try to recover from addiction and developing self-compassion will definitely help with that.

When you think about the mistakes you’ve made, try to have compassion for your past self. Imagine you’re talking to a close friend and trying to support them. It’s also important to have compassion for your future self. Compassion for your future self can give you the motivation to do the hard things now that will benefit you in the future. 

Practice Listening

Empathy is about half of compassion. If you are going to feel compassion for someone, you have to understand what they’re going through. The best way to do that is to listen. Give others your full attention and listen without judgment. Reflect back what they’ve said and try to put yourself in their place. Ask, “What was that like?” 

Try to Stay Present

Staying present is an often overlooked aspect of compassion. If you’re ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, you are necessarily stuck in your own head, and most likely worrying about your own problems. You’re not paying attention to the people around you. Compassion really only happens in the moment, when you become aware that someone else is having trouble.

You have to be present to listen too. One trick you can use to stay mentally present is to think about your feet. Your feet have a high density of nerve endings, yet we rarely pay attention to those sensations. Doing that will instantly bring your attention into the present.

Set Aside Judgments

We make quick judgments all the time and most of the time, we’re trying to answer the question, “Is this useful to me?” as quickly as possible. The problem is that applying these judgments to other people is basically the opposite of compassion.

Once you can stick a label on a person and put them in a box, you don’t have to think about them anymore. Try to be aware of when you're making judgments about people--including yourself--and pause before you do it. Instead of thinking, “they’re this or that kind of person,” just try to see them as they are.

Look for Commonalities

Whereas judgments oversimplify people for easy categorization, looking for common ground builds a bridge. You start to think about what it might be like to be that person. If you don’t know someone well or at all, you can start with some fairly universal assumptions, like that they want to be happy, they want to feel appreciated, they want to be free of pain, and so on, the same as you. Even if they seek these things in a very different way, you will have some points from which to build empathy.

Try Metta Meditation

Metta means something like loving-kindness and it comes from a Buddhist meditation practice. The idea is simple. It’s almost like lifting weights for compassion. You start with something relatively easy: feeling compassion for yourself. You direct a few positive thoughts towards yourself, something like, “May I be happy, may I be safe, may I be healthy,” and so on. When you feel a genuine sense of compassion for yourself, just allow yourself to rest with that feeling for a few minutes. 

Then, move on to someone close to you, perhaps a relative or your best friend, and do the same thing. Then, move on to a stranger, and finally a challenging person. You don’t have to do all this at once. You can work up to it over the course of weeks or months if you have to. The key is to challenge yourself to feel genuine concern for people you aren’t really close to or that you may even dislike. This is incredibly hard for most people, so don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do it right away.

Developing a greater sense of compassion is one of the best ways to strengthen your recovery because it makes you feel happier and more connected to others. Cultivating compassion is mainly a matter of intention and persistence. Remind yourself daily that you’re going to listen to others, try to understand what they’re experiencing, and try to be kind.

At The Foundry, we know that connection is one of the most important things in recovery. It makes you feel happier and gives you a sense of purpose and belonging. That’s why we promote a sense of community in our treatment program through group and family therapy, group activities, mindfulness meditation, and other methods. To learn more, call us at (844) 955-1066.

Fear is one of the biggest barriers to seeking help for addiction--fear of withdrawal, fear of loneliness, fear of vulnerability, fear of failure, and more. Underlying many of these fears is a general fear of change. Getting sober is perhaps the biggest change you’ll ever make in your life and it requires other changes, including how you relate to others, what you do for fun, who you spend time with, and how you take care of yourself.

That can feel pretty daunting and fear can slow your progress in recovery. The following suggestions can help be less afraid of change, and perhaps even embrace it.

Why Change is Scary

First, it helps to understand why change scares us. It may seem irrational to fear change. For example, you may look at what drugs and alcohol have done to your life and think that any change has to be better, and, in fact, that’s what motivates many people to seek help. However, you may still resist change, even when you rationally know it will be better for you.

Why? Well, however bad your life is right now, at least you know you can survive it. You know what to expect and you know how to deal with the challenges that come with your current way of life. Even if it’s bad, at least it’s familiar. If you make a change, who knows what will happen?

You may face some situations that you don’t know how to deal with. Even if you know, rationally, that getting sober won’t threaten your life--and will likely save it--we instinctively fear the unknown. You don’t know quite how to imagine sober life and at the very least, that can undermine your resolve.

Do Your Research

One way to reduce your fear of change is to understand it better. The clearer your idea of your destination, the less threatening it will seem. For example, in the days before the Internet, if you wanted to book a hotel room or rent an apartment in another city, you pretty much had to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Now you can look at pictures, explore the neighborhood with Google street view, and get step-by-step directions to the front door. The whole process is much less scary. 

Similarly, if you’re trying to make a big change in life, whether it’s getting sober, moving to another area, or changing careers, knowing what you’re getting into helps minimize your fears. If you’re trying to recover from addiction, that means reading memoirs about recovery, listening to others at 12-step meetings and group therapy sessions, and talking to people who have been where you want to go. This helps replace simplistic and distorted ideas of what that change means with more accurate and inspiring possibilities and it also alerts you to possible challenges along the way.

Approach Change With Curiosity

However much research you do, you won’t be able to predict the future. There will always be unexpected challenges and every individual has a different journey. These unknowables can be a significant source of anxiety. 

One way to cope is to approach the change with curiosity, rather than trepidation. Fear and excitement are physiologically the same--your heart rate and breathing speed up, your senses are sharpened, and so on--and you can choose how to interpret those physiological signals. That means you can feel afraid and choose to be excited. Being excited about the unknown is another name for curiosity.

Think of recovery as a film, in which you can’t wait to see what happens. This applies to big and small changes alike. Is your therapist asking you to do something that stretches your comfort zone a bit? Think of it as an experiment and be curious about the result. 

Confront Your Fear of Failure

As discussed above, we often prefer the familiar to the unknown, even if the familiar is pretty miserable. The reason is that in the primitive parts of our brains, we believe the unknown can be fatal. While death is not a likely outcome of getting sober, failure is certainly possible. Recovery takes a lot of time and effort.

You and your loved ones may have high hopes and the thought of letting everyone down can be frightening. Or you may be afraid that once you’re sober, you’ll no longer have an excuse for failure in other areas of your life, such as work or relationships. In short, you’re afraid that trying to get sober will somehow expose you as inadequate. 

That’s a normal fear but it’s also a kind of illusion. Say, for example, that you do relapse. That’s certainly a setback, but it’s not a permanent failure. Plenty of people relapse several times and still eventually get sober. Everything worthwhile takes practice and perseverance. You will inevitably have setbacks and disappointments but they don’t have to be permanent failures. 

Focus on the Process

Part of the fear of change is that you see a clear dividing line between the person you are now and the person you want to become. That idea of transformation can be simultaneously exciting and terrifying. The problem is that the person you are changing into only exists in the future, in your imagination.

If you could somehow snap your fingers and turn into that person, it would feel strange and alienating. All you can really do is focus on the present and the process of recovery. Recovery is really a matter of practicing new skills, learning new things about yourself, and making small changes in your habits, and eventually, you will move from being able to abstain from drugs and alcohol to preferring to live without them. There is no point at which you change into a different person but at some point, you’ll look back and realize life is different now.

It’s normal to fear change. Most of us are hardwired to prefer the familiar. However, fear of change can keep you stuck, and sometimes it can even threaten your life. The keys to overcoming change are to know what to expect, be curious about the process, be aware of your fear of failure, and focus on the process in the present moment. 

At The Foundry, we know that making any big change in life is scary but we also know that treatment helps people live happier, more fulfilling lives. We use proven therapeutic techniques and provide a great support system to help you make one of the best changes in your life. For more information, call us at (844) 955-1066.

Emotional regulation is one of the key skills to learn when recovering from addiction and anger is one of the most challenging emotions to regulate. Anger can come on quickly and feel overwhelming. It can lead to rash decisions, arguments, strained or broken relationships, or even accidents.

If you tend to repress your anger, you can avoid some of the consequences of anger but you may have other problems instead, including depression, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, and more frequent illnesses. Whether you more often lose your temper or stuff it down, dealing with anger in the wrong ways can damage your health, your well-being, and your recovery from addiction. The following are tips for dealing with anger in a healthier way.

Know What Anger Is

First, it’s important to understand that anger, like all emotions, is not inherently bad and is useful in some situations. Fundamentally, anger is a response to a threat. In the simplest situation, someone attacks you physically, you get angry and fight back, and they leave you alone.

However, these days, anger is rarely the result of a direct physical threat. It’s the result of disagreements, obligations, criticism, unfair situations, and other kinds of frustration, most of which won’t respond to physical threats. As a result, unresolved anger becomes a kind of chronic stress. Resolving it is largely a matter of identifying the perceived threat and finding an appropriate solution.

Know Your Own Tendencies

As noted above, people tend to inappropriately respond to anger either by exploding or suppressing, neither of which is typically helpful. It’s important to be aware of which behavior is more typical for you. If you explode, you probably know it, but you may not be as aware of suppressed anger, especially if it’s a habit you formed in childhood. Depression, resentment, and chronic pain often involve an element of suppressed anger.

It’s also important to know what kinds of things make you angry--your triggers. Often, anger involves some combination of stress and insecurity. For example, if you’re under a lot of stress at work, you may be more likely to lose your temper with your spouse, especially in some area you already feel insecure about.

Learn to Pause

The first skill to master when it comes to managing anger is the pause. This means that when you are aware of becoming angry, you give yourself some time before responding. This isn’t suppression; it’s just collecting yourself so you don’t say or do anything to make the situation worse.

It often helps to have a go-to technique. Maybe you count down from 10 or take five slow, deep breaths. After the first wave of anger passes, you should be able to think a little more clearly and employ an appropriate strategy.

Practice Relaxing

Learning to relax has two important benefits for managing anger. First, it lowers your baseline. We all have a certain set point that is partly physiological. Also, stress tends to accumulate. If you practice relaxing every day, you shake off some of your accumulated stress and you gradually lower your set point for anger. Typically, relaxation will involve some deliberate routine, such as progressive relaxation, where you focus on each body individually and let it relax.

Or you may use some kind of visualization or some kind of breathing exercise. The second benefit of practicing relaxation daily is that you are better able to relax when you feel yourself getting angry. It’s easy to get swept away with anger, so practice is key when you need to relax under pressure.

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness meditation is a great practice for managing anger because it combines the relaxation and awareness of your own tendencies discussed above. Mindfulness meditation is just spending a few minutes every day keeping your awareness in the present moment, nonjudgmentally observing any sensations, thoughts, and emotions that arise. After practicing this for a few weeks, you’ll be more aware of the relationships between your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. 

You will also be able to use your mindfulness skills in the moment to manage your anger. For example, when you pause, you can watch the progression of anger without getting swept away by it. You can feel the physical sensations, such as your face getting hot, your throat getting tense, and so on. You can also notice what thoughts are associated with your anger, which brings us to the next point.

Watch Your Thoughts

As noted above, these days, we rarely experience anger as the result of a direct physical threat. Our anger is mostly a result of our thoughts and beliefs about a situation. Anger is typically caused by frustration, which is often associated with assumptions about how the world should be, “That guy should be more considerate,” “This process should be more efficient,” “That policy should be fairer,” and so on.

And maybe some of those things are true, but we have to take the world as we find it. Another common distortion is jumping to conclusions or assuming the worst possible outcome. That feels threatening, which can lead to anger, but in reality, the worst possible outcome rarely happens.

Improve Your Communication

Sometimes anger does actually signal that something needs to change. This is the kind of situation in which you want to express your anger but in the most constructive way possible. To do that, you typically need to pause and collect yourself before moving forward.

The next step is to communicate clearly. That means understanding what you want from a situation as well as being willing to listen to the other person. Communication is a huge topic but start by listening with an open mind and communicating your needs without accusing or condemning the other person.

Work on Solutions

Finally, not all anger is the result of direct interpersonal conflict. Forgetting your password can be just as enraging as being slapped in the face, but smashing your computer on the desk will only make you feel better for about three seconds. Instead, allow yourself to calm down and start working on a solution. Think of it as an opportunity to practice frustration tolerance, the core skill in managing anger. Pause as often as you need to but keep working steadily toward a solution.

Anger is a common problem and the nature of anger makes it a difficult problem to solve. It takes practice and it may take therapy as well. The good news is that anger appears to respond well to cognitive behavioral therapy, the most commonly used form of therapy today. Medication will also be part of therapy for some people with anger issues.

At The Foundry, we know that emotional regulation—including anger—is one of the most important aspects of addiction recovery. We use a number of proven methods to help you live a richer, more fulfilling emotional life, including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, trauma therapy, mindfulness meditation, and more. To learn more, call us at (844) 955-1066.

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.