Photo: James Wheeler / Pexels — Free to use A trigger can be almost anything. It’s not usually one big dramatic event, it’s more often a small moment that quietly starts pulling you down a path toward looking for relief, and if you’re not paying attention, that path ends in relapse. The problem is most … More Know Your Triggers Before They Know You
Photo: Centre for Ageing Better / Pexels — Free to use Knowing that connection matters and actually knowing how to build it are two different things, and for years I only had the first one. I’d nod along whenever someone said isolation was the enemy, and then go right back to handling everything alone, because … More Connection Is the Cure
Photo: Stephen Leonardi / Pexels — Free to use For years, if you’d asked me to describe myself, “addict” would have come out somewhere in the first few sentences, and not as something I’d struggled with, as something I was. Not a person managing a problem, but a problem wearing a person’s clothes. I said … More You Are Not Your Addiction
Photo: Hami Durgut / Pexels — Free to use Nobody in my life knew, for a long time, exactly how bad it had gotten. Not because I was surrounded by people who didn’t care, but because I made sure of it. I got quieter every time it got worse. I stopped answering texts I would … More The Loneliness Loop
Photo: Adil / Pexels — Free to use For most of my struggle, I thought shame was doing me a favor. I figured if I felt bad enough about what I’d done, disgusted enough with myself, it would eventually scare me straight. That’s the logic a lot of us run on without ever examining it: … More Shame Is Not Your Friend
Photo: Koyel Dey / Pexels — Free to use After I understood that I’d spent years going numb instead of finding calm, I ran straight into a new problem: I had no idea how to actually feel something on purpose. Nobody teaches this, not even your own parents. We’re taught how to read, how to … More Learning to Feel Again
Photo: eberhard grossgasteiger / Pexels — Free to use For years, acting out was how I got through things I didn’t want to deal with. If there was a project at work I was dreading, or a conversation I didn’t want to have, acting out is what let me finally sit down and do it. … More The Difference Between Numb and Calm
Someone asked me once, in an early recovery group, “what are you feeling right now,” and I genuinely did not know how to answer. Not because I was hiding it, but because I actually could not locate the feeling. I could tell you what had happened that day. I could tell you what I was … More Do You Know What You’re Feeling Right Now?
For a long time I thought I was chasing a high. Looking back, I wasn’t chasing anything, I was running from something. Underneath every binge there was some kind of pain I didn’t want to sit with: things not going the way I wanted, uncertainty about where my life was headed, boredom I didn’t know … More Why Addiction Steals Your Joy Too
I used to think my relapses came out of nowhere. One minute I was fine, doing the work, feeling solid, and the next minute I was right back in it, wondering how I’d gotten there so fast. It took me a long time to notice the pattern underneath the pattern. It was never really about … More The Real Reason We Relapse
