Tag: recovery

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Add Some Color And Spice to Your Recovery – Kyczy Hawk

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We are each of us unique and all of us similar. That is what makes recovery such a challenge and a blessing. I hear me in you, and yet, I process things in my own way. I am both an individual and a part of this clan. Ayurveda is the sister science to yoga. This ancient tradition also applies to people in modern society. It is the practice of restoring people to their personal original balance and constitution. Not all of us have the same constitution, but we each have something in common with one another. We are all forms of air, water, solids, vapor, chemicals, biology and so on. The ayurvedic practitioners have categorized all these into three main types, called “doshas”: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. There are no words into which to translate these- but they are easy enough to say. Here are some characteristics of each. (Please… Continue reading

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The Great Right Now – By Mark Masserant

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  Outside noisy. Inside empty-Chinese proverb “Welcome to the Here and Now,” he said, then winked and sipped his coffee, awaiting my response. The sage but puzzling remark was followed by a mischievous grin and eyes so penetrating they unmasked me. The Whiz sensed we were talking long-distance—I was trying to see through the cloud of me and my ten thousand things while he spoke with a simplicity too abstract for me to grasp. I didn’t know it and couldn’t help it, but it was all me, me and more of me. That was the problem—this self-obsessed junior grasshopper wasn’t all there. “What the hell is he talking about? The Here and Now?  Is this another Timothy Leary moment?” I wondered, alluding to the wacky LSD pioneer from the Sixties. It was philosophical gibberish to me—something from a bumper sticker on a makeshift Socrates dummy at a psychedelic toga party,… Continue reading

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Attentional Bias in Addiction Recovery – William L White

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People addicted to alcohol and other drugs see the world differently. They SEE the world differently as a result of neurocognitive changes in perception that accelerate in tandem with increased tissue tolerance, increased intensity of cellular hunger (craving), and the resulting obsession with maintaining the drug relationship at all costs. As drug seeking, drug procurement, and drug use rise to the top of one’s motivational priorities, one develops attentional bias toward words, symbols, and images linked to these substances. Perceptual preferences for drug-linked stimuli are an essential element within the neurobiology of addiction. In recovery, this perceptual preference is reframed, giving perceptual priority to words, symbols, and images that reinforce the recovery process. The journey from addiction to recovery is marked by extreme ambivalence, particularly during the early stages of recovery, and exposure to these contrasting sets of cues can tip the scales toward either addiction recurrence or the transition… Continue reading

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Whether or Not Our Loved One Finds Recovery – Jackie Stein

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Loving someone who has a problem with drugs or alcohol is life changing for the entire family.  Those of us who have been down this road know that we have spent huge chunks of time and energy trying to help and/or fix our loved one.  We can become obsessive.  In fact, our loved one can become OUR addiction.  We feel a wide range of emotions – mostly fear and anxiety, but sometimes also anger at what the disease is doing to our loved one and in fact, to the whole family.  We worry ourselves to the point of becoming physically ill.  In many cases, we make little or no time to take care of ourselves. At some point most of us figure out that without help, nothing will change in the family.  There are no guarantees that our loved ones will find recovery.  They might go in and out of… Continue reading

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Recovery as an Act of Resistance – By William L. White

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When a slave was drunk, the slave holder had no fear that he would plan an insurrection; no fear that he would escape to the north. It was the sober, thinking slave who was dangerous, and needed the vigilance of his master to keep him a slave. –Frederick Douglass, 1855.  Addiction is influenced by personal vulnerability, but global drug trends and their consequences to individuals and families are also influenced by larger technological, political, economic, and cultural processes. Awareness of such contextual influences and their relationship to personal recovery has been most fully articulated within American communities of color and other historically oppressed and marginalized communities. The earliest recovery support movements in North America rose within Indian tribes whose prophetic leaders (e.g., Handsome Lake, Tenskwatawa, Kennekuk) expressed a profound understanding of the role alcohol was playing as a weapon of exploitation, colonization, and extermination. These leaders challenged the “Firewater Myths” that portrayed racial… Continue reading