Some people grow up feeling good and strong, while others carry the burden of damaging shame that persists no matter how much love they receive or great their achievements later in life. There is a difference […]

The denial cycle has a special meaning for families coping with substance use. We all have denial in our lives. Denial is a way to help us to cope with overwhelming problems, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. At […]

Shifting the family balance from dysfunctional to functional is a challenge where there is substance or alcohol use. Secrets have to be kept. Crises need covering up. Abuse is ignored. Family members, especially […]

Who get addicted and who doesn’t? Teen addiction is fact of life for 15% of high schoolers, and it’s important to take any teen use of alcohol and drugs very seriously. But not all experimentation ends in […]

Self talk is that inner voice that often chatters to us about all types of things. Unfortunately, it is often negative. Negative self talk impairs our ability to cope with life’s ups and downs. Buddhists refer t […]

Most teens know someone who passed away do to drug or alcohol use. The loss may be the friend, or sibling, who is no longer able to attend school or be part of your life because of his or her lifestyle. Or it may […]

Healing codependency takes time to develop roots just like plants. Codependency doesn’t exist only in families where there is substance use disorder. This unhealthy conditioning can occur in any family, love or […]

What’s the difference between guilt and shame? Shame lies. Basically, guilt is a healthy feeling and shame is an unhealthy feeling. Let’s take a closer look.
What Is Guilt?
When we’ve done something wrong, we f […]

Family addiction is complicated, and it isn’t isolated to one person who may be using. Addiction is passed on through generations and everybody is affected.  Intergenerational addiction studies examine how a […]

Addiction is actually the very opposite of taking care of your needs, so we need many tools in our recovery first aid kit. Self care both for people struggling with addictions, and for their loved ones simply […]

We live within a culture of chaos. A 24 hour news cycle flashes before us. Multi-tasking means epic to-do lists with fragments of completion time. We’re simultaneously running here, posting there, and making plans […]

Do you wonder if your pain meds are safe? New research shows that opioids and prescription pain drugs are not the best answer for chronic pain. Almost daily we hear about opioid-related overdosing and accidental […]

Talking to teens about family substance use is difficult, especially when it is a parent’s. Without the full understanding of what is happening to a loved one, however, teens can’t heal or enjoy healthy […]

Healthy detachment? It sounds like a recipe for the impossible. We often hear that we need to detach from a dysfunctional family system. But how do you detach from perhaps the only family you’ve ever known? Or […]

No one sets out to enable addiction. On the contrary, many start out with good intentions. We love the person struggling with addiction, and she’s in grave danger, so just this once, we bail her out of jail. Or he […]

Is substance abuse grief different from other kinds of grief? Does grief differ if it’s the death of a child, a breakup of a romantic relationship, a child leaving home, a death of a pet, or the grief of a m […]

We often think we need to protect kids and addiction shouldn’t be discussed. We think they’ll be too young or immature to understand this, but they probably already know what is happening. In fact, they’ve likely […]

We so often read about dysfunctional families that we may believe that there is no such thing as healthy families. But healthy families aren’t a myth – they really do exist. Your family may be one of them, but if […]

Denial feeds addiction, and everyone in the family is impacted. To truly we recover, everyone in the family has to take an honest look at how addiction impacts them. Meanwhile, denial will do everything in its […]

Along with teen gun violence, teen suicide is also the news. The numbers of teen deaths are rising, particularly for African Americans and Latinos. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reveals it is the second […]