People in Recovery

The point is to foresee predictable traps and make changes to reduce your vulnerability to slips – defined as an unplanned use of drugs or alcohol that results from a weakness or flaw in your program of recovery.

The intent is simply to make sure that everyone who needs to know, does know. That you get to explain things in your own way.

Accumulate a bunch of small positive accomplishments over a succession of ‘todays’, and you’ll be stunned at exactly how much your life has changed for the better.

Someone who’s concluded that he or she has a disease is far more likely to treat it than somebody who is taking another person’s word for it (no matter how many degrees that other person may have.)

One key to success is learning recovery skills for both addictive disease and mental illness, and applying them together.

I recall someone telling me he could be patient as long as he knew that eventually he’d get what he wanted. Well, it’s easy to be patient then. The trick is to have patience when you don’t know the outcome.

Here we arrive at the core of stigma: the alleged inferiority of the person with alcoholism based on weakness of will. But alcoholic people aren’t weak-willed; if they were, it would be much easier to convince them to seek help.

Alcoholism is stigmatized. So is drug addiction. So is mental illness. And that’s an important obstacle to recovery.