Topic: Recovery Tools

Calm is a tool we learn to use so that we can deal more successfully with life and the problems we all face.

Relapse doesn’t mean failure, but it does mean a great deal of pain and effort.

Mindfulness therapies are a way of stepping outside your everyday attitudes and beliefs — those automatic to your thinking — in order to consider alternatives that might improve your life.

Motivation springs from external as well as internal sources. Our internal desire for change is rarely enough to get us all the way through to our stated goals.

You’re aware that music therapy is used in mental health settings. Playing music is great, but for most of us, it’s enough just to listen and be affected.

The trick is to find another reward to replace the one that’s no longer available. For instance, if we’re no longer going to have a cigarette with coffee after dinner, what other reward could we substitute in its place?

Many of us have deliberately set the bar too high to encourage ourselves to jump. Obviously, we don’t always reach it.

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.