Topic: tools for recovery

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.

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 wasn’t trained in how to incorporate material about faith and God into counseling. Most of my graduate school education was on traditional social work practice.