‘Fine’ or ‘Bad’
Early in recovery, many people have two words for how they feel: fine or bad. Naming feelings is a skill that goes quiet during substance use and comes back with practice.
Topic
Emotional Skills
The interior work — emotional intelligence, panic, resilience, anxiety, brain clutter. Practical skills you can build to steady yourself when life gets loud.
49 stories
Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired
HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) works better as a question than a checklist. A look at how a body running on empty gets mistaken for a character flaw.
Got a Craving?
Your brain is lying to you about what you need. A small dip in energy feels like crisis. Everyday stress feels overwhelming. This article explains why cravings feel so powerful, how your brain misread…
Beyond Dry January: Self-Observation
Sarah reaches for a glass of wine at five o'clock, same as every weekday. She doesn't think about it anymore; her hand just knows the routine. But when January arrives, she pauses. What happens when a…
The Hidden Power of Hope: Why Believing Changes Everything
Someone walks through the door of their first support meeting, hands shaking. One small act, but it proves something to them: change is possible. This is how hope works in recovery. It's not inspirati…
Hope Through Love & Resilience: A Family’s Recovery Journey
Embark on a transformative journey with Linda and Melissa, guided by resilience, community, and unwavering hope. Discover the real, empowering stories that prove recovery is within reach, one step at…
Resilience: The Strength to Bounce Back
A person in recovery sits down to write three things they're grateful for. It's a small habit, but it shifts something. This article explores how resilience grows through connection and purpose, offer…
Building Emotional Wellness with Strong EQ
During a twelve step meeting, someone notices a tightness in their chest but can't name the feeling. A friend listens as they talk it through. This moment of recognizing an emotion, then managing it w…
Creating meaningful relationships requires courage
Carolyn didn't respond to emails, and the frustration built. Rather than withdraw, the author chose a harder path: speaking up with kindness. That conversation, and Carolyn's openness to hearing it, b…
Why Not Ask for Help?
A person struggling with substance use disorder sits alone, thinking about asking for help. But shame whispers that they should handle it. Fear of judgment whispers louder. Understanding these barrier…
Cameron Obremski
Cameron Obremski's cat Belle runs and hides whenever he raises his voice. Years into recovery, he realizes he's chasing away the love he's finally learning to accept. This musician's journey reveals h…
Building Strong Futures: Resilience and Positive Childhood Experiences
A scout leader notices a teen withdrawing from group activities. She asks what's wrong, listens without judgment, and helps him problem-solve. This moment, one of many warm interactions, becomes prote…
Navigating Sobriety with Self-Compassion and Courage
Erin Hamlin stood in front of her fitness class, fully present with her three children at home, something she once thought impossible. Now a recovery advocate in Maine, she's learning that sobriety me…
Unlocking the Power of Empathy
A friend shares something difficult, and you pause to really hear them, not to respond. In that moment, you're building something that matters. This piece explores how empathy creates stronger connect…
Nurturing Your Intentions: Empowering Change from Within
January arrives with possibility, and you set your intention. By February, it's gone. The article explores why our resolutions fade and how to build the internal fuel that sustains change. Discover ho…
A Changed Message: Embracing Stress for Growth
When your heart races before a test or your shoulders tense during a busy week, your body isn't working against you. It's preparing you to meet the challenge ahead. This article explores how reframing…
Surfing My Feelings
A person adrift in depression learns to distinguish between the body's signals and the mind's stories about them. Instead of fighting overwhelming emotions, they discover how to read their physical se…
Recovery’s True Persona
Karen St. Clair pauses when asked what recovery means to her. She thinks of the masks falling away, the relationships built on trust instead of fear, the moments she thought impossible becoming real.…
Recreating Myself
Niki introduces herself with a name that isn't the one she was born with. That simple introduction marks something harder: shedding the person trauma and active addiction created. In recovery, she dis…
Discovery Recovery with Choices
Karen St. Clair woke one morning and noticed how her mood at dawn differed from dusk. She realized she made thousands of choices daily, each one shaping her emotional landscape. Through discovering EF…
She Recovers
MaryBeth Murphy was immobilized in a cast when her life shifted. That pause forced a reckoning that led her into recovery from alcohol and codependency. Years later, searching for deeper connection, s…
Recovery Discovery within Rejection
A toddler's cry goes unheard. A child learns their feelings don't matter. Years later, that person overworks, people-pleases, stays in situations that harm them. This article explores how early reject…
Understanding Moral Suffering and Cultivating Moral Resilience
When you compromise your values to survive a difficult situation, the guilt can linger long after the moment passes. This piece explores moral suffering, the pain that comes from acting against what m…
A Son, Softened Ed Crockett’s Story
Ed Crockett is the author of The Ghosts of Walter Crockett, a book about his father. After 30 years apart, the two found each other, and Ed says his dad taught him how to forgive.
One Gratitude at a Time
Your alarm goes off. First thought: "Too early. I hurt." But what if you paused there? Your heart beat all night without asking. Your lungs kept working. You can see, hear, feel. This piece explores h…
Changing Our Lives
At six months sober, the author sat in a treatment facility not because she'd returned to use, but because she didn't know how to live without substances ruling her days. She was working in mental hea…
Brad Sorte
Brad Sorte kicks a soccer ball with his daughter, lunches with business partners, seems to have it all. But years ago, he was a boy without words for his pain, reaching for alcohol as his only tool. T…
That’s All I Had to Do?
A woman in recovery calls a friend in tears, furious at someone for no reason she can name. Her friend asks one question: Have you eaten? Twenty minutes after a meal, the anger vanishes. This piece ex…
Sarah Langevin
Sarah closes the bathroom door in her Auburn home, not to hide, but to breathe. Four children play beyond it. Inside, she thanks the frustration and anger visiting her body, then lets them go. This sm…
Taking Care of Your Wellness in Recovery
River Martin sits down with people rebuilding their lives after substance use and asks them a simple question: what does wellness look like to you? Their answer often reveals something unexpected. Rec…
Stepping Up
A therapist friend kept offering unsolicited advice when the writer only wanted her perspective. The old response was silence and resentment. But this time, he spoke up. Not once, but twice, until the…
Senior Sober
At sixty-one, Brian Cuban remembers sitting in a recovery room at forty-six, listening to people twenty and thirty years sober and thinking he'd wasted his life. He'd spent years replaying the past, c…
Brave the Unknown With Spirit
Standing before the mirror, she promises herself, "I can do this." After reinventing herself through multiple chapters, some shadowed by struggle, she's learned that breath grounds her. Now she shares…
Are You Surviving Or Thriving?
You've kept yourself alive through countless hard moments. That survival skill runs deep. But somewhere between paying bills and getting through the day, there's another possibility: thriving. It look…
There’s No Place Like Home
A woman realizes her years of searching outward for belonging missed something crucial: home lives inside her, in how she sees herself and her world. This piece explores how your deepest beliefs shape…
Home is not ‘there,’ it’s ‘here’
For years, she chased a mythical "there": the right job, the perfect body, a love that would finally make her whole. She filled the emptiness with drugs, alcohol, and self-hatred. It wasn't until reha…
Amy Alexander
Amy found a sand dollar on a beach outside a hotel where she was staying with her boyfriend and understood it as a sign to leave. That moment, asking for help and calling the police, marked the beginn…
Conversations
Sarah sits across from her mother, bracing for the same argument they've had a hundred times. But this time, she pauses and asks something different. Journey explores how curiosity can transform famil…
Letting Go Of Holding On
During the pandemic, someone in recovery confronts a familiar challenge: grief. They've already learned to release what addiction took from them. Now they face new losses,jobs, routines, the life befo…
Bouncing Back
Resilience is an innate capability that some people seem to have that allows them to keep going despite the setbacks – it applies to all stages of recovery regardless of the path.
Compassionate Living
Stephen Andrew, who has led support circles in Portland for 32 years, watches people struggle against isolation during social distancing. He knows that emotional distance feeds vulnerability to return…
Daily Self-Care Recovery Practices: Part 2
Someone in early recovery once described themselves as fog waiting to lift. That simple act of writing, of naming where they stood, became part of something larger. This piece explores ten daily pract…
Feeding the Fear or Nourishing the Soul?
Sam stays late at work again, avoiding the fights waiting at home. Jess works late too, building something that makes her feel alive. Same choice, opposite reasons. This piece explores how to tell the…
Sara Kraus
Sara Kraus walks out of her bank shift and pauses before speaking. She's nervous sharing her story, but she will, hoping it reaches someone trapped in the darkness she escaped. Her path to recovery wa…
Is it selfish to love yourself? No way – it’s healthy!
In a women's group, Kimble was asked a simple question: how do you celebrate yourself? She froze, embarrassed to admit she'd learned to love who she was. That discomfort reveals something many people…
Give the gift of truly seeing others
Amy Wood pauses after a meeting to email someone back, not with quick praise, but with specific details about what she noticed and why it mattered. This gift of truly seeing others,acknowledging what…
The Beginning
Standing in front of her refrigerator with five minutes to spare, she noticed something. The moldy containers buried in the crisper drawer, the expired condiments taking up space, they weren't really…
Amanda Lapointe
Amanda Lapointe thought vulnerability was weakness. In recovery, she learned it was the opposite. Now a sober single mom reunited with her daughter and family, she speaks at jails and treatment center…