Skip to main content

How Addiction Affects Our Instincts

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Drugs & Alcohol. No Comments on How Addiction Affects Our Instincts

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, PLEASE call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Addiction, just like depression, can totally interfere with the normal functioning of our instincts. Whereas we naturally would work in our best interests, addiction can cause us to instinctively work against ourselves. We become self-destructive. Our instincts for self-preservation go out the window. Our main focus is not on our health and well-being but on getting our fix and holding onto the high. We aren’t self-protective. We don’t care for ourselves. Our relationships with ourselves suffer.

Addiction and depression can completely alter our perception of ourselves. We can become self-hating. We drown in feelings of shame and regret. We create a self-image based on self-rejection rather than self-love, and we build our lives around this image. We don’t feel deserving of love, kindness or respect, so we settle for relationships that reflect back to us our feelings of insecurity and unworthiness. We don’t feel we deserve forgiveness for our past mistakes and wrongs, so we are constantly berating, belittling and judging ourselves. We deny ourselves our own compassion and understanding. We become our own harshest critics. We seem to become proponents for our own demise rather than our success. We compete with other people and never feel like we measure up.

Having such a skewed sense of self can impact how we view the world. Sometimes we feel like the whole world, and the people in it, are out to get us. We feel powerless over the circumstances and events in our lives. We feel like the victims in our own narratives. We blame other people for our pain, and we struggle to take personal responsibility. Addiction can weaken our ability to look at ourselves objectively, to be courageous in our self-inventory, and to stay strong in our quest to improve ourselves. We can become self-pitying, negative and pessimistic.

When our perception of ourselves and the world is so tainted by addiction, it can negatively impact our instincts. We don’t have the normal instincts to want to be happy, to want to heal, to want to contribute to the world, to want to design a life we’re happy with. Our instincts aren’t to grow, learn, improve, build or succeed. Instead, we are self-deprecating, and our instincts are to hide away, to isolate ourselves, to retreat inward, to avoid people. We instinctively put ourselves down and hold ourselves back. We put ourselves in harm’s way. We take chances with our safety. We self-harm. We even contemplate suicide. Addiction and depression have a way of manipulating our instincts to deepen our dependence on the substances, behaviors and emotions we’ve been clinging to. Working to heal from our addictions means understanding our instincts and working to return them back to a healthier state.

The holistic treatment programs at Enlightened Recovery will help you to heal, mind, body and spirit. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Healing from Sex Addiction

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Addiction Recovery. No Comments on Healing from Sex Addiction

Recovering from sex addiction, just like other addictions, can involve abstinence while you’re working to heal. Unlike with other addictions where we will often choose to abstain permanently, sex and relationships are something we plan to engage in again. Taking a break from our drug or behavior of choice, sex included, doesn’t guarantee our recovery. If we haven’t healed from our underlying root issues, abstinence will not solve our problems for us, and we’ll be confronted by them all over again. The same cycles and patterns will still affect us even if we’ve taken a break from the drug or behavior in question. Abstinence, therefore, is an important element in healing but only part of the equation.

An often overlooked factor in our addictions is the physical imbalance of our energies. Our sexuality is associated with the sacral chakra, or second chakra, which also governs creativity, emotion and manifestation. When we are experiencing sexual urges or addiction, our sacral chakra’s energy can be imbalanced and unhealthy. To balance this energy, we can express our creativity in healthy ways, through art, music, writing, dance or other kind of self-expression. We can go swimming, spend time near a body of water, or perform a water ritual, as water is the element associated with this chakra.

Our emotional health is the foundation for the rest of our wellness, and to heal from addiction, we have to identify and examine the emotions that are unresolved within us that are causing the disturbances to our well-being. Are there fears we’ve been refusing to look at? Are we clinging to shame from past mistakes? Are we holding onto the grief of a loss, or the sadness from a particular traumatic experience? Whatever emotions we have yet to process will try to get our attention any way they can, in the form of conflict, pain and addiction, until we finally take heed and work to heal them. We can work to heal our wounded emotions by working with a therapist, joining a support group, using journaling and creative arts therapy, and seeking out a spiritual guide. We can talk about our feelings with people we trust, this sometimes being the hardest step for us but one of the most important in learning to process how we feel in healthy ways. Rather than continuing our patterns of denial, avoidance, distraction and suppression, we can start to really face our emotions. Getting a handle on our emotional health is perhaps the most crucial element in healing from sex addiction.

Enlightened Recovery will work with you to heal not only from your primary addiction but also from any other co-occurring conditions you might be experiencing, including sex addiction. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Sex Addiction and Relationships

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Relationships. No Comments on Sex Addiction and Relationships

Sex addiction can take over our entire lives in devastating ways, one of the most painful being our relationships. When we are addicted to love and sex, it can affect our personal relationships in various ways. Having a healthy relationship can feel next to impossible when we are coming from a place of dependence, neediness and attachment. When our relationships are filled with addiction of any kind, they don’t have the solid foundation they need to survive. Relationships with sex addiction as a factor can be destructive and explosive, in drastically unhealthy ways.

Very often we are attracting relationships into our lives based on the energy of our addiction. We enter relationships simply to satisfy physical urges. We don’t choose our partners based on compatibility, mutual interests or love. Sometimes we’re not even physically attracted to our partners. We are so driven by the compulsive need to get our sexual fix, to feel our high again, that sometimes we don’t care who it is we’re sleeping with. We might be so desperate for connection, intimacy and company that we choose partners we might never have chosen if we were in a healthier place. Many of us are painfully afraid of being alone or lonely, and this fear drives us to make unhealthy choices that we later regret.

Sometimes we attract other addicts who are themselves struggling with sex addiction or another kind of addiction. When we’re in relationships with other addicts, we can feed off of each other’s destructive habits and exacerbate them. We can pull each other into relentless cycles of breaking up, making up, ending and restarting the relationship countless times. The toxicity of these kinds of patterns can worsen our addictive urges and make us more likely to use addictive substances or engage in other addictive behaviors to cope. We can also feel heightened compulsiveness with our sexual urges as well, making us even more likely to stay in the toxic situation or find other unhealthy outlets for our energy. Any time we’re in destructive patterns such as these, we can experience worsened depression and anxiety.

With addiction in general, but sex addiction in particular, we can find ourselves engaging in dangerous behaviors, having casual sex with multiple partners we don’t know well, staying in abusive relationships, risking our health and wellness to get our fix. Sex addiction can put us at higher risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections and/or having unwanted pregnancies. We may put ourselves in grave danger staying with partners who are abusive, because we feel we love them, when sometimes we’ve simply become addicted to them and to what they represent for us – someone who can fill our needs, make us feel less lonely or give us the attention we crave. Coming to an understanding about sex addiction involves looking at the ways in which it functions in our relationships.

The treatment programs at Enlightened Recovery work with co-occurring conditions, including sex addiction. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Changing the Narrative of Addiction

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in 12 Step Program, Addiction. No Comments on Changing the Narrative of Addiction

When it comes to looking at addiction honestly and removing the stigmas around it, those of us who have lived with addiction firsthand can begin to change the narrative of it for the larger culture to be able to learn from our experiences. We can express ourselves and speak about our experiences. We can shed light on the truth of addiction and how pervasive it is in our families and communities. We can illuminate for people just how destructive and debilitating it can be in our lives.

For us to be honest about our struggles with addiction, we have to muster a level of courage we might not think we possess but which is part of our inherent inner strength. Once we realize our potential and claim our voice, we can tap into the strength and courage within us. Many of us have only ever discussed our addiction with those closest to us, with our support groups, close family and friends, or therapists. Many of us haven’t even brought ourselves to tell our loved ones about our addictions. Why would we hide such a huge part of our lives from other people, especially those that care about us? The answer lies in fear – the fear that fuels the stigmas around addiction in the first place, and our fears of being judged and rejected by the people we love and by society in general.

Fear causes us to misunderstand each other and the illness of addiction. Just as depression and mental illness are still widely misunderstood, addiction also suffers from the negative stereotypes, stigmas, misconceptions and misinformation surrounding it in our culture. Working to summon our courage means realizing that we might always have fear on some level but that we can transcend it. We can give addiction a face and a name. We can change the dialogue around addiction to be inclusive of the addicts who have had personal experience with it, not the people who are most judgmental and fearful of it. We can give ourselves a voice and reclaim the discourse around addiction, for ourselves and for our larger communities. We can redefine addiction as something that impacts our lives but doesn’t have to dictate them entirely. We can see our addiction as something we can learn from rather than be devastated by. Healing from our addiction can be part of what empowers us, rather than just being a memento of our self-destruction. The memories we hold of our struggles can motivate us to move forward, rather than staying stuck in the past, mired with regret.

The community at Enlightened Recovery has years of personal experience with addiction, recovery, and helping others in recovery. We can help you too. Call (833) 801-LIVE.

Stigmas Around Sex Addiction

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Uncategorized. No Comments on Stigmas Around Sex Addiction

The stigmas surrounding addiction have become a dominant part of our mainstream cultural dialogue but were generated from a place of fear and lack of understanding from people who aren’t addicts themselves. Without having experienced it firsthand, addiction can be a complicated and difficult thing to comprehend. Just as all addictions carry specific stigmas and stereotypes associated with them, sex addiction has come to be viewed a certain way that is unique to it. Since sex itself is still taboo in so many ways, and since sex is such a powerful force in our lives, there is a great deal of fear, trepidation, misunderstanding and misinformation when it comes to sex addiction.

A common misconception about sex addiction is that it is an excuse for promiscuity and reckless, dangerous sexuality. Addiction as a whole carries the weight of shame with it for many people, and with sex addiction, this can be even more true. Sex addicts can be drowning in shame for the compulsive acts they’re engaging in. We can feel as though we’re totally out of control, like our actions and our bodies are not within our control but being driven by a compulsive force. Many of us don’t want to be promiscuous. We want loving, healthy, monogamous relationships but feel as though we can’t stop ourselves from having casual sex, cheating or otherwise acting out. We feel ashamed of our sexual history, of the partners we’ve been with, of our choices and behaviors. We feel sadness, regret and remorse after our sexual encounters. Just as alcoholics are not using their addiction as an excuse for destructive behavior, sex addicts are not using their addiction as an excuse for promiscuity.

Another stigma surrounding sex addiction is that sex addicts are immoral, deviant people. This belief is based on the larger belief that sex is wrong, that having sex for pleasure is an immoral thing to do, and that our sexuality is a source of shame. Addiction can impact and taint every area of our lives, but it doesn’t rob of us of our inherent goodness. We can be suffering from addiction and still have compassion and kindness. Addicts are not necessarily bad people, and sex can be a beautiful thing when treated with the respect it deserves. Sex addiction is not a badge of immorality just as alcoholism isn’t. Understanding sex addiction and how it affects people’s lives involves looking at some of the stigmas that addicts have to live with on a constant basis.

If you’re living with sex addiction and struggling to feel understood, you’re not alone. Sex addiction is one of the most common co-occurring conditions we address in our treatment programs at Enlightened Recovery. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Understanding Sex Addiction

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Uncategorized. No Comments on Understanding Sex Addiction

One of the many conditions that can both accompany other addictions and function as an addiction on its own is sex addiction. Whereas we usually associate addiction with substances such as drugs and alcohol, there are many behaviors that can become similarly addictive and destructive in a person’s life. Gambling, gaming, spending, shoplifting and overeating are all examples. Sex addiction, often referred to as love and sex addiction, is when a person’s relationship with sex and romance has become unhealthy, obsessive, impulsive and compulsive. When we struggle with sex addiction, our natural impulses for love and sex are overtaken by a neediness, a desperation, a compulsive need to return to a feeling of being high. Our thoughts are dominated by our sexual relationships, and we find it hard to focus on anything else. Our lives can become totally consumed by our reckless and dangerous behaviors. Our health can be derailed by our sexual patterns.

Very often our addictions stem from the trauma we haven’t resolved within ourselves. Sex addiction is no different. Sometimes our traumatic experiences were sexual in nature, causing us to have a dysfunctional relationship with sex based on fear, mistrust, shame and sadness. Sometimes our trauma can be totally unrelated, but our unresolved pain manifests in a sexual way. For example, the abandonment we felt at the loss of a loved one can cause us to compulsively try to relieve that pain through having sex.

With sex addiction, we often confuse sex for love and vice versa. In a healthy relationship, sex can be a mutual expression of our love and a reflection of it. In unhealthy relationships based on addiction, we have a hard time processing or clarifying our thoughts and feelings, including our definitions of love, respect and trust. We don’t know how to define, let alone embody, a healthy partnership. Often what results is a lot of confusion and turmoil. We’re filled with neediness and longing. Our relationships are based on codependence. We form attachments rather than unions. We feel as though there is a void within us that we try to fill through being loved, needed and wanted by another person. We can become just as addicted to the euphoric feelings of love as we are to the physical act of sex, and both can become the driving forces behind our behavior.

Sex addiction is one of the many co-occurring conditions we treat at Enlightened Recovery. You’re not alone. There is help available to you. Call us today: (833) 801-LIVE.

Addiction in our Relationships

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Relationships. No Comments on Addiction in our Relationships

Living with addiction means our addiction impacts every single area of our lives. We can see the drastic effects of our addiction everywhere in our lives, and very visibly on the health of our relationships. When we’re addicted, we often attract other addicts, and our relationships are built on a foundation of unhealthiness and instability.

Addiction presents itself in our relationships in various ways. Codependence is one of them. We are not only dependent on our addictive substances and behaviors, we also become dependent upon each other. Our unhealthy relationships can be based on toxicity, attachment and lack of independence. Our relationships become codependent in nature, and we struggle to function independently, to hold onto our own identities and to feel whole within ourselves. We feel like we need the other person to survive. We feel like we can’t live without them. Our relationships are not comprised of two healthy people coming together to share of themselves. Instead, they are two broken people full of insecurity and pain bringing their issues into the mix and bringing each other down. Healthy unions are practically impossible in this kind of climate. Our relationships are so full of our fears and unresolved issues that there is little room for growth and healing. We subconsciously hope that we’ll get better, that the other person will change, that somehow our love will conquer all and cure us. For many of us, though, our relationships only exacerbate our existing problems. We fall deeper into our depressions. We become unhappier and more afraid.

When our relationships grow from a foundation of addiction, they often have nowhere to go but down. We have a tendency to enable each other’s destructive habits and addictive behaviors. We perpetuate each other’s patterns. We make excuses for each other, we lie for each other, we cover up each other’s problems. Our relationship can become a safe haven for our addiction to fester undisturbed. We retreat into the comfort and distraction of the relationship rather than face ourselves. Any willpower we might have had can go right out the window when the people we love are urging us to drink or use with them. We trust the people we’re with, and subconsciously we want to believe that they have our best interest at heart. When they themselves are addicts, though, they don’t have the clarity or peace of mind to act in your best interest, let alone their own. Our self-destructiveness becomes a joint effort, and we self-destruct together. We cause ourselves and each other increased pain, adding a growing list of issues to heal from onto our already existing unresolved issues.

Recovery requires that we take inventory of everything in our lives that is detracting from our capacity for healing, and this often includes our relationships.

Call Enlightened Recovery today to get the support you need to focus on your recovery: (833) 801-LIVE.

The Effects of Addiction on our Friendships

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Relationships. No Comments on The Effects of Addiction on our Friendships

Those of us struggling with addiction and mental illness are no strangers to isolation. We isolate ourselves from the outside world and from the people who care about us. Often our isolation comes from a place of fear. We fear being judged and rejected. We fear being confronted on our issues. We fear leaving our comfort zone and pushing ourselves to do the difficult work of recovery. When we isolate ourselves, we miss out on all the wonderful benefits of friendship. We lose the opportunity to love and be loved, to help others and be helped by them.

Throughout the course of our struggles with addiction, we tend to accrue all kinds of relationship issues. We experience intense interpersonal conflict, painful endings to our important relationships, and burned bridges full of anxiety and frustration. When we haven’t learned how to have healthy relationships with other people and when we haven’t found a sense of inner peace within ourselves, it’s impossible to have peace with others. We come to associate friendship with difficulty, stress, effort and overwhelm. Many of us start to believe that the difficulty isn’t worth it in the end, so we stop trying. We resign ourselves to being alone, and we think we don’t need other people in our lives.

Our friendships are like reflections of us. Just like our other relationships, they can mirror back to us our wounds, our fears and our unresolved pain. When we have issues within us that have yet to be healed, we often direct them towards other people and they become issues in our relationships. We create conflict out of our own unresolved personal problems. We transfer our pain onto the people closest to us. We often are in denial about the severity of our pain and choose to turn a blind eye to it, focusing instead on the drama of our relationships because it can provide a form of temporary escape. Our issues with our friends can be easier to handle than the deep pain we’re trying to avoid within us. As our issues intensify, many of us decide we don’t want to deal with them anymore, and we separate ourselves entirely, breaking off friendships that took years to build. We convince ourselves we’re better off without them, and even though we miss them, we keep our distance. Our relationships often become another casualty of our addiction.

At Enlightened Recovery, our treatment programs include therapy, spiritual care, mentoring, holistic healing and trauma support, to help you heal yourself and your relationships. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Learning as a Wellness Tool

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in 12 Step Program, Addiction. No Comments on Learning as a Wellness Tool

Learning can be a very helpful tool in our healing and recovery from addiction and mental health issues. Practicing a new skill, learning a new language, even trying a new recipe can boost our production of dopamine, one of the body’s feel-good chemicals that makes us feel happy and satisfied when we accomplish something. Exploring, learning and practicing new things can all help with our feelings of well-being, which can benefit our mental and emotional health and keep us positively occupied on productive things rather than on our addictions. When we feel more content and satisfied with ourselves, we’re less likely to be tempted to give into the temptation of addiction.

Some of us associate education with the tediousness of school, but learning can actually be a lifelong endeavor that brings us pleasure and fulfillment. When we open ourselves and broaden our horizons, we grow and expand to become deeper, more enlightened versions of ourselves. We break out of the mental constraints we were in that closed us off to deeper understanding. We gain insight and awareness that help with our mental and emotional development. We become stronger as a result.

When it comes to addiction and mental health, learning new things can mean the difference between staying stuck at plateaus of healing and breaking through to increase our wellness and making entirely new discoveries about ourselves. The more we know about ourselves, the better prepared we can be to handle any setbacks we come across. We have a clearer understanding of who we are and what it will take for us to heal. We learn more about our inner selves, our connection to other people, and the truths of human nature.

As part of your recovery, consider adding the element of learning. Is there something you’ve always wanted to pick up? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to learn to play the guitar, to cook, or to knit. Maybe there’s a language you’ve always been intrigued by, or a country you’ve always wanted to visit and learn more about. Give yourself permission to explore these things. Be open-minded and adventurous in your approach to your recovery. Recovering from the serious afflictions of addiction and mental health issues involves giving ourselves some enjoyment, some pleasure, fun and satisfaction. The feelings of pride and accomplishment we get when we learn something new and succeed at it can invigorate us and make us feel connected to ourselves again. The more we give energy to productive and positive things, the less inclined we are to self-destruct in our old ways.

The treatment programs at Enlightened Recovery include yoga, meditation, art and music therapy to help you heal holistically and have fun learning in the process. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.

Dismantling the Shame Around Addiction

Written by Enlightened Recovery on . Posted in Addiction, Drugs & Alcohol. No Comments on Dismantling the Shame Around Addiction

Of all the emotions we contend with throughout the course of our addictions, shame may be the most limiting and debilitating. Shame keeps us locked in cycles of self-deprecation, self-hatred and judgment. We find it impossible to forgive ourselves. We convince ourselves that we are shameful, immoral people rather than seeing ourselves as growing and learning from our mistakes. We don’t see our missteps as the normal part of our evolution that they really are. We create a self-image based on our shame, and we reject ourselves. Our self-hatred blocks our recovery and makes us seek refuge from our cruelty in our addictions.

Dismantling the shame around addiction is a crucial step in the self-acceptance process. We can consciously choose to shed the stigma surrounding addicts and addiction. We can reject the notion that addiction is not a real thing, that addicts use it as an excuse for immorality and recklessness. We can recognize just how destructive an illness it is and have compassion for ourselves in our struggles. We can see how pervasive and all-consuming addiction can be and commend ourselves for the strength in coping with it. We can choose to be proud of ourselves for not giving up on ourselves and our quest for recovery. We can see our healing and recovery as accomplishments, rather than seeing our addiction as a source of shame.

The shame we feel internally has a lot to do with our culture’s perception of addiction. Addiction is depicted in the same negative light as criminal behavior, homelessness and poverty, all of which are shunned and judged. As a culture we don’t lift up our most vulnerable populations. We don’t seek to uplift, encourage or love them. We reject them from the mainstream culture, making them outcasts. When we shame and shun people, it only causes them to sink lower into the depths of their pain. It exacerbates their existing problems. They become more depressed, more addicted, more likely to act out. The answer is to give more energy and attention to the people who need it, and to give them more love, not less. We can see all of our challenges as testaments of our strength, as special characteristics that add to our uniqueness. We can view our society as comprised of differing personalities, all coping with different and unique struggles that add to their growth and progress.

When we commit to seeing all of us as equal rather than judging people and placing them in hierarchies of goodness, status and morality, we open ourselves up to learning from each other and sharing in the beautiful experience of life. Dismantling shame in ourselves and in our culture is a gift we can give not just to the people living with addiction but from everyone else who can stand to learn from our experience and wisdom.

At Enlightened Recovery, we believe that every addict can recover. We provide the supportive community, care and healing modalities to help you regain your self-love. Call (833) 801-LIVE today.