Oh my grief by MaryBeth Cichocki

“Now he is gone, and I’m told I have to accept and go on. How does a mother learn to accept the death of her youngest child? There are no magic pills that will make my shattered heart whole again,” wrote MaryBeth Cichocki in her 2015 post, Coping With a Son’s Death by Drug Overdose.…

Read More

How to Best Manage Stress in Addiction Recovery

Managing stress in addiction recovery can be one of the keys to relapse prevention. That feeling of “stress” is triggered by the fight-or-flight stress response kicking into gear without thought when triggered by emotions, sounds, sights, touches, smells, and the like. Often stress and substance use disorders go hand-in-hand because the chemicals in the alcohol…

Read More

3 Things You Don’t Know About Dreaming in Recovery

Erin Gilday explains that dreaming in recovery is can play a huge role in relapse prevention.

3 things you likely don’t know about dreaming in recovery as a blog post titled grabbed my attention. As someone who has studied the importance of sleep for brain health and wellness, as well as its role as one of the key brain healers people seeking recovery can do, I was happy to share this…

Read More

Are Your Parents Toxic?

Underage Drinking - How Teens Can Become alcoholics before 21

Toxic parents? Being raised by toxic parents can radically change a child’s brain wiring and mapping. Brain wiring and mapping is basically the process by which the brain “connects” its roughly 100 billion brain cells (neurons) from birth through early 20s. This process determines everything that child/adolescent/young adult/adult thinks, feels, says, and does, and it…

Read More

Which One Is the Addict?

Which one is the addict? Can you tell? Here to share her opinion on this question is guest author, MaryBeth Cichocki. She a registered nurse living in the state of Delaware and lost her youngest son, Matt, to an overdose of prescription drugs on January 3rd 2015. After his death she was unable to return…

Read More

The Universal Addiction | Redefining Codependency

Redefining codependency with the universal addiction – control – is the topic of today’s guest post by Steve Hauptman, LCSW. Steve is a Gestalt-trained, Buddhist-flavored therapist who has practiced on Long Island for twenty years. He graduated from Adelphi University’s School of Social Work, trained at the Gestalt Center of Long Island, and specializes in a unique…

Read More

Recovery Tools as Close as Your iPhone

Recovery tools on an iPhone app? I was so taken with Holly Hess’s story of her codependency recovery journey and her husband’s addiction recovery journey and how she took their experiences and merged them with her professional IT talents to recreate a tool box of recovery in an iPhone app, that I invited her to…

Read More