Co-occurring Disorders Require Co-Occurring Disorders Treatment

co-occurring disorders treatment

Co-occurring disorders require co-occurring disorders treatment. So what are they? Co-occurring disorders means having a substance use and two or more other mental health disorders (aka mental illnesses) at the same time. (Substance Use Disorders are commonly referred to as alcoholism, addiction or drug or alcohol abuse.) A person with anxiety, depression and alcoholism (aka…

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Children of Addiction Awareness Week

children of addiction awareness week

Children of Addiction (COA) Awareness Week is an annual event celebrated around the world during the week of Valentine’s Day. This year it will be held February 9 – 15. It is sponsored by the National Association for Children of Addiction, NACoA.org, whose mission is to eliminate the adverse impact of a parent’s alcohol and…

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End Stigma | Shame Surrounding Addiction

End Stigma | Shame Surrounding Addiction

Not until we end the stigma | shame surrounding addiction can we take the first steps to effectively treat it. Why? It is the stigma and shame that causes the people who suffer with this chronic, often relapsing brain disease (and those who love them) to believe they just don’t want recovery badly enough. And…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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BreakingTheCycles.com 10 Year Anniversary | Sharing Favorite Posts

BreakingTheCycles.com 10 year anniversary — its hard for me to believe it’s already been 10 years! I started BreakingTheCycles.com in 2008 to provide education, prevention and intervention information and services rooted in 21st Century brain science for a range of addiction-related concerns, including: substance abuse, mental illness, addiction* as a brain disease, secondhand drinking, toxic stress,…

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