It seems difficult at the beginning, fresh out of rehab or in the first month of your meetings, to find any kind of balance. With the decision to get sober, your life has been overturned, derailed and mixed up; most of us feel like we are just being spit out of a tornado, bouncing around in midair.
Continue Reading I’m often asked how to proceed with sobriety and recovery once the first steps are over. We are clean, detoxed, got the idea, started living the life and all that. A lot of people get the idea that now it’s time to grow. But what does it mean?
Continue Reading When time arises to make a decision about getting sober or not, many people face the same obstacles that built a brick wall in front of me on my path to the future. I had the fear of the unknown, the unwillingness to crawl out of my comfort zone and face facts, the lack of hope and zero knowledge about the recovery process itself. But I had discovered one essential thing: the strong desire to live.
Continue Reading During my first weeks and month in sobriety, I kept hearing people say that they were “grateful recovering alcoholics.” How can be anybody be grateful to be an alcoholic? I didn’t understand the word. I was definitely NOT grateful to be an alcoholic. I could not drink or do drugs anymore and I had to sit in those meetings and go to treatment. I did it because it saved my life, but I AM NOT GRATEFUL for it!
Continue Reading It is important never to let the fire of recovery completely get cold. The addiction devil is waiting for us and ready to hit us full force when we least expect it. We have to be aware of our disease and have to keep our guards up. If that becomes “work” instead of “fun” and “routine” instead of “passionate,” it may make your life more miserable than it needs to be. If you are around happy people, you have a higher chance of being happy and content yourself.
Continue Reading Almost every person with the disease of addiction to any substance or alcohol eventually reaches a point in life where he asks himself the most important question for his future. He thinks, “I am an alcoholic and like me there have been millions of others who have sat in a bar, at home, in a restaurant, in a dirty bathroom or anywhere at a given moment in front of a glass, a joint, a line or a fix and looked at it thinking: ‘If I drink this now, I will die. If I don’t drink it, I can’t live. Now what?’”
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