A selection of blogs on the recovery process:-
Early Recovery
The most important period in recovery can often be these early days of recovery when the brain is full of stress and intrusive thoughts about drinking or re-using and the heart distress.
We hope the blogs linked below will help you in what areas may challenge you most and perhaps how to cope with these. Getting over the first, at times difficult, obstacles of recovery.
Don’t fight those intrusive thoughts about alcohol or drugs!
Don’t worry if you still have experience urges!
“Drinking Dreams” reflect Motivation to Recover?
How Do Recovering Alcoholics Appraise their Alcohol-Related Thoughts?
Shame about the past related to not recovering in the present?
12 Step Recovery
How The Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Step Program of Recovery Helps with Emotional Dysregulation.
Maintaining Emotional Sobriety (and sanity) via the steps 10-12.
Why a “Spiritual Solution” to a Neurobiological Disease?
The Stories They Tell in AA – Transformation through AA Narratives.
Looking Inside 12 Step Recovery
How Religious are 12 Step Groups?
The Benefits of Helping Others
Carrying this Message to the Wider World?
Effectiveness of 12 Step Recovery
Participation in Treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous – a study of AA effectiveness.
Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness: Faith Meets Science
Measuring the “psychic change”?
AA helps to reduce impulsivity
Reducing Impulsivity via 12 Step Mutual Aid Group Affiliation
Does science show what 12 steps know?
Social Anxiety and Peer Helping in Adolescent Addiction Treatment
Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness: Faith Meets Science
AA linked to Higher Rates of Continuous Abstinence/Recovery.
Ernie Kurtz on the History of AA, Spirituality, Shame, and Storytelling ~ with William White.
How meditation improves emotional processing and regulation
Getting out of “self” via Prayer and meditation
Differential recovery of cognitive control over emotional regulation and impulsivity.
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 1).
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 2).
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 3).
Other
We do Recover – the relationship between the duration of abstinence and other aspects of recovery.
The Relationship between Motivation to Change and Alcoholic Problem Severity.
Acceptance is the Key – Using Acceptance-Based Mindfulness to Promote Emotional Regulation
From Active to Recovering Alcoholic – The Role of Self Schema in Recovery
Reconstructing the Self in Recovery
Differential recovery of cognitive control over emotional regulation and impulsivity.
Labeling Negative Emotions Lessens Their Intensity
Demonstrating Neouroplasticity in Short-Term versus Long-Term Abstinent Alcoholics
Prolonged Abstinence and Changes in Alcoholic Personality?
Recovering Cognitive Control Over Emotions In Recovery.
Self Compassion Eases the Distress at the Heart of Addiction
Healing the Hurt That Can Drive Addiction
Treating Addiction as Attachment Disorder
Treatment needs to allow addicted clients to “earn Attachment”
For anyone interested in recovery and the history of recovery movement William White is probably the best place to start.
Here is a series of brief videos describing recovery up until the recent creation of the new recovery movement which has seen recovering people, come out of the closest so to speak, to publicly reveal their identities as recovering people in the hope it not only reduces stigma around suffering from this chronic illness but to help encourage many more people enter treatment and recovery groups.
As William White mentions it is strange that a chronic illness is treated as an acute illness, in other words, the treatment of alcoholism and addiction does little after care in helping long term recovery, especially when the data is showing that recovering persons after 5 years of recovery have a very high chance of being in recovery long term.
Should recovery persons (and treatment) not be doing a lot more “after care” post acute treatment-based work? Can recovery communities help with long term recovery and global recovery i.e. deal more effectively with the interpersonal nature of addiction and recovery? Can it help more with recovery of people, their families and their communities? Addiction affects all these, should recovery not heal all these relationships? Should we as recovering persons not share the gifts of our recovery with others, with our communities and societies?
Should we not seek to make recovery from addiction the same as recovery from, say, heart disease?
Should we let others define us by our silence? There are up to 25 million recovering persons in the US, all with a life changing story to tell.
The power of this type of advocacy is probably immeasurable! One day treatment and recovery from addictive behaviour, hopefully, will be seen as commonplace, the norm.
It is a very interesting and idealistic development and one that will be critically appraised in due course in this blogsite.
What does Recovery Mean to You?
Illuminating interview with Michael Botticelli, recovering alcoholic and Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).
The Alcoholics Guide to Alcoholism 