Recovery

Over the past several years the opioid epidemic has received local, state and national coverage. The crisis in the United States has forced the public and our politicians to take a closer look at how addiction is impacting every area of our society. Even with this coverage, addiction remains a topic that carries with it […]

In the world of substance abuse treatment, it is easy to find passionate debate over the efficacy of 12-step programs. It is difficult to track outcomes of a program that keeps no formal records or documentation of its participants. Regardless of your opinion, there are principles taught in 12-step programs that are crucial to a

Addiction is a family disease. It affects the individual and everyone in the individual’s life, often for years. When the recovery journey begins, the road in the rearview mirror is littered with wreckage. Spouses want nothing to do with us. Parents are tapped out. And children have lost hope and respect for us. We are

Wasatch Crest’s Clinical Director, Rich McDonald, CMHC, and Primary Therapist, Kevin Kirchenmann, LCSW, discuss strategies for helping clients through the holiday season. You can watch their presentation below. During the holiday season and immediately after it, we see an increase in individuals seeking treatment for substance abuse, for many reasons. The holiday season’s pressures can

Many situations can lead us to drug and alcohol use, like stressful occurrences, external pressures, difficult emotions, or unprocessed trauma. We tend to turn toward external forces to help us relax, reward ourselves, and escape emotions. Before entering recovery, we didn’t know how to cope with these feelings or situations in a healthy way, so

When we look at relapse patterns, 99.9 percent of the time, clients report that they stopped working their program prior to relapsing. This means that they stopped putting their recovery first, maybe by not attending meetings or their outpatient treatment sessions. That’s when the relapse starts—when individuals start to disengage with their recovery regimen, not

When we’re in active addiction, we become accustomed to numbing painful emotions by engaging in behaviors that provide instant gratification. In recovery, we must learn to shed the urge to “escape” feelings of discomfort and become comfortable sitting with them.   Luckily, mindfulness is a simple and effective tool that can provide a variety of benefits,

Do you take care of yourself? How do you take care of yourself? Often, we answer the first question with, “Yes!” and the latter with, “Ummm.” Simply put, self-care is taking care of ourselves by what we deliberately do (or refrain from doing) with our own well-being in mind. In the early stages of recovery,