Together, We Can Save Lives We’re currently in the middle of National Suicide Prevention Week, which began on September 8th and runs until the 14th. As you all know, Ocean Recovery specializes in treating substance abuse and eating disorders. What you may not know is that suicide is that tenth leading cause of death in…
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Widening the Circle I’ve gone over the importance of a sober support network time and again in these blogs. And because it’s absolutely essential to a successful recovery program, I’m going to mention it one more time (at least for now.) The value of a close group of people who have been through some of…
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Back to School With the days slowly getting shorter and football returning to the TV, kids all over the country are packing up their cars and getting ready to return to college. While the excitement of new opportunities and experiences is building, so, too, is the stress and anxiety. An increased workload, more demanding social…
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Recap: Emotional, Mental, Physical Last week, I shared part one of a post on relapse prevention, based on Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery by Steven M. Melemis. That blog focused on the three stages of relapse: emotional, mental, and physical. To quickly recap, emotional relapse is the stage in which a person…
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An Ounce of Prevention A couple of months back I shared a blog called Dealing With Relapse in which I attempted to offer some hope to those coming off of a slip. It’s so important to right the ship quickly after a setback to keep things moving forward and prevent a slip from turning into…
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Moving Toward the Light In a blog back in May, I wrote that eating disorders want us “to sit in the dark in order to further [their] own progression.” They are diseases that flourish in isolation and secrecy, keeping the sufferer disconnected from others. It’s only while the afflicted is cut off from everyone that…
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A Warning…and a Sign of Hope Many of us who work in the recovery industry have first-hand experience with addiction and I am no different. In a number of my blogs, I’ve alluded to some of the things I went through as an active alcoholic. I generally try to keep the focus of these posts…
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Ten and a Half Hours In a recent blog on positive body image, I mentioned looking critically at the advertisements and images that mass media will be unloading on us this summer. However, it’s more accurate to say that the media blitz is a year-long event when it comes to unrealistic standards of body image…
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Genetics Or Environment? As someone who works in the recovery field, I have a front-row seat for the ongoing “nature vs. nurture” debate. Modern science considers addiction and eating disorders to be products of both genetics and environment. Furthermore, we’ve discussed some of the elements of both sides in previous blogs concerning both substance abuse…
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Essential to Long Term Success Looking over old blogs, I noticed that I’ve mentioned sober support networks in quite a few of them (Dealing with Relapse and the Benefits of a Routine in Early Recovery are two recent entries that spring to mind.) However, I also realized that I’ve never written an entire blog on…
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