Addiction Recovery Counseling & Therapy

Experience More Confidence & Hope About
Addiction Recovery – Starting Today

Are You – Or Someone You Love – Wrestling With Any Of These Challenges?

• A past history of using alcohol, drugs or other compulsive behaviors – such as relationship or love addiction, to deal with stress, anxiety, depression, past hurts, trauma, grief, loneliness, or low self esteem.
• Stopped addictive behaviors – or committed to stopping – but concerned you could slip into replacing one addictive substance or habit with another.
• In recovery from addiction, but feeling unfulfilled, anxious, angry, down or insecure.
• Lack effective Relapse Prevention strategies and keep slipping.
• Feeling overwhelmed by your loved one’s addictive behaviors and caught in negative relationship dynamics.

Recovery is not a quick fix. But Counseling can help you get to the root of your problems and heal emotionally, so you can rebuild your life from a place of strength and enjoy long term success!

The key to long term recovery – and a satisfying life – is stopping addictive behaviors and ‘staying stopped’. The challenge of staying stopped lies in making permanent lifestyle changes that center on strengthening emotional stability, healthy living and positive relationships. Let’s face it, addiction recovery is a major process of readjustment. This transition time can be filled with a lot of personal growth as well as emotional obstacles. Many people struggle in the first few months and years of recovery to find their comfort zone. However, it is not your destiny to ride an emotional roller coaster. With the right support, strategies, skills and motivation, your pain and uncertainty can be replaced by a sense of balance, calm and fulfillment. Addictions counseling can be a vital source of help to get you moving in the right direction quickly during this time.

Counseling is available by Video Worldwide

When Abstinence Isn’t Enough

You may have worked hard to achieve recovery from addiction, and should feel good. You’ve stuck to your goal of leaving addictive behaviors behind and embracing life to the fullest. But something’s missing. Some days you can see you are making great progress and feel at peace. Other days, you are anxious, irritated or feel lost. You may feel isolated from others. Or you might find yourself feeling empty, sad or unfulfilled. Perhaps you are struggling with your relationships or your job. It’s frustrating and maybe a little scary. You know you don’t want to relapse, or replace one compulsive habit with another. What you aren’t sure about is how to make your addiction recovery the success you know it can be.

Gaining ‘Emotional Recovery’ Skills Is Essential To Recovery From Addictions

Emotional recovery skills – aka ’emotional sobriety’ – include the ability to deal constructively with feelings, such as calming oneself when upset, tolerating intense or painful feelings, maintaining emotional equilibrium in the face of stress, developing solid relationship bonds, and achieving overall balance in life between the body, mind and spirit. A lack of emotional recovery skills, stemming from unresolved past losses, grief, other hurts or traumas – and reinforced by negative beliefs or anxiety – tend to be the main reasons people have these challenges in recovery. When emotional resiliency skills are not nurtured in childhood, or people experience psychological or physical harm, they may turn to alcohol, drugs, food, sex or gambling to try and restore a sense of calm and contentment that is difficult to achieve on their own.

Developing emotional recovery skills is critical to achieving stability between moods, thoughts, behaviors and appetites. Learning to accept emotions, deal with stress, and reframe pessimistic thinking, without responding in counter-productive ways, such as self-medicating with substances or compulsive behaviors, is the foundation of recovery from addiction. The good news is that addiction counseling can help you gain the emotional coping skills that will make your recovery a lasting success!

Addiction Counseling can help you gain emotional balance, a positive perspective & healthy coping skills in the following ways:

• Overcoming negative thought patterns or belief systems that are holding you back
• Resolving childhood wounds caused by abuse, negligence or inadequate parenting
• Rebounding from the pain of grief and loss experiences
• Discovering what your legitimate needs are – and finding healthy ways to meet them
• Learning techniques to stay calm and feel resilient during times of stress
• Forging healthy relationships and a sense of community
• Finding meaningful activities, work, hobbies and passions
• Developing inner strength, and learning to enjoy quiet restorative time, such as meditation or spiritual pursuits
• Maintaining physical health based on exercise, rest and nutrition

Whether you are new to recovery and struggling, in recovery for a while but frustrated, finding relationships a challenge or work difficult, you can achieve emotional recovery and free yourself from the negative legacy of addiction once and for all.  You don’t have to wait to start enjoying the security and peace of mind that comes from living a life full of meaning and contentment.

Glynis Sherwood helps people just like you transcend addiction and achieve a fuller recovery, so you can feel more emotionally resilient and satisfied with life and love, work and play. Help Is Available Now! Don’t lose another day feeling stressed, confused, dissatisfied, isolated or adrift in your recovery from alcohol, drugs or addictive behaviors.

Relationship aka Love Addiction

Addiction to love or relationships occurs when you repeatedly pursue people who are distant, controlling, critical or leave you – making you feel panicky and despairing. You probably feel very vulnerable most of the time, as your self esteem is directly tied to whether that person accepts or rejects you. In other words, you have given your power away. You may tend to blame yourself for their behavior, rather than recognize that you are attracted to someone who will only hurt, reject and abandon you. On the flip side, ‘Romance Addicts’ are consumed by the thrill of the chase, but lose interest and abandon their partners when the excitement and fear of intimacy crop up. Both relationship and romance addiction stem from the belief that you need to be with an intimate partner in order to be a whole, lovable and worthwhile person. Counseling can help you learn to love yourself first, so you feel worthy and capable of having healthy relationships in the future. Learn more about breaking free from Relationship & Love Addiction

Codependence

Are you caught in a repetitive cycle of being attracted to people who have emotional difficulties or problems with addictive behavior, hoping you can ‘fix’ them? If so, you may feel like you have lost your sense of self identity as your life, and self worth, tends to revolve around the person with the problem. Instead of having a healthy relationship with yourself, you probably make someone else more important – in this case, your addicted loved one. The bottom line is that you never get your own needs met, leaving you frustrated, hurt, lonely, and increasingly out of touch with yourself.

Counseling with Glynis focuses on helping you to regain control of your life by taking care of your own needs first, so you feel stronger and recover your peace of mind. We will work together to help you set healthier boundaries by detaching from your loved one’s addictive behaviors. By focusing on your own well being you will feel more at ease, and therefore more capable of building a productive relationship with your addicted love one.

Help For Families and Loved Ones

If you love an addicted person you are probably experiencing one or more of the following emotions: fear, anger, guilt or sadness. You may be feeling that the addict you love is taking up too much of your time at best, or destroying your life at worst. Either way you are probably feeling confused about what to do, and possibly at the end of your rope. You may have tried to get help for your addicted love one, only to discover that they are unwilling to stop their behavior. This can leave you feeling hopeless and helpless at the same time. You might even notice that your own health and well being has been negatively impacted as you pour your energies into trying to help the addict you love.

If you are ready to put the pain of addiction behind you and be at peace with yourself and your loved ones, contact Glynis to book a video counseling appointment