When we make a heroic effort to change the way we think about our triggers in recovery, we enhance our learning, memory, and ability to respond to stress in life. Our physical, mental, and emotional health improves.

A few years ago, I facilitated an in-person women’s support meeting. In preparation for this meeting, I found a video called “Will the Pain and Suffering Ever End?” Will the Pain and Suffering Ever End? I took the video to the group meeting. As the meeting began, a young, petite woman sat down next to me and began to sob. I put my arm around her, told her she was in the right place, and gave her my phone number. No one in the room made a fuss. They just smiled compassionately

The Study of Recovery principles in our personal Recovery Path will help us build an ADDICTION-informed paradigm. When our responses to SHAME include self-shame in its many forms, watching for its many facets in our cognitive thinking, narrow paradigms, and self-shaming paradigms will give us the power to reject the onslaught of the negative shaming triggers. Strong and intentional boundaries are vital in this process; we never condone or excuse our past behaviors or the abu

Guilt, Shame, and Grace | August 1, 2026 Last week in our Thursday night Addiction Recovery Group for women, we explored how changing our negative thinking patterns can change our paradigm—the way we see the world and our place in it—and how vital that process is to recovery. This Thursday, August 6, we'll continue that discussion by looking more closely at guilt and shame, two of recovery's greatest enemies. By definition, guilt and shame are current feelings about something

If the weight of past mistakes is making life joyless—even miserable—today, we should consider that we cannot heal the addict we were by using the recovery tools we discovered only last week. Recovery takes time and honesty (Step One). It is easy to look back with guilt and shame, armed with today's knowledge, and dismiss the truth that we were operating in survival mode, not malice. We probably broke generational patterns we didn't even recognize while suffering inside. We d

Almost a decade ago, during our first mission with the Church's Family Services in Arizona, the culture within the Addiction Recovery Program centered on carefully protecting participants' anonymity. We put up privacy screens over the meeting room doors, held meetings in homes, paid attention to where participants parked their cars, and emphasized the importance of maintaining confidentiality within the group. Then something happened that changed me forever. During one sharin

Lessons from Jacques Lusseyran's And There Was Light Over the past several years, one of my greatest teachers about light has been a blind man. Jacques Lusseyran, author of And There Was Light, lost his eyesight at the age of seven. Yet instead of describing his life as one of darkness, he insisted that true light comes from within. As a leader in the French Resistance during World War II and later a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, Lusseyran discovered something ex

For the first three years after Chad died, I experienced an overwhelming peace—one that consumed me. This peacefulness told me that...

Repentance is merely change. Recovery is a repentance process usually involving a 12-Step program. 12-Step programs are merely...

Every decade has its challenges, as my skin refuses to keep its elasticity and my hair refuses to stay in its follicle, my body parts...

At each moment of her existence, Woman chooses Queenship or slavery as she confronts the workings of her thinking mind. When her thoughts...

According to C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity), “we never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.”...

An excerpt from Michele Noel’s upcoming book, Respect the Light “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he...

I submit a clarion call for all women who seek a better relationship with their Heavenly Parents to take the time to consider that it is...

As mentioned in the preface of this work, it is imperative for the recovering codependent or addict to accept the truth that what­ever...

She was happy as a caterpillar—all cute and fuzzy. But before she knew what was happening, she was frantically weaving a cocoon. She...

When one of my siblings or I were faced with a hard life decision, our Dad’s favorite remark was, “Looks like you’re stuck between a rock...