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