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

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