Intentional Living: Aligning Your Needs With Your Goals
What else does “choosing the needs of right now” look like in practice? It’s about being present with yourself and recognizing what your body, mind, and spirit require to thrive in this very moment. Are you craving connection? Reach out to a supportive friend. Feeling overwhelmed? Take a moment to breathe and meditate, write down […]
Intentional Living: Sobriety and the Present Moment
Sobriety teaches us that focusing on the present is key to increasing fulfillment, connecting with healthy relationships (like learning to let our guard down when we’re so used to being invulnerable), and overcoming challenges. It’s a lifestyle that understands, and embraces, that we can only take life one day, one hour, or even one minute […]
Intentional Living: The Power of Intentional Living
Intentional living isn’t just a trendy buzzword; it’s a lifestyle that includes conscious decisions. Sober In 60 Seconds is about conscious living! For example, you made a decision to find support. Congratulations! Some of you may be happy about this. Others might resent that same decision right now. If that’s the case, I get it. […]
Intentional Living: Choosing The Needs of Right Now
I understand: On a daily basis, even up to the minute and second, we can feel like we are constantly pulled in a thousand different directions. In fact, it’s not only a feeling. We are pulled into several directions at once and it is important to normalize this very real human experience of being pushed […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: The Truth About Shame
Like every toxic relationship, shame has been working overtime to control your life and leave you empty. Shame doesn’t want to draw attention to the truth of its presence. Shame doesn’t want you to know it either leaves you empty within, empty without, or both at the same time. The truth about shame is this: […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: Yielding to Shame
To yield to shame is to merely exist in life. One yields, or gives up and allows, the premise that shame cannot change and there isn’t anything that can be done about it. You may think “I feel like I’m going through the motions. I’m just existing, not really living.” Your energy is low, it’s […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: Overcompensating For Shame
Overcompensating for Shame with “I don’t like myself.” If you’re like some people, shame may trigger in you the desire to hyperfocus and overcompensate to prove you have it together, and you go to work like a “bad ass and do bad ass shit.” And you get good at that! As another successful day is […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: Shame and Negative Self-Talk
Shame whispers one of two (or both) core statements in your ear every day, from the time you get up from another restless night of barely any sleep at all (and when you do sleep, you haven’t gotten any rest): “I don’t matter.” “I don’t like myself.” “I don’t matter” and “I don’t like myself” […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: Dealing with Shame by Externalizing Shame
Shame can be difficult to release from our identity. Shame exists with several cognitive distortions (negative thoughts with a funhouse mirror version of reality). The cognitive distortions of shame include “All or Nothing” (either all of this or none of that), “Disqualifying the positive,” (nothing good counts because of something bad), “Emotional Reasoning” (I feel […]
The Destructive Power of Shame: Our Secrets Keep Us Sick
You may have heard the saying “Our secrets keep us sick.” It’s absolutely true: The things we stuff, bottle, avoid, and keep a secret, becomes acidic and eats at us from the inside out. Here’s an example of what that looks like: When I was a child, my parents bought a home, helped in part […]