Recovery Road

In this excerpt from her book Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice, psychotherapist Ingrid Mathieu shows us that we don't have to be stuck on unhelpful definitions of God. We can let go of images and attributes that don't serve our sobriety. We get to be free to choose our own conception of a Higher Power we can trust - one that helps us heal.

In his book Feed Your Head: Some Excellent Stuff on Being Yourself, Earl Hipp offers a framework for recognizing and dealing with feelings that can come with uncertainty, loss, and crisis. This excerpt introduces techniques for reducing stress and gives specific tips to guide us through problem management. We can use these tools to help navigate the difficulties in recovery and our daily life.

In their book Six Essentials to Achieve Lasting Recovery, Dr. Sterling Shumway and Dr. Thomas Kimball have identified six principles that reinforce the Twelve Steps and that are key to maintaining lasting recovery. This excerpt compares recovery to a greenhouse and describes what we need to keep our recovery, and healthy relationships, flourishing.

Those of us in recovery have a unique lens when it comes to pain and trauma. We have a sense that we can learn from our suffering, but how do we actually do that? In his classic book A Gentle Path through the Twelve Steps, Dr. Patrick Carnes shows us how learning from our painful past can help us find meaning. Together with others, we can heal our hurting brains, find our spiritual power, and discover our life's purpose.

In his book Twelve Step Sponsorship: How It Works, author and sponsor Hamilton B. lets us in on some of the need-to-know information about what can seem like a mysterious part of the program. In this excerpt, he offers a few basics about how sponsorship works, what a sponsor is for, and how this unique relationship helps newcomers to recovery find help and hope.

In her book The Recovering Heart: Emotional Sobriety for Women, best-selling author Beverly Conyers shares insight on achieving emotional healing by addressing our behaviors and feelings. In this excerpt, Conyers describes the benefits of having a therapist, sponsor, or a group to talk to as we work the program and progress in our recovery.

In First-Year Sobriety: When All That Changes Is Everything, author Guy Kettelhack gives insightful advice about how to approach life when we're new to sobriety. In this excerpt, he reminds us that there isn't one specific way to go through the program, or to do recovery itself. We're not right or wrong - there's only one requirement for membership in a Twelve Step program: the desire to stop drinking or drugging.

Unhealthy and isolating rituals were part of our experience of addiction. Healthy rituals that connect us with others must be part of our recovery. Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior, by Craig Nakken, describes the two-sided personality we developed through our addiction and offers insights that can help us navigate the journey of wholeness and recovery.

In her book Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, author and therapist Anne Katherine explains what healthy boundaries can look like. In this excerpt, Katherine gets us thinking about how our boundaries came to be and discusses how good boundaries need ongoing attention and maintenance.

Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects by Bill P., Todd W., and Sara S. is an important book to have when approaching Steps Six and Seven - in which we become ready and then ask our Higher Power to remove our defects of character and our shortcomings. In this excerpt, we're told how we can clean our house and detox in other areas of our lives in preparation to have our defects of character removed.