Recovery Road

How are you feeling? It's a common enough question—especially in these days of the coronavirus pandemic. But not everybody knows how to answer it. In this excerpt from Feed Your Head: Some Excellent Stuff on Being Yourself, Earl Hipp describes how an emotional vocabulary can help us tolerate and talk about the intensity and discomfort that come with big feelings.

In this excerpt from his book A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Principles: Living the Values Behind the Steps, Dr. Patrick Carnes outlines insights on addiction and healing from current brain science and invites us to embrace our recovery as a lifelong creative emotional, physical, and spiritual process of healing and growth.

There's a lot to be angry about these days. The coronavirus pandemic has affected our jobs, our health, and our families; recovery can feel harder to maintain. In this excerpt from their brief book, Of Course You're Angry: A Guide to Dealing with the Emotions of Substance Abuse, Gayle Rosellini and Mark Worden call us to examine self-pity as a destructive form of unhealthy anger, and point a way past it.

In this time of distancing and isolation during the pandemic, we can learn from how people handle panic, anxiety, and agoraphobia. This excerpt from Embracing the Fear: Learning to Manage Anxiety and Panic Attacks by Judith Bemis and Amr Barrada can teach us how fear can be useful to us in our recovery.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, even healthy people and relationships will experience conflict. With insights from neuroscience as well as her own recovery, Cynthia Moreno Tuohy's book, Rein In Your Brain: From Impulsivity to Thoughtful Living in Recovery, opens the door to a whole new way to think about thinking—especially when the emotional stakes are high.

While right and wrong can sometimes be clearly defined, much of the time we wrestle with competing perspectives and pressures in order to do the next right thing. In Finding Your Moral Compass: Transformative Principles to Guide You in Recovery and Life, Craig Nakken offers tools for discovering options and making choices. In this excerpt, we explore the tension between chaos and discipline—a timely topic during the coronavirus pandemic, when chaos seems all too present.

In times of stress and uncertainty, it's common to worry about relapse, either for yourself or someone you love. Extra anxiety, fueled by global, local, or even personal experience with the coronavirus pandemic, may lead people to cope in all kinds of unhealthy ways. In this excerpt from Destination Joy: Moving Beyond Fear, Loss, and Trauma in Recovery, Earnie Larsen reminds us that avoiding relapse depends on our willingness to "face what is chasing us."

As we kick off National Recovery Month during a pandemic, it's a good time to look at one of our most popular titles for advice about how to manage ourselves as we manage our recovery. Here's an excerpt from Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects by Bill P., Todd W., and Sara S. to help us act "as if" we can keep walking through our recovery by looking up to see the big picture and having faith that we can—and will—get to where we're going.

It's impossible to have a problem-free life—the global effects of coronavirus have underscored this reality. Written originally for young people Earl Hipp's book, Feed Your Head: Some Excellent Stuff on Being Yourself, offers specific ways to access calm and stay in touch, even when the storms are raging.

In his book, A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Principles: Living the Values Behind the Steps, Dr. Patrick Carnes teaches that recovery's process of healing and growth will be sustained not by control but by trust. In this excerpt, Dr. Carnes invites us to reflect on a time in our life when we survived—and even thrived—through a leap of faith.