A Connected Life
It is our hope that “A Connected Life” will engage you in fresh, inspiring ways with what a life empowered by recovery can look like. It’s also our way of staying in touch with you in a conversation that’s alive with practical, new insights and meaningful resources for community and support.
Self-Talk Pointers to Help You Stay Sober at Family Holiday Events That Involve Drinking
When you’re in early recovery, an important rule of thumb is to avoid situations that involve alcohol. The same is absolutely true if you’ll be spending time with family this holiday season— so it’s best to skip that annual Christmas party that your cousin Leo hosts, featuring spiked eggnog and Santa Shots. Why not Skype…
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Connecting with Family over the Holidays in Meaningful Ways
This holiday season may be your first sober in a long time. If that’s the case, you may be facing a common dilemma in early recovery: how to connect with family over the holidays. Connecting in positive and meaningful ways can strengthen your resilience to relapse, after all— but the reverse can also be true…
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5 Tips for How to Handle Family Conflict This Holiday Season
Tis’ the season for being around loved ones. For most of us, that includes the prospect of family drama, which usually comes in the form of one disagreement or another. And research shows that interpersonal conflict with family members is a major relapse trigger. This reality means the holidays are an especially vulnerable time for…
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A Free Relapse Prevention Toolkit for the Holidays, From Our House to Yours
Since it first aired December 8, more than 2,300 viewers have tuned in for the live conversation that Beach House Center for Recovery hosted on its Facebook page, and which featured timely tips for preventing holiday relapse. As part of a free monthly series that Beach House offers as a service to our local and…
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Role of Religion in Recovery
When Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, the question “What’s your religion?” meant, “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” The only other alternative was Jewish—Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists lived somewhere in exotic Asia, and anyone who self-identified as atheist was looked on almost as somebody from another planet. Today, thousands of Americans are openly proud of…
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Helping Your Family Kick the Enabling Habit
When someone develops a substance addiction, well-meaning family members often become “enablers”—out of denial, pride or fear, they begin “helping” in ways that make it easier for the addiction to continue: They make up excuses for why their family member is too sick to go to work, the car has a fresh dent or the…
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“Bad” Stress vs. “Good” Stress
The word “stress” carries so many negative connotations, many people are unaware that medical science recognizes negative and positive forms of stress. We’ve all heard of “distress,” mostly in the context of extreme emotional upset. But its constructive counterpart, “eustress,” is a stranger to the average vocabulary. STRESS FROM THE SCIENTIST’S PERSPECTIVE European endocrinologist Hans…
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Balancing Long-Term Planning with Living in the Moment
If you try to live by proverbs, you soon learn that life is full of paradoxes. Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. Out of sight out of mind, but absence makes the heart grow fonder. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. And one such seeming…
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“The 12 Steps of Forgiveness” by Paul Ferrini
Welcome to Beach House Center for Recovery’s Monthly Book Club! Each month, a member of our community recommends a book that inspired them, changed their life, helped a loved one through a tough time, or is simply too helpful to overlook. This month, Tammy Davis recommends “The 12 Steps of Forgiveness” by Paul Ferrini. Tammy…
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4 Keys to Integrating Gratitude in Your Recovery
When we talk about having an attitude of gratitude in recovery, what we’re really talking about is the practicing of gratitude. That distinction can be helpful for those of us who fall into the “glass-half-empty” category. An “attitude of gratitude” sounds a bit like you have to be born with it—like it’s either in your…
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3 Eye-Opening Ways That Gratitude Can Strengthen Your Support System
With Thanksgiving around the corner, this month we’ve been unpacking the theme of gratitude as it relates to recovery. The physical and mental health benefits of gratitude are numerous, according to equally abundant research, much of it by researchers at the University of California Berkeley (UCB). (This short article on UCB’s website summarized the key…
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3 Tips for How to Savor a First Thanksgiving Without Alcohol
If this Thanksgiving will be a first without alcohol for you, you may be thinking that your main concern is making it through the day without a drink. (And, to be sure, if the only two options were white-knuckled sobriety or an alcohol relapse, I’d be rooting for the first.) But there’s actually a far…
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