July 26, 2021

What Is Sober Living and Why Should I Go There?

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Lifestyle, Support
sober living

Jaywalker Lodge believes in helping alcoholics and addicts every step of the way in recovery, so we’re especially glad to talk about sober living. Sober living is the transitional living environment between intense addiction recovery treatment and independent recovery living. In other words, sober living is the buffer between working the recovery program in a safe treatment environment and living the recovery lifestyle out in the big, beautiful world. Of course, there are lots of benefits of taking advantage of a sober living environment. But before we discuss why we should go to sober living, let’s get into what it is and why it was created in the first place. What Is Sober Living? Sober living is a little bit like treatment and a lot like living on our own. It’s the transition between an in-house, intense recovery treatment and fully independent living in recovery. Sober living is the safe…

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July 23, 2021

Taking Our Wellness Seriously

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Mental Health, Recovery
wellness

In early recovery, we are introduced to many new modes of living that we never knew before. It’s easy to see how things involving our general health and wellness went by the wayside when we were living in active alcoholism and addiction. Now, in recovery, we have the time, energy, and opportunity to pay attention to any areas of our life that went neglected in our disease. Now, in recovery, we can finally take our wellness seriously. This is not only a new opportunity for us, but it is also a responsibility. A glass can only spill what it contains. If we do not take care of ourselves, we will be unable to properly help anyone else — and helping others is not only one of the main purposes of recovery, it’s also the most surefire way to protect and maintain our recovery. Being of service to others is not…

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July 20, 2021

Is It Really a Life Beyond My Wildest Dreams?

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Recovery
dreams

Any alcoholic or addict new to recovery has surely heard someone in a meeting say something like, “Recovery has given me a life beyond my wildest dreams!” If you haven’t heard anybody say this, you will at some point. And the truth is, they aren’t wrong. But of course, this whole concept may sound absolutely absurd, especially to those of us who are brand-new to recovery. Typically, when we seek treatment and first enter the rooms of recovery, our lives are in shambles. We’re dealing with the fallout and consequences of a life overtaken by alcoholism or addiction. How could recovery grant us a life beyond our wildest dreams? We admit that it probably sounds crazy at first, but take a look around the next time you’re fellowshipping or at a meeting. Look at all the alcoholics and addicts who are sober in recovery. Listen to how long they’ve been…

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July 15, 2021

Celebrating Every Victory

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Lifestyle, Recovery
celebrating victory

It’s a major part of the Western mindset to focus on avoiding bad things rather than embracing good things, but especially with alcoholics and addicts like us. We love to focus on the negative, worry about escaping crisis, or generally sell ourselves short. Too often, we forget to celebrate the victories (big or small), embrace the positive, or at least peek at the bright side. It’s time to change all that and start to look at how we can adjust our perspective on a daily basis to include a bit more joy and celebration. Practice Makes Progress There are no quick fixes for altering a lifetime of skewing towards the negative. We’ve trained ourselves for years to see and focus on the bad. Our minds, habits, and attitudes won’t change overnight. It’s important that we don’t get discouraged. Good things take time, and so does learning how to see the…

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July 13, 2021

How Can I Get Out of This Rut?

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Recovery
stuck in a rut

It’s common for people from all walks of life to get stuck in a little rut now and then. We all get caught in a slump, a stretch of hard luck, or just plain down in the dumps from time to time. It could be caused by a specific event or circumstance, or it could be caused by nothing at all. Sometimes it just happens. It helps to know that this happens to everybody once in a while. It’s just a normal part of human life. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with us. It may not even mean that we did anything wrong. But as alcoholics and addicts in recovery, there is plenty we can do about it when it happens. Let’s take a closer look at ruts and how we bust out of them. Am I Depressed? This is a big question that we have to get out…

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July 7, 2021

Cease Fighting Everything and Everyone

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Recovery
fighting

The most common characteristic of alcoholics and addicts is defiance. Seriously, we are defiant and independent people. However, we are defiant to a fault. For most of us, it goes way beyond simply not being a pushover or marching to the beat of our own drum. For many of us, our defiant streak goes too far. We rebel even against sound advice or good reason. We are so unwilling to follow orders that we even ignore good sense much of the time. When defiance manifests like this, it can be extremely troublesome. Surely any of us can reach back into our past experiences and easily find a handful of times when our defiance caused us more trouble than it was worth. This is true for almost all alcoholics and addicts. If defiance is so common amongst us, but also so troublesome, what are we to make of it? And why…

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July 5, 2021

I Have No Faith. Can I Still Work the Twelve Steps and Recover?

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Recovery
faith

The matter of faith is a big question — a huge question, in fact. It touches people from every walk of life, whether they are alcoholics or addicts or not. And people have been wrestling with the issue of faith since the dawn of man. That’s a long time. Whether we have great faith or no faith, personal beliefs and inner faith are things that every person has a position on. Some believe that faith is all that matters, while others believe it doesn’t matter at all. These disparate positions can cause a lot of trouble, and that’s not an arena for us to step into. What we can weigh in on is faith in recovery. But we aren’t going to tell you what to believe — that’s not our place. What is our place is to help people understand how our personal position on faith plays into our recovery….

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July 2, 2021

Fun in Recovery

Posted by Jaywalker Lodge Staff in Recovery
fun in recovery

One of the biggest misconceptions about life in recovery is that all the fun stops. Suddenly, we aren’t drinking or using anymore and life will never be fun again. Let’s be honest here for a second. Was it really any fun being an active alcoholic and addict? The pain, the chaos, the wreckage, the drama, the constant need to feed the beast on our back — sounds like a total blast! It’s time to get real about this idea that life stops being fun when recovery starts. Life stopped being fun when we crossed that invisible line into alcoholism and addiction. Now that we’re in recovery, life can actually be fun again! Let Go of the Past This might seem unrelated to fun in recovery, but it has a lot more to do with it than you may think. One of the common roadblocks to enjoying our life in recovery is…

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June 30, 2021

I’m Afraid I’m Engaging in Addictive Behaviors. What Should I Do?

Posted by Jaywalker in Recovery, Treatment
addictive behaviors

For those of us with alcoholism or addiction, it may be helpful for us to understand that this disease does not limit its symptoms and manifestations to only alcohol and chemical substances. The disease of alcoholism and addiction can take many varied forms. In fact, we may be engaging in alcoholic or addictive behaviors without ever taking a drink or using a drug. Whether we are new or familiar with recovery, things like this can happen. It is common for us to discover that when we are sober, we may still be suffering from the disease — even in recovery. By no means whatsoever does this mean that the program of recovery is not working. No human being is perfect, and the disease we all share is especially tricky and insidious. If you are sober in recovery but fear that your alcoholism or addiction is taking new forms, there is…

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June 28, 2021

Have Patience With Yourself

Posted by Jaywalker in Mental Health, Recovery
patience

It’s a safe bet that you have a lot going on right now. We all have busy lives that are always changing, especially in recovery. There is always some 12 Step work to do, a meeting to attend, or somebody we can help! Particularly for those who are new to recovery, it may seem like things are changing all the time or there’s almost too much going on. But just as often, even with all the changes in our lives, we can’t stop ourselves from thinking about all the stuff that we wish we could change. As if there wasn’t enough happening already! Those of us in early recovery fall into this trap a lot, but anyone in recovery at any point can get caught up in rushing after a whole bunch of changes that we want to make. We see the things that we wish were different and we…

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