Are you a jazz fan? To be honest, that is kind of a tricky question to answer. After all, jazz is a word that can be applied to quite a number of styles of music. There’s big band jazz. There’s bebop. There’s fusion. Spend some time listening to jazz on the radio and...
As a rule, do you think of yourself as a positive person? Do you tend to focus on the good things in your life, expect the best of others, and look back on your past with happiness and pride? If you answered “yes” to those questions, we congratulate you. If, however,...
For some people, the moment of leaving residential treatment for a substance use disorder and returning to the “real world” can be a daunting, anxiety-inducing experience. After all, while in treatment you have worked hard to regain your sobriety in an environment...
If you were to rank holidays that are associated with free-flowing alcohol, you would probably put New Year’s Eve in the number one spot. Sure, there is lots of drinking on St. Patrick’s Day, on Cinco de Mayo, and on the Fourth of July (too often by people who also...
Thanksgiving is on its way, and many of us are probably already planning menus, identifying topics of conversation that won’t lead to arguments around the table, and trying to decide if any of our relatives can bring a pie that anyone else will want to eat. It can be...
We commonly talk about recovery from a substance use disorder as a journey. It is a useful metaphor because it highlights the ways in which recovery is always unfurling in front of us and can only be traversed one step at time. In this entry, however, we want to make...