Texas Addiction Recovery Blog
Seniors and Substance Use Disorder: Let’s Not Forget Them
A few years back, a unique episode of Intervention aired: Elena was a 63 year old woman living in Fortuna, California with a substance use disorder problem: she snorted crystal meth and popped painkillers endlessly. As an LGBTQ-identified woman, she'd grown up in the...
Not Such a Pretty Package
Canada is proposing legislation that might help curb the abuse of nicotine and cigarettes in that country. The country’s proposal? It wants to require cigarette manufacturers to use plain packaging for their cigarettes. All cigarette packaging would include the same...
Lifting Stigmas
The more research I do and the more blog posts I write, the less I understand the stigmas surrounding drug and alcohol abuse. Assigning stigmas to substance use disorderrs doesn’t help the substance use disorderrs. It certainly doesn’t accomplish anything for anyone....
Dirty Dealings and the Opioid Epidemic
Just when you thought the news about the opioid epidemic couldn’t get any worse…. It appears that groups like the Pain Care Forum may have had a role in the opioid epidemic. Opioids, if you remember, are drugs that are related to opium. They're also known as opiates....
More about Prince and Fentanyl
We keep hearing about Prince in the news. Sadly, it’s not for his music. We’ve also talked about him in these blogs. Again, it wasn’t because of his music. As you’ve probably heard, Prince died in April, 2016 from an overdose of fentanyl. Fentanyl is an opioid, a...
Positive Emotions
Yep, this is another blog post about emotions. Will it be the last? We can’t promise that. After all, emotions, addiction, and recovery are all closely related. They influence each other in complex ways. Emotions can contribute to substance use disorder, but rehab...
Talking about Emotions
This is another post about emotional health and recovery. Are we beating a dead horse by talking about the same subject? Maybe. I hope not. But seriously, emotions are a rich topic. We can talk about different aspects of emotions and recovery and not really talk about...
Improving Our Emotional Health
We’ve talked recently how emotions can be powerful things. They can lead us to good things and bad things. Trying to cope with emotions can even lead us to abuse drugs and alcohol. Sadly, this is a common occurrence. We’ve all heard of people who say they drink or use...
Emotions and Substance Use Disorder
People dismiss or try to hide their emotions, but it’s not that easy. Although we can’t often define or explain them, emotions can rule our lives. This can be good. Emotions can help us fall in love, care for our children, succeed in our careers, and find our passions...
Little Things Mean a Lot
Little things mean a lot. That phrase might seem something like a cliché, but I think it’s a good phrase for the rehab and recovery processes. After all, we’ve been talking a lot about success and failure lately. It seems like most of us measure success in ways that...