Spring reminds us every year how life works. For something new to emerge, the old has to die away. Even if we don’t consciously take note of this happening, we get reminded of it annually. For us in the treatment field, there’s a deep metaphor here. 

By the time clients or family members pick up the phone to call us, they are usually in the midst of loneliness and desperation that has settled in for a long period of time. It feels like the deepest parts of the winter. But unlike winter, there is typically no sense of when the days will start to brighten and warm up.

In fact, many times, the hope that the days will get better has been stamped out by the disease of addiction. Often, by the time people reach us, they are under the impression that their lives are irrevocably damaged. Even if they think there’s a chance they or their loved one might stop using substances, they often carry a sense around with them that life will never really be good again. 

But based on over 45 years of experience, we know that this does not have to be the case. Although pain, grief, and loss are common to those entering recovery and must be encountered and felt, there is an alternate perspective on how we can view these heartaches.  

Rather than the end, we can see this period as a painful but potentially life-changing transition, an invitation to something new. 

The old way of life, centered around the addiction and all that it entails, is dying away. The former coping mechanisms, systems of denial, and avoidance strategies wear thin. And this process can be painful. 

Those previous ways of handling things simply will not work anymore for our clients. This is often true for our clients’ family members as well, who have grown so used to living under the sway of the family disease and codependent patterns it creates.

At times, this transition certainly can feel like dying. It’s difficult to find the words to express the loneliness people with addictions and their families feel as the disease progresses. 

These difficult feelings are thoroughly disorienting. The hope of something better can often feel impossible to access. That is where we come into the picture to help in this rebirth process. 

Along with clinical expertise, best practices, and individualized treatment plans, we carry the hope that is continually restored and renewed that recovery into a life full of meaning and connection is possible, no matter how impossible it seems. 

We carry that vision and hope for our clients and their families until they can carry it for themselves. 

We’ve seen it happen countless times. Like the early spring, the sun gradually stays out longer, and the cold begins to melt away. It often sneaks up on our clients and families in quiet moments. They may notice themselves genuinely laugh from their gut or relax their posture, perhaps for the first time in years. 

This melting away of the cold continues. All that is required is a posture of honesty, openness, and willingness to try something new.

Before long, life can be completely different for our clients and their families. A passage from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps, gives the most succinct description of this winter months’ transition into the spring of early recovery. 

“Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends – this is an experience you must not miss” (Big Book of AA, page 89).

In time, the genuine connections formed in active recovery create a sense of well-being and community strong enough to drive away even the longest and loneliest winter. 

At MARR, we firmly believe that this type of complete recovery is possible for people suffering from addiction and for their family members who are suffering as well. Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Professional success doesn’t make somebody exempt from having substance abuse problems. From our 45 years of working with professionals with addictions, we find that this statement might not be as obvious as it seems.

Some of our most beloved treatment groups that are consistently well attended by current clients at MARR and alumni are our Atlanta Recovering Professionals (ARP) Groups. In addition to individual therapy, mirror imaging, the other Phase I and II groups, the ARP groups are required for our clients in our Recovering Professionals Program.

Meeting twice a week as a large group and then again in smaller groups, these gatherings focus on the concerns unique to professionals in the early stages of recovery.

Many of these clients find the group so essential for their recovery that they consistently return to participate as volunteers, in some cases for decades after finishing treatment.

Why groups specifically for professionals?

As mentioned at the outset, a successful career doesn’t preclude a person from substance abuse difficulties. In fact, it can make addiction or alcoholism more difficult for a person to recognize in some cases.

Denial of addiction is common across the board, regardless of the individual’s work situation or vocation. But people who have managed to maintain careers while also dealing with worsening substance abuse issues often develop a more profound sense of denial about their addiction.

To preserve a career that they have worked hard to achieve, professionals often become experts at hiding their addictions, both from others and themselves. When you add all the exterior signs of outward success to this naturally occurring denial, it becomes even more challenging to see how one’s substance use is a problem. Many professionals with substance use disorder appear as if they have their lives pretty well put together from the outside.

Unfortunately, what this logic overlooks is the fact that substance use disorder is a progressive disease. Typically only after professionals start suffering from more visible and difficult-to-hide consequences do they seek treatment. But in such cases, the addiction has likely been progressing for years, or even decades, under the surface.

Whether they realize it or not, by the time our professional clients end up at MARR, their alcoholism or drug addiction has likely affected every aspect of their lives in significant ways. Many of these effects have managed to go unnoticed because their career has helped to keep up appearances that all is well.

Other professionals who are further along in recovery, who have worked through similar forms of denial, can help newer clients see how their disease has likely been affecting them in ways they hadn’t realized. They can share from their own experience how career success may have covered up red flags that were present for a long time.

Also, many times it is the ARP groups that relieve deeply held shame. In cases when a significant incident like the intervention of an employer or a licensing board mandates treatment, open and honest sharing from others who have dealt with similar stresses provides an invaluable source of hope to professionals in early recovery. A client may discover in these groups that she is not the only dentist to have diverted medication—a secret she thought she would never be able to talk to anybody about. Or a teacher may meet other people who drank before leaving for work in the morning.

Connections in this group also help the clients find hope that they can return to their careers. Many clients who check into treatment assume that they will never work in their field again. However, this is hardly ever the case for those who stay in recovery and comply with their licensing or other oversight boards. The ARP groups provide clients in early recovery with living examples of people who have been in their situation and have returned to work.

ARP groups are a unique and valuable source of insight, relief, hope, and guidance for men and women in a crisis point in their lives and careers. These sources of strength naturally emerge from a group of peers who have confronted circumstances and persevered to find meaning and connection in the very things about themselves they thought they never could face. And the alumni volunteers who return for the group feel blessed and grateful that their past pain can be of use to those new in the recovery process.

These professionals form a community of mutual aid that helps to remind all parties involved of the possibility of recovery, in which they are no longer defined by their career but can use their professional background and skills to help and connect with others.

Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Around Valentine’s Day, we often think about the people in our lives that we love and how we can express that love to them. We wanted to take a moment in this blog post to reflect on loving and taking care of ourselves and how that actually helps us love others.

For people in early recovery, self-care often involves relearning how to meet basic physical needs that have gone neglected for a long time. This can often include returning to a consistent and healthy schedule of meals as well as regular exercise and sleep. It usually also involves restoring basic emotional and spiritual needs that have gone unmet, like the needs for security, connection, and recreation.

For family members, their lives have often become consumed by the person with the addiction. After years of constantly watching over and cleaning up after their loved one, their physical, mental, and spiritual well-being has likely been affected in significant ways. Often family members get to a point where they also are not sleeping, eating well, or otherwise neglecting their basic emotional and spiritual needs. And many times, reincorporating these practices is the first step to proper self-care. 

It all sounds easy enough. However, when deciding to do something for ourselves, we might fear that the people close to us will feel neglected or cheated out of our attention. But we might be surprised. Often people who care about our well-being derive deep satisfaction from seeing us take care of ourselves. 

A MARR family counselor once recalled a family session in which a client in early recovery told his wife that it made him feel happy whenever he saw her taking time out of her day to go running. This revelation was a surprise to her. She thought he might feel like she was ignoring him during this time. But of course, she wasn’t ignoring him, and he knew that. Properly taking care of ourselves gives us the strength and emotional capacity to show up to love others in our lives. 

Sometimes self-care is more challenging in the short term. For people suffering from addiction, checking into treatment might not be the thing they want to do at the moment. But it is undoubtedly a better way to take care of themselves than taking that next drink or drug.

In the case of family members of people with addictions, self-care often involves setting healthy boundaries. Doing this can often feel cold or uncaring, but healthy boundaries force the person with an addiction to confront the reality of their illness. Even though it is hard, it is actually the loving thing to do. 

When addiction is involved, we often need help to practice self-care, but we don’t even know where to start. Addiction has a way of confusing everyone. Even when we think we are caring for ourselves or others, we can sometimes unknowingly cause them and ourselves harm. 

If you need some help sorting through how you can take care of yourself and your loved ones, our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take. Call us at (678) 805-5100 or reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Self-care is foundational to being a happy, whole, and connected human being and foundational to loving others in the best way we can. Healthy self-care, which contributes to healthier family dynamics, is one of the most important goals we have for all of our clients and their family members.

January is synonymous with heartfelt resolutions. We tell ourselves about how this year “everything is going to be different.”  

Unfortunately, for many of us, by the time February rolls around that new gym membership is getting used less and less. We avoid even opening the closet that we swore we were finally going to organize. The diet has completely been thrown out, and we finally just delete the language-learning app from our phones.

Perhaps even more painful than any of these other failed resolutions, year after year, some of us may have told ourselves, or listened to our family members say out loud, “This is the year that I’m going to quit drinking and using.” Or at least: “This year I’m going to get things under control.”

Yet despite the best intentions, this important resolution continues to fall by the wayside. 

For 45 years we have worked with people who repeatedly have tried and failed to keep this resolution, in January and throughout the rest of the calendar year as well. Whatever they may think about themselves, it is not because they are “bad people” or that they are not “trying hard enough.” These are often the mistaken ideas people with addictions have about themselves, but they are not true.  

Rather, with addiction, we are up against a disease that is bigger than the individual. It’s something that their own willpower alone is no match for. 

We have found that with the proper clinical support, 12 Step immersion, and the residential treatment that we provide that long-term recovery is possible. This is even the case for people who have gone through multiple treatment centers and continue to relapse.

For our clients, their past failures are their greatest assets. It is the failures that help remind them that they alone are powerless over their disease. But with the right support, these past failures can be the foundation for a life full of purpose, meaning, and connection.

The 9th Step Promises are typically read aloud at the beginning of every A.A. meeting, and they boldly state, “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.”

At MARR, we firmly believe that this type of complete recovery is possible for people suffering from addiction and for their family members who are suffering as well. But we also believe that it cannot be done alone. 

Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 805-5100, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

For many of us, the holiday season brings with it a sense of hope.

This time of year often gives us much-needed time away from our hectic work lives. It provides opportunities to reconnect with family and friends, and oftentimes, the holidays include religious observances that give people the time and space to reflect on their deepest values.

For many of our clients and their family members, recovery means slowing down, and the holidays can provide that. This change of pace can serve as an invitation to let our Higher Power come into our lives in more significant ways. A little bit of stillness can help us cut through the urgency of daily life with all its “musts” and “shoulds” and allow us to make way for the rhythms of our own souls and connection to something deeper.

But this isn’t always the case, particularly for people who are still struggling with addiction in their own lives or within their family. Rather than providing hope, the holidays can introduce increased uncertainty and pain.

Addiction is a disease of isolation, and the holidays can serve as a painful reminder of this. When addiction is part of the family dynamic, holiday gatherings intended to be restorative and hopeful may lead to revisiting painful relationships. Overpowering feelings can unexpectedly flare up in such situations. A family Christmas party can easily lead to heated disagreements, waves of sadness, a sense of loss, or other lingering difficult emotions.

Any family member of a person with an addiction has likely experienced a holiday gathering where a loved one drank too much and became a source of unwanted attention. And any person who has struggled with addiction has likely experienced the hopelessness and sense of remorse the next morning after having ruined another family gathering.

And in cases where the disease of addiction is in its later stages, friends and family members of the person in active addiction may not even have contact with them, which is painful for everyone involved.

If you find yourself in any of these difficult situations, we want to acknowledge that no matter how alone you may feel this holiday season, we can assure you that you are not. In the course of 45 years, we have worked with countless others who have been where you are and have returned to a life full of purpose, meaning, and deep connections.

Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 805-5100 or reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

The first step away from isolation and desperation towards connection and hope usually involves reaching out to talk.