The word substance has my attention lately. There is something both conceptually satisfying about it as well as experientially...

I’ve written elsewhere that you have to change to change. Pretty simple, right? But yet we all struggle with this. Even the smallest and...

I’m not sleeping well these days. My psycho-philosophical work with my addicted clients in treatment is too ripe a ground to explore...

Term: I’m going to use the term “addicted relationship” to mean when one person has an addiction and the other does not. Being in a...

For people quitting addiction, one of the most difficult aspects is not the actual quitting, is not accepting they have a problem, it’s...

Buddhism is founded upon what Siddhartha Gautama realized were the four noble truths of human existence.  I want to take those four noble...

One could say that a huge reason people seek therapy or struggle in life is due to some aspect of shame. Shame is a sense that something...

Last week I wrote about change and how we need to take action in order to change.  Sometimes change is also in how we see the world,...

One of my favorite authors, Irvin Yalom, MD, is a psychotherapist who has written a book entitled Existential Psychotherapy. I’m sure I...

In a brief addendum to my last post on Addiction is Good For you, I would like to share a quote from Rollo May (1977) in his book, The...

I’ve written before on the idea that addiction can give a person reason to look more deeply into his/her life, resolving issues, hurts,...

The more I work with the phenomenon of addiction, the more fascinating it becomes as an extremely dynamic coping strategy – dynamic in...

I work with couples that are trying to mend their relationships after or during the impact of an addiction. There is a typical dance...

I believe a major problem in how the general public, as well as some professionals, sees addiction is that it is too narrowly defined....

I’ve written a lot about having compassion toward those struggling with addiction and that we need to remove a lot of the moral...

Harm Reduction is a philosophy that is surrounded with a lot of controversy, confusion, and intrigue. What is it? What does it really...

When someone struggling with addiction has a relapse it can feel like the end of the world – for both themselves and their loved ones....

Peace is found, not through repressing experience, but through acceptance of whatever comes up. (Thomas Bien in his book Mindful...

One use for addiction in a person’s life is to fill up the emptiness. We all do many things to fill the “hole” in our lives. I have...

What is counselling? What goes on in a counselling session? It is just for those with real messed up lives, right? No, not true. It is...