kathyberman

[kathyberman]

Pruning Codependency From My Life

Pruning Codependency From My Life

Having lived for 70 years at doing what I thought was serving others, I have had to learn how to relate to everyone from a position of not offering myself as a servant.

For six years now, I have pruning codependency from my life. I view codependency as giving too much. How do I judge when I am giving too much? I have two ways to tell. (1) If I am helping someone solve a problem, and they “yes,…

[kathyberman]

My Recovery Journey

After I came to recovery in 1976, my daughter (who was five years old at the time) told me that she had been telling the neighbors that I was an alcoholic. I was somewhat surprised because I didn’t know my neighbors very well. So I sat down and asked her to tell me what an alcoholic is. She said, ” Oh, Mommy, you know. It is someone who doesn’t drink and smiles a lot.” The only alcoholics she…

[kathyberman]

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) Offers the Leading Edge in Cognitive Retraining

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) Offers the Leading Edge in Cognitive Retraining

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) works so well because it helps clients learn what triggers his/her mind to choose destructive responses. At the same time, the client learns which coping skills help the most. Each of us is an individual so these triggers and coping skills will be unique for who we are.

[kathyberman]

Loving Someone Who is in Addiction is a Journey With Little Real Guidance

Loving Someone Who is in Addiction is a Journey With Little Real Guidance

Helping addicts involves three separate battles as well as dealing with addict’s behavior. These three extra battles take most of the time: (1) the stigma that the addict is causing the disease, (2) the intervention of how an addict finds help, and (3) the cruelty that requiring total abstinence from all chemical help is killing people.

Having had to find all my own answers about dual diagnoses,…

[kathyberman]

Codependency is the Emotional Foundation for All Addictions

Codependency is the Emotional Foundation for All Addictions

I was what was termed a “high-bottom” drunk because I suffered no rejection because of my alcohol use. In fact, when I quit, most of the drinkers I knew said that I couldn’t be an alcoholic because they drank more than I did. I always related in meetings that you don’t have to get hit by the train to hear the whistle blowing. That statement shut up my loudest critics. I can’t say that I was…

[kathyberman]

Stigma Causes Many to Not Receive Help for Addiction

Stigma Causes Many to Not Receive Help for Addiction

No other disease/medical condition suffers so much from lack of intervention and possible cure as does addiction. The public thinks, “Why don’t they just quit using?” That is what addiction looks like from the outside. From the inside (I am a recovering alcoholic) what it feels like is that I can’t quit using because–(million reasons). Because addiction solves one main cause of addiction. It…

[kathyberman]

Addiction Recovery A-Z Links Directory

Addiction Recovery A-Z Links Directory

I update this list annually (May 2018) as best I can. Few addiction recovery blogs last very long so I have kept ones that are no longer active. I started this blog, Emotional Sobriety, in November, 2004. I have since added 20 more blogs. Luckily I discovered curated content years ago. It is time-consuming because you bring together 2-3 sources for each blog post with the same topic for that…

[kathyberman]

How I Made the Connection With My Inner Child

How I Made the Connection With My Inner Child

One of the techniques I used early in my recovery to get in touch with my wounded feelings was accepting my inner child. Transactional Analysis helped me to discover my parent, child and adult states. Eric Berne was the founder of TA and introduced the idea of the games we play to get what we want.

Games People Playis the title of his first book and was a bestseller in the 1960’s. After 40 years…

[kathyberman]

In Recovery, Are You Being Transformed?

In Recovery, Are You Being Transformed?

“Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow. The caterpillar will become a breathtakingly beautiful butterfly. You will no longer have to pretend to be someone you’re not. You will no longer have to prove you’re good enough. When you embrace your shadow you will no longer have to life in fear. Find the gifts of your shadow and you will finally revel in all the glory of…

[kathyberman]

Healing is About Learning to Love Yourself

Healing is About Learning to Love Yourself

“Healing isn’t just about pain. It’s about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.”     Ellen Bass

From “Self Care” by Jennifer Brody:

“Self care is bringing awareness to your entire life.

It’s not limiting self care to just a facials or deep…

[kathyberman]

Creativity is Our Bridge to Joy

Creativity is Our Bridge to Joy

“Creativity takes the heavy mass of our lives and transforms it back into available energy. Taking the mundane or the weighted, the overlooked or the too familiar, art is able to re-show us ourselves and ourselves in the world. Art holding up a mirror to life is commonly misunderstood as realism, but in fact it is recognition. We see through our own fakes, our own cover stories, we see things as…

[kathyberman]

Self-Parenting Teaches Us How to Help Others As Well As Ourselves

Self-Parenting Teaches Us How to Help Others As Well As Ourselves

Having been an addictions counselor for years and in my personal recovery since 1976,  I know that healing comes from within. It usually begins with someone realizing that another person is loving them unconditionally. What is unconditional love? It is love from one person to another without ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we usually experience unconditional love from new people in our lives.

Af…

[kathyberman]

Use the Enneagram to Find Your Type and Your Fellow Co-workers Types

Use the Enneagram to Find Your Type and Your Fellow Co-workers Types

Overview of the Enneagram personality system

The Enneagram is a powerful and dynamic personality system that describes nine distinct and fundamentally different patterns of thinking, feeling and acting.

The word “ennea” is Greek for nine and “gram” means model or figure. Hence, the Enneagram is a diagram or star with nine points representing the nine personality patterns. Each of these nine…

[kathyberman]

Healing Means Matching Your Inner With Your Outer

Healing Means Matching Your Inner With Your Outer

“Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings…Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive…

[kathyberman]

24,000,000 Americans are in Addiction Recovery. 13% of the US Population.

24,000,000 Americans are in Addiction Recovery. 13% of the US Population.

Recovery support is moving from the dictates of the treatment industry to the rapidly growing field of recovery support. Treatment only happens for 11% of addicts. For those who do go to treatment, this is just the first step of a  lifelong journey to wellness. More people are identifying as being in recovery as opposed to identifying by the vehicle they used to find recovery such as 12 step…

[kathyberman]

Our Emotional Energies Provide Our Direction

Our Emotional Energies Provide Our Direction

The four types of emotional energy that we each have are creative, logic, relationship and grounding.

To gather energy, we use either grounding or creative energy.

In order to process energy, we use either logic or relationship energy.

The energies are:

1) Relationship energy—working with and being sensitive to others.

2) Logic energy—setting goals, planning action needed and analyzing resources…

[kathyberman]

The Family Roles We Adopted Set Up Patterns of Behavior

The Family Roles We Adopted Set Up Patterns of Behavior

Our self-image is formed by allowing ourselves to be influenced by various authority figures. As we mature and accept the responsibility of defining ourselves, these internalized voices of authority must each be examined and evaluated. It is only when we take back our own power to define ourselves that we are truly free.

Our conscious mind is where thoughts are formed. Our subconscious mind is…