CRP's Life in Recovery Podcast

Our guest today, Sam, leads us to the grand finale of Season 2! He shares about learning how to trust himself to make positive change now that he’s gotten a year clean. We discuss how many of us used to make changes in our lives due to survival or self-sabotage until it just became normal. We hope for change in recovery to look more like growth, but how do we know the difference? We take a look at...

Our guest today, Jaclyn, has over two years clean and breaks the ice with some humor around navigating dating in recovery! Through conversation we explore our motivations behind sex, relationships, and most importantly the relationship we’re building with ourselves along the recovery journey. Not only are we learning what we’re looking for in others, we’re discovering what it is WE have. Afterall,...

Today, Elyse brings in our guest Arianna who describes her journey with gaining tools in recovery yet having trouble with accumulating clean time. She talks about the “switch” and how there seems to be a struggle between our old self and the one we’re learning to grow into. Elyse describes this as being something that we’re actually constantly doing throughout our recovery journey; there are many...

Today, Elyse brings in our guest Arianna who describes her journey with gaining tools in recovery yet having trouble with accumulating clean time. She talks about the “switch” and how there seems to be a struggle between our old self and the one we’re learning to grow into. Elyse describes this as being something that we’re actually constantly doing throughout our recovery journey; there are many...

Today we have our guest Genesis with a year and some change clean. She tells us how giving recovery a try helped her to let go of using, and also gave her awareness to see all the other issues. She identifies some barriers most of us struggle with- procrastination, lack of discipline, and impatience. In our discussion we end up drilling down to the root of these problems such as fear, insecurity,...

Theresa, with 45 years clean talks about her recovery journey and taking care of her body, mind, and spirit. She walks us through how she started out- just starting with staying clean, just showing up at the gym, just sitting still for a couple minutes- and how these things evolved over time. She shares her realization of learning the importance of some of these aspects simply by experiencing the...

On today’s episode, our guest Keri gets current about some of the tougher recovery subjects- from doing an honest self-assessment to moving through grief in recovery and mending the wreckage of our past. In our conversation today, we discuss some of the core issues that arise from these experiences and how we’ve navigated them. Through honestly looking at our patterns, we’ve been able to identify...

Our guest today, Seth, tells us he’s just hit his five-year mark in recovery! He shares about coming to a point that feels a lot like stability and maintenance. But what about what led up to that point? The instability, self-will, and damage? We discuss some tough subjects today such as coping with suicidal thoughts and their relationship to addiction and recovery. We also talk about how tools we...

Our guest, Markus, joins us today to talk about insecurity, loss, and goals. As usual we find that our seemingly unrelated topics actually have a lot to do with each other. First, we throw an idea around- insecurity- and how we believe it shapes the ways in which we show up in the world- needing to appear larger than life, or, on the other end of the spectrum- constantly apologizing for existing.....

In this episode, we talk about faith and how we’ve utilized it to chart a new course in our lives. If you see the word “faith” and cringe, you’re not alone! Some of us know exactly what that means, and some of us feel lost or angry when the word is thrown at us when we enter recovery. We’ve found that most humans, especially addicts, have trouble letting go of fear to make room for new growth whic...

We are right in the middle of the holidays, and we chat about this with our guest Andrea of 38 years clean in today’s episode. She shares with us which foundational things she has continued to do since the beginning of her recovery such as attending meetings and building a support. She also shares some recent life changes that are in the mix. We discuss how recovery is a continuous process of grow...

Our guest today, Gil, is one spiritual gangster! He shares about his difficult experiences of handling the recent death of his best friend due to addiction, preparing to go to prison CLEAN, and rebuilding broken relationships with family. Gil shares about how he’s been working a program while on pretrial for years and now has to take a pause from every wonderful thing that he’s built in his recove...

It could be said that addiction, in essence, is having an inherent problem with reality and finding ways to escape it despite the cost. In this podcast, we chat with our guest Miranda about how our thinking constantly veers toward escape even in recovery, whether it is through fantasizing, avoiding, procrastinating, or planning means of self-sabotage. We review actions we’ve taken from seeking out...

Welcome back to the Life in Recovery podcast as we kick it off with Season 2! We brought back Nick F, with all his years of recovered wisdom to discuss stress. Nick talks about his stressors of new life changes, fear of success and the unknown. New things can be interesting and exciting yet also stressful since we aren’t sure what to expect. We discuss a theory that when the stressors are greater...

Today we discuss creativity in addiction versus recovery and how it interacts with things like feeling depressed, down, worthless, etc. for us. Barriers to creativity that we identify in this episode are getting stuck in fantasy, needing outside validation, falling into procrastination, comparing ourselves to others, and seeking instant gratification. Through discussion we find that positive perce...

In this episode, we begin to explore anger- where does it come from? what does it do for us? what happens when it becomes dysfunctional and how do we break free? We discuss how instantaneous anger feels and how that reactivity helps us to survive against external threats and regain control over our environment. Addiction, trauma, or any situation that requires constant survival often creates never...

In this episode, our guest of over 44 years clean gives us a glimpse of what to expect in the long haul, the differences he's experienced throughout time, and how working a program progresses from simply achieving freedom from addiction to overall improvements of the human condition. We talk about how addiction is not being ok with what is- I need more, different, now....the grass appears greener...

Our guest for today- Nick, has been clean for over two decades, so we start our session by asking him to drop some knowledge on us. One of Nick's gems is that "mediocrity is delicious." He expands on this due to our puzzled faces- after all we're addicts- we're special, no we're the worst, no you're the worst, we need stimulation, no validation...what is it? Nick breaks it down for us as simple pr...

Toxic patterns in relationships- romantic, family, or otherwise can cause immense pain even in recovery. In today's session, your hosts Elyse and Marc chat with friend Andrew about our experiences with this issue. We discuss how similar negative relationship patterns are to using substances- addiction to the roller coaster, chasing the euphoria, the relationship to self-worth, fear of change, fant...

As usual, we start our conversation in one direction, land in another, then it all circles back! Today we explore some of the drivers of resentment like low self-worth, then question if self-esteem is necessary first to drive behavior change when behavior change seems to increase self-esteem and reduce things like resentment. Sound confusing and ironic? It is! Let's explore... We start our discuss...

How do we get through situations that could trigger us? In this session, we start out talking about how to get through pain and surgeries in recovery and find that the solution is similar to the way we get through normal, ongoing life in recovery- with the support of others to keep us accountable. We refer to the tool Accountabilibuddy in CRP's Toolkit Book 2 (p. 31) which is a simple list of five...

How does behavior change begin? Do we reach a pain point when everything we've done has stopped working or driven us into a corner? Whether recovering from addiction, trauma, or both- how do we move into a place of willingness to get somewhere different? In this episode, we discuss some of the drivers we've found that jumpstart initial change such as other people and outside sources pointing out o...

Welcome to early recovery- do good things for yourself even though you don't care about yourself yet. How do we navigate this irony? We talk about the issue that arises when we do feel like nothing matters and everything else becomes an option, including destroying our lives again. So how do we act as if we care? Desperation and avoiding negative consequences can certainly help. We also talk about...

It gets real today- sometimes we just say f*** it. Nick talks about how he acted on the f***-its and how he found himself regretting that choice. Why do so many of us get trapped in that early recovery pattern of relapse- the 4- 6 month or so shuffle...get clean, use, get clean, use? We talk about addictive thinking from the viewpoint that nothing is ever "enough"-the reward, the progress, even th...

Here we go again with this routine shit- that's how we think of recovery sometimes, right? Today, we start out talking about how even though consistency is key to recovery, we often get stuck in the perception that it's mundane as compared to the chaos of addiction. Often our mindset is that the grass is always greener on the other side until we get there. How difficult it is to stick with what is...