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LoveWithBoundaries

Am I Helping or Enabling? The Wisdom to Know the Difference

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For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I love the Serenity Prayer. I’m not a fan of the way it’s recited at the end of every 12-Step meeting, in a quick, sing-song kind of way. In fact, even as I said it that way with everybody else for the first 10 years of my own recovery from many addictive behaviours, I began to feel curious about this Prayer and what it really meant. As I dug deeper, I discovered it to be one of the simplest, most profound pieces of writing I had ever experienced. And now, as an Addictions Therapist for over 30 years, I often use it with my clients to help provide both simplicity and clarity in sometimes very complicated circumstances.

I have written several articles about the Serenity Prayer over the years, which can be found on my Blog and the Free Articles page on my website. Today, however, I want to focus mostly on the last line:

“The Wisdom to Know the Difference”

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Addiction and Recovery: What Do Addicts REALLY Need?

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Whenever I hear clients repeating themselves in our therapy sessions, I take notice.

Their repetition alerts me that something is really important to them. Sometimes they’ll tell me the same story more than once, other times they will ask the same questions a few times. In other cases, they will repeat words—especially when they are striving to let me know how they feel.

So when I began receiving emails this past week from both colleagues and clients containing the same link to the same TED talk about addiction, my curiosity was piqued. [Read more…]