Maintaining Your Emotional Immunity During COVID-19: How to Create a Sense of Calm in Uncertain Times

Read some tips that will help you to manage anxiety and actively create some balance and calm throughout this challenging period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More

Parental Addiction: Children are the First Responders

By Tian Dayton, Senior Fellow at The Meadows Children experience a great deal of emotional pain when they watch the parents they love, look up to, and need to feel safe and secure exhibit the kind of behavior that is part of addiction. Children experience deep anxiety. Read More

Facing A National Emergency with the Opioid Crisis

You may have recently heard the news that on Thursday, President Trump said he was preparing to officially declare the United States’ worsening epidemic of opioid overdoses as a national emergency. “The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency,” Mr. Trump told reporters before a security briefing in Bedminster, N.J. “It’s a national emergency.” Read More

A Kick in the Gut: How You Can Jumpstart Your Gut Health for a Longer, Happier Life

When you think about your overall health, which parts of your body do you think are the most important? You probably envision your heart, brain, and even kidneys or liver. Do you ever think about your gut? Gut health has taken center stage in the world of food, health, and… Read More

The Cycle of Trauma and Addiction

By: Claudia Black, Ph. D. Clinical Architect of the Claudia Black Young Adult Center at The Meadows Addiction encourages trauma and trauma can encourage addiction. This process becomes a vicious circle or negative feedback loop, with trauma contributing to addiction, which in turn fuels more trauma, which encourages still more addiction, and so on and so on. The Claudia Black Young Adult Center treats substance and process addictions, recognizing them to be primary disorders that reinforce each other and are often fueled by traumatic experiences. Here are some examples of how this process plays out: Read More

Gaming: The Addiction for a New Generation

Video games are great escapes from the world. If as a young adult you struggle with real-life relationships, feel pressure from unrealistic expectations, feel powerless, or defeated and inadequate, games are hypnotizing, allowing you to dissociate from real-life stresses at home, school, and work. Gaming offers many rewards, from escape from… Read More

The Connection Between Love Addiction and Love Avoidance

By Jean Collins LCSW, LISAC, CSAT, Executive Director of Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows What are love addiction and love avoidance, and what do they have to do with love? Things can get very muddy for women who struggle with self-defeating relationship patterns. Fortunately for women whose lives… Read More

Distorted Love: Adult Attachment Styles and Love Addiction

By Alexandra Katehakis, Ph.D.(c), MFT, CST-S, CSAT-S, Former Senior Fellow at The Meadows For decades, researchers have struggled to define the unconscious processes of irrational love paramount in myths and fairy tales. Lovers in these stories are portrayed as love-struck, driven to tantrums or immature behavior, wholly bewitched by the… Read More

Signs That You Need Help for Sex Addiction

By Dr. Georgia Fourlas, LCSW, LISAC, CSAT Clinical Director of Rio Retreat Center Workshops at The Meadows “Are my sexual behaviors really a problem?” Some people addicted to sex know the answer to that question, even if they refuse to admit it. Other people aren’t so sure. Sometimes, sexual behaviors… Read More

How We Shortchange Men in Trauma and Addiction

By: Dan Griffin, MA When I went to school to learn how to work with people with addictive disorders, I got a lot of great guidance: Brain science. Internal family systems. Motivational Interviewing. Models of change. Working with the criminal justice population. Working with women. Cultural influences on addiction and recovery. Read More