The Aviary Recovery Center Blog

Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood? If you are a Sesame Street fan, you probably remember a song called “The People in Your Neighborhood.” Each segment featuring the catchy tune introduces viewers to the various kinds of people they might encounter in their neighborhood. A fireman, for example, or...

We Admit This Post is Making Us Hungry One of the great joys of what might be called “the big food holidays”—especially Thanksgiving and Christmas—is that there are often delicious leftovers to enjoy in the days that follow. Often, that includes turkey, which when combined with some other scrumptious ingredients,...

When you are in recovery from a substance use disorder, there is a reasonable chance that you will experience some embarrassment or guilt or shame related to the way you behaved before you got sober. Those are the sorts of the feelings that can cause you to isolate yourself from...

Here’s a question for you: When you think about the next few days or the next few weeks or the next few months or even the next few years, what are you looking forward to? Maybe something immediately springs to mind. An upcoming wedding (yours or someone else’s). A vacation...

Before we go any further, here is an essential reminder: Your most important goal or resolution for the New Year should be to reclaim and/or maintain your sobriety. That is the goal that makes all your other goals possible. With that said, we want to reflect on the tradition of...

It is always tricky to put people into categories. After all, each and every one of us is unique and complex and inconsistent and changing all of the time. Still and all, it can sometimes be useful to think about differences among people by considering characteristics that seem to provide...

During his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously told the nation, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It is an inspiring line, to be sure. But in our day-to-day lives, we tend to be afraid of all sorts of things. Spiders or heights or...

When you are in recovery from a substance use disorder, it is extremely important to stay focused on your ongoing and most important goal: staying sober one day at a time. That is easy to say and hard to do. In fact, with so many demands on our attention, your...

Maybe you have read a book—or a number of books—in the popular “Choose Your Own Adventure” series. These books lay out a story for a page or two and then offer the reader a choice. Each choice is followed by a page number: If you want to do X, turn...

There are several ways to think about a hammer. For example, Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame (an inspiration for a series of our blog entries) titled his memoir Every Tool’s a Hammer. On the other hand, in the 1960s, Abraham Maslow (drawing from a thought by Abraham Kaplan) wrote, “it...