Skip to content
  • Council
    • About Us
      • Our History
      • Leadership & Board
      • 2024 Annual Report
    • Newsroom
    • Careers
    • Blog
    • Resources
    • Stay Connected
  • Services
    • The Place to Start
    • Counseling & Treatment
      • Outpatient Treatment
      • Therapeutic Counseling
      • Children & Adolescents
      • Therapist Staff
    • Community Programs
    • Workshops & Trainings
      • Family Workshop
      • Behavioral Health Training
      • Recovery Coach Training
      • Breaking the Silos Symposium
    • Substance Use & Mental Health
    • Recovery Activities
      • Twelve-Step Meetings
      • Yoga
      • Meditation
    • Rent a Venue
  • Events
    • Council Luncheons
    • Evening With
    • Sober Recreation
    • Community Events
  • Support Us
    • Ways to Give
    • Volunteer
    • Speaker Series
  • Contact Us
  • Give Now
  • Get Help Now
  • Council
    • About Us
      • Our History
      • Leadership & Board
      • 2024 Annual Report
    • Newsroom
    • Careers
    • Blog
    • Resources
    • Stay Connected
  • Services
    • The Place to Start
    • Counseling & Treatment
      • Outpatient Treatment
      • Therapeutic Counseling
      • Children & Adolescents
      • Therapist Staff
    • Community Programs
    • Workshops & Trainings
      • Family Workshop
      • Behavioral Health Training
      • Recovery Coach Training
      • Breaking the Silos Symposium
    • Substance Use & Mental Health
    • Recovery Activities
      • Twelve-Step Meetings
      • Yoga
      • Meditation
    • Rent a Venue
  • Events
    • Council Luncheons
    • Evening With
    • Sober Recreation
    • Community Events
  • Support Us
    • Ways to Give
    • Volunteer
    • Speaker Series
  • Contact Us
  • Give Now
  • Get Help Now

Blog

Rob Lowe Wows Record Crowd at The Council’s Fall Luncheon, Raises Over $600K

Rob Lowe Speaks at The Council on Recovery's Fall Luncheon

Iconic Hollywood star, Rob Lowe, helped The Council on Recovery’s Fall Luncheon exceed all expectations in terms of size, money raised, and rave reviews from attendees. Nearly 1,270 enthusiastic Council supporters filled the Hilton Americas grand ballroom on October 20th to hear the celebrated actor, author, and producer tell his personal story of recovery from alcoholism and addiction. In the process, he helped The Council raise more than $600,000 to fund its critical programs and services. Continue reading “Rob Lowe Wows Record Crowd at The Council’s Fall Luncheon, Raises Over $600K” →

  Date: October 26, 2017November 27, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Featured, Blog, Highlights, Uncategorized
  Tags:  addiction  alcohol  drug-free  Fall Luncheon  Houston  recovery  rehab  rob lowe  The Council on Recovery  

Fighting the Opioid Epidemic Using New Technology

Facing a rapidly worsening opioid epidemic, federal health organizations are turning to new technology to fight the growing problem. Leading the way, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created a mobile application called the CDC Opioid Guideline Mobile App. 

CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline Mobile App
An app created by the CDC in order for health professionals to monitor their patients’ pain and opioid medications. Photo credit: CDC.

The app features a Morphine Milligram Equivalent (MME) calculator that helps give prescription recommendations, and lets health providers practice effective communication skills. It is free and available to download on any smartphone. The CDC is optimistic that the app will help manage the legal distribution of opioid drugs more efficiently.

Cities across the U.S. have also found ways to tackle the opioid epidemic using new technology in their local communities. The Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP) helps first responders and public health officials locate areas where overdoses are happening. It also helps predict potential opioid drug trafficking areas.

Continue reading “Fighting the Opioid Epidemic Using New Technology” →

  Date: October 24, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Blog, Health, Highlights, Medium
  Tags:  addiction  app  application  data  drug addiction  drugs  epidemic  mobile  new technology  opioid addiction  overdose  recovery  software  technology  The Council on Recovery  

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 16

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 16 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

Dante and Virgil, having finally escaped Hell, the Inferno, find themselves traveling through the Earth into the light of day, on the other side of the world. Now they must traverse upward, through the circles of Purgatorio. In the Church of the time, Purgatory was a place where souls, otherwise in God’s grace, needed further purification, further temporal punishment to become holy enough to enter Heaven. In Dante’s poem, Purgatory is effectively the reverse of Hell, structured as a mountain with rising terraces, each dedicated to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, in reverse order from The Inferno. Each terrace is where souls with one of the sins encounter a process of purification dictated by the representative sin.

The punishments are much less severe, temporal in length, and designed to “correct” and “purify” the soul.  We could see this as a representative parallel to our efforts in our early stages of Sobriety.  This seems a reasonably good parallel to the practice of working the Steps of Four through Nine.  We must record our history in the disease and then reveal it to another.  From this we identify our “defects of character,” ask God for their removal, and then work to correct the effects they had on our life by seeking forgiveness from all those we had harmed.

Having achieved such a purification in Purgatorio, the souls reach a pinnacle, a sort of paradise on earth.  The top of the Purgatorio mountain is just such a paradise, it is the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. For us, this could be seen as a place of Steps 11 and 12, where we develop the conscious contact with God and begin to practice the principles and pass on the revelations.

From here, Dante proceeds on to Heaven, Paradiso. Virgil has had to leave him in Purgatory, since, in the beliefs of the Church of the time, his not being a Christian has obviated his worthiness to enter Heaven. In his place, Dante has connected with Beatrice, the love of his early life and the symbol of purity and perfection, and she becomes his companion in Heaven. They ascend above the Earth, traveling to the Moon and the Planets, each housing a realm more beautiful and bright than the one before, until finally reaching the company of all the angelic beings and the Trinity.  The brightness and serenity of this final place is a perfect representation for those of us in the glow of fully committed Sobriety, perhaps the most perfect rendition of the “Sunlight of the Spirit.”

  Date: October 19, 2017November 27, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Guest Bloggers, Blog, Featured, Highlights

The Council Teams Up with KPRC Channel 2 to Fight Opioid Addiction

Counselors at the phone bank at KPRC on October 6th.
Counselors from The Council on Recovery participating in the KPRC phone bank. From Left to Right: Desmond White, Lisa Simmons-Arnold, Christine Yeldell, Leonard Jeffcoat, and Kara Grant. Photo Credit: The Council on Recovery.

With the opioid epidemic becoming a community-wide problem, The Council on Recovery teamed up with KPRC Channel 2 during its October 6th broadcast of “Opioid Nation: An American Epidemic“. The Council sent five of its licensed counselors to staff a live phone bank throughout the one-hour program, as well as during KPRC’s afternoon/evening newscasts. Continue reading “The Council Teams Up with KPRC Channel 2 to Fight Opioid Addiction” →

  Date: October 11, 2017November 27, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Featured, Blog, Highlights

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 15

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 15 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

Dante and Virgil, in the opening to the medieval epic poem, The Inferno, have begun their journey into the bowels of Hell. There are nine concentric, descending circles they must traverse, each dedicated to a certain group of sinners, each one more frightening and severe than the pervious. Dante, beginning a desperate search to find God, is extremely afraid. Virgil, the Latin scholar, is his guide.  The characterizations and descriptions of the groups of sinners in all the Levels, and their forever, eternal torment in Hell, provide stark and terrifying reminiscences of the events of our own lives in the acting out of our addictions. Dante’s and Virgil’s descent into and through Hell is necessary to get them to the recovery stages of Purgatory and eventually Heaven.

The sins and sinners of the Circles of the Inferno are organized generally in line with the Seven Deadly Sins, as promulgated by the medieval Church leading up to Dante’s time. Dante is using them both in a spiritual, political, as well as mythological sense.  They are dealt with by Dante according to the Church’s view of increasing severity:  lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence and fraud.

Forgetting about the nature of these offences for purposes of our analogy, it is interesting to see the horrific nature of the eternal punishments Dante describes for these sins.  From the point of view of pain and suffering, it is a vivid analogous journey of us in our addictions, before recovery, conveying the horror of what we all experienced in our disease.

In the descent, for example, they see souls wallowing in putrid muck and slime, others encased in frigid ice, or boiling in oil and pitch (“enormous bubbling boiling pitch”).  Many are on fire.  Those whose lives were engaged in endless violence “are steeped in a river of boiling blood.”  The greedy, those whose lives were lived as hoarders or wasters of money, are chained together “straining their chests against enormous (opposing) weights with mad howls,” railing at each other’s lack of restraint in life.

Finally Dante and Virgil reach the bottom of Hell, and come face to face with the Devil.  They then courageously claw their way over him to a hole in the earth and eventually emerge into day, on the other side of the world.  Here begins their journey to Purgatory. This confrontation and emergence, the subject of the next note, could be seen as a very vivid, if symbolic, inflection point for our own initiation into recovery.

  Date: October 3, 2017October 30, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Guest Bloggers, Blog, Featured, Highlights

Addicted to Comedy 2017

Celebrate National Recovery Month with The Council on Recovery at Addicted to Comedy 2017. Performers from previous years have included Shayla Rivera, Jose Sarduy, Kristin Linder, and Jamie Lissow. This year, comedians Jay LaFarr, Mike Vance, and the headliner, Rich Vos, will be serving up laughter all night long.  This event will be the ninth fundraiser hosted by The Council on Recovery for the Sober Recreation Committee (SRC).

Addicted to Comedy Flyer 2017

The annual Addicted to Comedy show will take place on Saturday, October 7th from 8 pm – 10 pm.  The event will be held in The Hamill Foundation Conference Center at 303 Jackson Hill St., Houston, TX 77007. Premium seating (first four rows) will be $30 and general admission is $20. To register, please visit www.councilonrecovery.org.

  Date: September 25, 2017  ·     Author: TCOR_Marketing  ·    Category: Blog, Featured, Highlights
Page 31 of 46« First‹ Previous272829303132333435Next ›Last »

Highlights

  • Welcome Chief Impact Officer, Tracey Burnett-Greenup

    We are excited to announce the newest addition to The Council’s Executive Leadership team, Tracey Burnett-Greenup, MLS(ASCP), LPC, who has …[...]
  • The Council on Recovery Welcomes Community Service Dog

    Meet The Council on Recovery’s newest team member, Emmy! Emmy, a three-year-old black Lab mix, came home to The Council’s …[...]
  • The Council on Recovery Earns Three-Year CARF Accreditation

    We are excited to share that after intense review, The Council has received a three-year accreditation from The Commission on …[...]
  • Houstonian Brené Brown Helps The Council on Recovery to Raise More Than $932,000

    Houstonian and New York Times bestseller Brené Brown inspired a crowd of more than 1,500 Houstonians at The Council on …[...]
  • How Mindfulness Meditations Can Help on Your Path to Sobriety

    As you navigate the ups and downs of recovery, finding inner peace and strength becomes paramount. Mindfulness meditations offer a …[...]

Categories

Archives

You know someone who needs us.

Start here at The Council.

  713.942.4100
  Get help now
Verify Approval for www.councilonrecovery.org

  Address
303 Jackson Hill Street
Houston, TX, 77007

Mail: P.O.Box 2768,
Houston, TX 77252-2768

  Phone
Local: 713.942.4100
Toll-free: 855.942.4100
Center for Recovering Families:
713.914.0556

  Facility hours
Mon-Thu: 8:30 am - 9:00 pm
Fri: 8:30 am - 5:00 pm
Sat: 8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Sun: Closed
See Call Center hours

  Call Center hours
Mon-Fri: 8:30 am - 5:00 pm
Weekend: Closed
See facility hours

© Copyright 2024 All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Terms of Service
Stay Connected

Stay Connected Email Sign Up

Job Announcement Request

Job Announcement Request Form

  • MM slash DD slash YYYY
  • Check one or more option - please note, not all locations may receive postings. Determination will be made based on job criteria and nature of placement site.

Notifications

  • Council
    • About Us
      • Our History
      • Leadership & Board
      • 2024 Annual Report
      • Back
    • Newsroom
    • Careers
    • Blog
    • Resources
    • Stay Connected
    • Back
  • Services
    • The Place to Start
    • Counseling & Treatment
      • Outpatient Treatment
      • Therapeutic Counseling
      • Children & Adolescents
      • Therapist Staff
      • Back
    • Community Programs
    • Workshops & Trainings
      • Family Workshop
      • Behavioral Health Training
      • Recovery Coach Training
      • Breaking the Silos Symposium
      • Back
    • Substance Use & Mental Health
    • Recovery Activities
      • Twelve-Step Meetings
      • Yoga
      • Meditation
      • Back
    • Rent a Venue
    • Back
  • Events
    • Council Luncheons
    • Evening With
    • Sober Recreation
    • Community Events
    • Back
  • Support Us
    • Ways to Give
    • Volunteer
    • Speaker Series
    • Back
  • Contact Us
  • Give Now
  • Get Help Now