Small Group Topic Generators
Topic starters for small groups in inpatient and outpatient treatment. The facilitator chooses a participant, generates a topic, and the participant answers its questions with the group's support. Each generator opens in The Recovery Files app.
Foundations
Powerlessness in Recovery
Understand Step One: powerlessness over substances and the unmanageability it creates.
The 12 Steps: Backward & Forward
Explore the contrast between where addiction takes us and where recovery leads.
Abstinence, Sobriety & Recovery
Explore the critical differences between abstinence, sobriety, and true recovery, and where you are on the spectrum.
The Science of Addiction
Understand the five biological factors: genetics, reward, memory, stress, and choice.
Self, identity and connection
The ISMs of Alcoholism
Explore the underlying patterns beneath addiction: denial, ego, shame, control, and more.
King Baby Syndrome
Explore emotional immaturity patterns and the journey to emotional maturity in recovery.
The Dis-Ease of Addiction
Understand internal conflict, fragmentation, and the path to integration and wholeness.
The Man Rules™
Explore the unwritten masculine code and consciously choose what serves your recovery.
Telling Your Story
Draw from 159 reflection prompts covering substance use history, denial, relationships, career, childhood, fears, and more.
Relationships in Recovery
Explore transactional, transitional, and transformative relationships across all dimensions.
Relationships & Codependency
Understand the relational ISM: enabling, control, and building healthy connections.
The Balance Spectrum
Navigate dependency patterns and find healthy interdependence in your recovery.
The Outsider Looking In
Navigate feelings of disconnection and build genuine belonging in recovery community.
Feelings and awareness
Fear in Recovery
Understand and transform your fears about recovery, relapse, identity, and change.
Grief & Recovery
Understand the stages of grief as they apply to losing your substance.
Trigger Identification & Management
Learn to identify and manage triggers: people, places, emotions, and thoughts that lead to cravings.
Expanded HALT Dimensions
Explore the 12 dimensions of Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired for precise vulnerability awareness.
Denial and thinking
Romanticizing the Substance
Break through euphoric recall by examining the full truth of rituals, hiding, and chaos.
Understanding Self-Sabotage
Explore why we work against ourselves and learn strategies to break destructive patterns.
The "Functional" Myth
Examine the dangerous illusion of functional alcoholism for first responders.
Using Work to Manage the Disease
Examine how careers become containment systems for addiction and the illusion of control.
Metaphors
The F-5 Tornado of Addiction
Understand addiction as a destructive storm and build storm-resistant recovery.
From Cucumber to Pickle
Understand the irreversible transformation of addiction through the classic metaphor.
Normal Is a Washing Machine Setting
Explore the myth of normal, the comparison trap, shame of difference, and the freedom of authentic living in recovery.
The Anger Iceberg
Discover what emotions lie beneath your anger: fear, hurt, shame, and powerlessness.
The Windshield Perspective
Balance past reflection, present awareness, and future planning in your recovery journey.
Your Brain Is Fake News Media
Randomized topics covering catastrophizing, perceived judgment, social replay, negativity bias, reframing, self-compassion, narrative revision, and recovery connection.
Recovery Quicksand
Learn why struggling harder makes things worse, and how the counterintuitive solution works.
The Twelve Steps
12-Step Foundations
History, principles and recovery essentials of the Twelve Steps.
Step One Deep Dive
Admitting powerlessness and unmanageability.
Step Two Deep Dive
Coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step Three Deep Dive
Making a decision to turn our will and our lives over.
Step Four Deep Dive
Taking a searching and fearless moral inventory.
Step Five Deep Dive
Sharing the exact nature of our wrongs with another person.
Steps Six & Seven Deep Dive
Becoming ready to let go of defects of character, and humbly asking.
Steps Eight & Nine Deep Dive
Listing those we harmed and making amends.
Step Ten Deep Dive
Continuing personal inventory and promptly admitting wrongs.
Step Eleven Deep Dive
Prayer, meditation and conscious contact.
Step Twelve Deep Dive
Spiritual awakening, carrying the message, and living the principles.
Relapse warning signs
Hitting Stuck Points in Recovery
Recognizing where recovery stalls, and how to grow past it.
Understanding Denial Dimensions
Building awareness of the forms denial takes, to break through it.
Social Isolation in Recovery
Noticing the drift away from people as a warning sign.
Understanding Inner Conflict
Working through the competing voices about recovery.
Self-Defeating Thinking Patterns
Catching the thoughts that undermine recovery.
Addicted Belief Dimensions
Examining the beliefs that keep the addiction going.
Understanding Addictive Thinking
Becoming aware of addictive thinking and interrupting it.
Understanding Immobilization
Breaking through the freeze that stops recovery action.