by Jennifer Storm

Having an active addict in your life is probably one of the most excruciatingly painful experiences a person can have. The word powerless cannot even begin to capture the utter devastation, hopelessness and futility one can feel while being in the presence of an active addict. It is gut-wrenching and heart-breaking to watch someone you care about make all the wrong decisions.

Almost every time I travel and speak with my new book, Blackout Girl: Growing Up and Drying Out in America, inevitably the question comes up “How can I help an active addict?” I see the…

by William Cope Moyers
The end of the school year is here for millions of college students. It’s a time for final exams and report cards, commencement ceremonies and parties. And while many will celebrate what they’ve learned over the years, their eduction won’t include lessons on the dangers of alcohol and other drugs. Some are likely to pay for their ignorance with serious consequences.

Dear Mr. Moyers: I’ve worked as a substance abuse counselor for over 20 years. The last three, I have been employed at the university level as their prevention person and counselor. I also teach a substance-abuse class…

My yoga practice has been a crucial part of my recovery for the last six months. I started yoga after working the fourth step and acknowledging that I’d been neglecting to take care of my body while focusing so acutely on my husband. Before discovering my husband’s struggle with addiction, I’d always been something of a health nut, enjoying taking care of my body and the profound ways my physical health improved my mental health. From the moment I found syringes in my house for the first time, however, until working on my neglect of self-care in the fourth step…

As a woman, runner, and un-regularly-employed-disabled-mentally-ill-person-with-no-401K-plan, I am not fond of aging. But I would age 5 years at a time if it meant my dog didn’t have to get old. My boy, Puck, is my running partner, traveling companion, counselor, comedian, soulmate, and lifesaver. He has kept me alive more than once in my 7.5 year journey with depression. Several years ago, I was literally in the middle of my suicide note, writing wishes for my friends to take care of my boy when he came up beside me, looked at me with a look I cannot describe, and…

I watched my story in multiple parts on The Second Road’s home page and felt like I’ve stripped naket in cyberspace. I’ve shared my story in private and very public forums now for years, I’ve had the most inimate details published all over but haven’t experienced this before. Now, my drug story is “out there” memorialized on the internet. I can imagine now being held to a standard where every future deviation from the video version will be subject to criticism a la the author of “A Million Pieces” I’ve no doubt offended many of the same traditional recovery stakeholders.…

David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he’s written a fantastic essay about smoking in this month’s issue of the New Yorker.

“I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theatres and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once, I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”

Read the rest…

Jennifer Storm is the real-life voice of millions of girls and young women today who are growing up in a nightmarish vortex of addiction, abuse, despair, and spiraling self-destruction. Addicted to alcohol by age twelve, Storm now serves as Executive Director of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2002 she was appointed commissioner to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Jennifer Storm has appeared extensively on national television and has been profiled in Rolling Stone, Time, Central Penn Business Journal, and many other national and local publications. She is the author of Blackout Girl: Growing Up and…

My grandfather died before I got sober. My grandfather died before I had a relationship with my father. I managed to pull together a couple of days clean before I drove 300 miles to the funeral, but you know the toll addiction takes. I was 40 pounds under weight. My eyes were sunken in. I was gray. I did a lot of terrible things when I was still ‘out there’ but being a source of additional pain to my family at that difficult time made me burn with shame.

I was so happy to be sober the next summer when my…

etta--every day prior to 2 years, 4 months, 1 week, and 4 days ago:

I am not an alcoholic.

I am not an alcoholic. I only drink because I have depression. My problem is depression. I can stop. I stopped drinking for 10 years! The only reason I started again is because of the depression. Depression chased away my spouse, led to my illegal firing, caused the loss of almost every penny I had, and finally took my house! What the hell reason do I have not to drink? If you had the uncontrolled, suffocating, debilitating darkness of my life, you would drink,…

I’m ready to bed one hundred million dollars that my husband will be using again within 48 hours. He is boiling addict behavior all over the place. In a 5-minute phone conversation, he demanded that we let go of all the boundaries I’ve set (Let me use the car. I’m going away soon, just let me use it one time. I don’t feel like working today. Why don’t you call out for me and say that I have to go home to meet the repairman or something? I feel like lying on the couch and thinking about things. I don’t…

By Lee Stringer

Reviewed by Ginger B.

In the spring of 1985, Lee Stringer, through a series of self-imposed, fairly destructive life changing decisions, finds himself being evicted from his one room apartment, and “Half an hour later I’m on the street, clutching a voucher for all that remains of my worldly possessions. Only instead of feeling put out, I feel strangely relieved. Elated even. I have just been released, I realize, from all earthly claims upon me. …Off to the freedom of the streets! Off to whatever happens next.” The next two hundred pages or so are stories about “what happens…

Consequences really piss my husband off, I’ve noticed. Nothing makes him more furious than for me to observe that he has done something foolish in feeding his addiction…when he has pawned things that belong to me, the worst part of it for him is my noticing, finding out.

He is facing a big dose of consequence, the biggest he’s faced yet as a result of his behavior over the last year. It’s scaring him, and it’s making his mood foul. How dare the state notice that he hasn’t been fulfilling his obligations? How dare there be consequences for spending a year…

Like a lot of us, I have this astonishing history of making exactly the wrong choice at the worst possible moment. It’s like I’m a prodigy at failure. Even more baffling is that in so many respects I’m a pretty bright guy. People close to me agree that I’m probably the smartest really slow learner they know. Obviously they’ve never hung out with a bunch of other addicts and alcoholics because I’ve found in recovery that I am hardly unique. Many substance-dependent individuals appear to exhibit a decision-making impairment similar to that of patients who have suffered injury or disease of…

Have you ever gone to the grocery store and walked off without your change? Or your groceries? I have.

Have you ever gone through a fast-food drive through and paid for your meal and driven away? I have.

Have you ever been looking for something, like your keys, only to discover them in your hand? Or been looking for your glasses for like 15 minutes only to discover that they are on your face? I have. Seriously. I’m not joking. On my face!

Just now I was broiling a hamburger and pulled out a bottle of Worcestershire and immediately lost the cap. Brand…

by William Cope Moyers

My soon-to-be-16-year-old son, Henry, took the written exam for his driver’s permit this week. He didn’t pass. I shared his disappointment. And I admired his commitment to study harder for too much and got behind the wheel — it’s that simple. — Melissa W. in Atlanta

Dear Melissa: Your family’s tragedy will never disappear. Neither will the woman’s responsibility for causing it. What she did was wrong. But perhaps there is some good that can come from this. On a personal level, only you can decide if meeting with her is the right thing to do

.

I’m sure it…

by Courtney H.

My alcoholism sure has a way of sneaking up on me. Whether in highly paranoid thinking, depressive mood swings, or a strange desire to self destruct the moment God does not give me what I want, the disease can place an extremely sobering block on my road to serenity. The first time I became acutely aware of how sneaky alcoholic thinking can become, even in sobriety, happened on a sunny morning last year.

I felt pretty wonderful as I walked down a Charlottesville street with six months of sobriety under my belt. When a row of bars formed in…

Try really, really hard to be nice to people you don’t like. The more you don’t like them the farther you should be willing to go out of your way to be helpful to them. If someone is irritating to you, practice being patient with them. If someone makes you angry do everything you can to be loving toward them.

There is nothing altruistic or pure about this suggestion. I’m not going to feed you some line of crap about how it makes you a better person and makes you feel wonderful. It would probably be a lie. At least I’ve…

My husband seems determined to be a living example of the recovery dictum: Find recovery, or find jails, institutions, or death. I am afraid of the things that are happening in our lives, but I don’t know that anything short of being locked away is going to make him wake up to how much of his life he’s missing.

He is doing a good job of staying clean, if staying clean means not doing heroin. He hits a meeting about twice a week, and he frets a lot about how he’s wasting the limited amount of time he has. He has…

Courtney H. moved to Charlottesville, VA, two years ago from upstate New York in search of warmer weather. She also found a loving and welcoming community where she has learned the fine art of sober living. When she isn’t working, Courtney can be found writing, playing outside, or enjoying the benefits of a membership in a 12 step fellowship. Look for her weekly blog in our “Young and Sober” feature.

I’ve mentioned before on my site that there was a time in my life where I was the drug user in my relationship. When we first met, my husband was clean. I wasn’t.

I am not sure, however, that I’ve explained the extent of my drug use. I was talking to MPJ last night about it, and wondering if I might not be (drumroll) a dry drug addict. If someone else told me my story, told me she’d gotten clean by moving away from the place where she was using, told me she was sure she’d never use again even though she never…

My dad is a scientist, a project manager at Yucca Mountain. It is his job to bury stuff forever; to insure it never sees the light of day and that it can never be pulled out and used to harm people. Kind of like what I tried to do by getting high. I took the problems in my life, little or big, and I wrapped them up tight, buried them, then ran like hell as fast as my little legs could carry me before any of it escaped and I had to deal with it.

The thing is that dope wasn’t…