By Courtney H.

I have had this big fat resentment against a childhood friend of mine for not asking me to be in her wedding party this fall. Even though my decision to stop drinking seemed to signify a serious barrier to our friendship, I still thought our many childhood and teenage promises of having each other in our respective wedding parties would be met.

The barrier between us began during our college years. It seemed par for the course with living so far away from each other. When we worked in the same city the year I finished my graduate degree,…

by Susan Jeffers, Ph.D.

There are times on our Journey through life that we feel lost, unloved, helpless, and defeated. Until we find the huge amount of power and love that lives within us, these times happen much too frequently. What do we do when we find ourselves in such an unhappy space?

Some of us escape into the land of danger and defeat. We “get out of ourselves” by drinking too much, or taking drugs, or feeling sorry for ourselves, or complaining, or doing whatever stops us from doing what is truly necessary…and that is…taking responsibility for our experience of life.…

My blog stats always fascinate me. From figuring out how people make their way to my site to seeing when I get peaks and valleys in my visits and page views, I’m kind of an Analytics Junky.

This week, for instance, I got one visitor who lingered for nearly 10 minutes who found me with the query “how to help a heroin junkie.” Someone spent 7 minutes and 11 seconds reading me after searching for “junky warning signs.” Others found me by searching:

• “drug junkie wife”
• “angry with the heroin addict i’m helping”
• “is krishna das married?”
• “spiders in dreams”
• “cause i felt like a junkie every…

My husband is on the third day of his detox, and I’m on my second day of unemployment. It’s pretty crappy around my house!

I spent this day in bed. All day, naked in bed. He was in and out, groaning and twitching and vomiting. I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, closing my eyes sometimes. I was online for a while. I read a book for a while.

I have to get out of bed. I’ve got to get up and get my armor back on and get back into battle. I have a higher power that’s preparing me for…

It was quite awhile ago now, so long ago that I barely remember, but I got to experience the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Now that earthquake, at a magnitude of 6.4, was approximately 31 times greater than yesterday’s earthquake in Chino Hills. When I saw news coverage about the earthquake on the news, yesterday my mind immediately dismissed the event as inconsequential. There are 800 quakes the size of yesterday’s every year.

Isn’t it amazing that one can be pretentious about being in an earthquake? I have such a long way to go. Anyway, having dismissed reports of the quake yesterday…

In my last post, I noted that faith requires not only courage but also practice. I can’t expect faith to arrive on my doorstep if I do nothing to summon it.  Likewise, I can’t hope that faith will stick around for the journey if I do nothing to entertain it. I have to practice living with faith in order to trust it will comfort me in my time of need. Sobriety, too, requires practice.

When I set down my last drink, I no more understood what I was getting into than I did the first time my father put a…

The Courage of Faith–that was the topic at my morning meeting yesterday. We read one paragraph from the Big Book, and a 50 minute lively discussion ensued. It was one of those meetings where just about everything said twisted my thinker. Courage of faith? I thought faith was for weenies!

That’s what I thought when I came into AA. Faith was synonymous with religion, and my view of religion had long since gone down the toilet. My experience with religious zealots proved to me that religion led to hypocrisy and judgmentalness. I was also fiercely independent and didn’t think someone should…

Afghans fight an addiction to heroin

Chris Sands, Foreign Correspondent

from an article in “The National”

More Afghans are turning to home-grown heroin, creating a serious health threat that officials say could be as dangerous as the insurgency. AP

KABUL // More and more Afghans are turning to cheap home-grown heroin, creating a health threat that is potentially as serious as the insurgency, narcotics officials and community workers warn.

The drug’s easy availability has become a major problem since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, despite efforts by the international community to stop poppy growth and the production of opium, from which heroin is…

Last night I went to a local church in town where a 12 step, Al-Anon and Alateen meeting were all being held simultaneously. Since I qualify for two of the three, I had to make a decision. I chose the Al-Anon meeting because I had never been to this one before. The topic was centered around the difference between compassion and enabling - something with which everyone in the room had more than an adequate amount of experience. Most of the faces were new to me, but the wisdom and strength were reminiscent of other Al-Anon meetings I attend.

Being a…

I was at a particularly “bloody” meeting yesterday, one of those where everyone who shared had some semi-horror story to discuss about their recovery. I go to a lot of meetings attended by folks from the many treatment facilities hereabouts, so that sort of thing is hardly a surprise. This one, however, was especially notable — lots of unhappy folks having their problems walking the path, just like I did in the early days.

I went straight from there to a weekend retreat that was mostly meditation, and found myself considering the question of just what constitutes an “old-timer”. It’s not…

by Dr. Allen Berger

What is recovery? Here are a few thoughts for you to consider. I see recovery as doing two things: first it helps us break the bonds of our addiction and secondly it helps us recover our lost, true self. Another way of saying it is that it helps us mature. Let’s discuss this further.

For many years, mental health professions tried to help their alcoholic or addicted patients by focusing on the underlying causes of their problem. Their thinking was something like this, “if I help a person resolve the underlying causes of their addiction they will no…

This morning our office mouse, Cotton, died. Even though he technically belonged to my boss, Melissa and her daughter, he was my mouse. His cage was kept in the little loft where I work and over the past year he had become by best buddy. I would leave his cage, open, on the carpet and he would come and go whenver he pleased.

Over the last several months, he and I had developed a special bond. He would crawl up my leg into my lap and I would put him on my desk, where he explored the tape dispenser, chewed the ends…

Just realized that I will be without access to a computer until Friday.

AAAAHHHH!

I’m off to the Keys, wish me luck!

See y’all in a few days.

by William C. Moyers

Sometimes the best advice comes when readers seek insight not in questions about themselves or their problems, but in querying me about my own experiences. This hit home in a recent letter from a 14-year-old boy.

Dear Mr. Moyers: I want to know what it was like to fall in the peer pressure of drugs and why you did. I know people always say to stay away from drugs, and I know to say no, but I want to know what it felt like to be asked. Were you nervous, anxious and scared? Being drug-free is very important…

Last week, I got a call from the guy that I had taken to an AA meeting the week before. He is a coke addict without an addiction to alcohol. He picked up a one day chip at last week’s meeting. Since I was going to an Al-Anon meeting, I took him along to the AA meeting that is in the same complex. Yesterday, he called again and wanted to go to the closed AA meeting on the other side of town. I was working out downtown so I picked him up and took him to the meeting. Because it…

Sometimes, I wonder what kind of battle it is I’m in training to win. It’s something hard.

I got an email today letting me know that the job I’d hoped would become my stability, possibly even full time one day, possibly even with BENEFITS, will be cutting my hours. The boss says that the work I’m doing is good, but sales are down. The economy is bad. And, if sales don’t get up soon, he might have to cut my position.

I’m realizing that I have an impressive set of skills, but they are luxurious skills. I’m as useful as a fresh…

Hi, I’m pseudonymously known to the denizens of the Internet as Mary P Jones (MPJ), and I’m the newest member of The Second Road blogging team. I’m the codependent (although I despise that term) complement to my husband’s sex addiction and compulsive debting. My husband and I entered recovery five years ago for our respective problems, and I been blogging about for a little over a year at A Room of Mama’s Own about (among other things) working through issues of sex addiction and codependency in my marriage.

Now, you all have no idea how much I wanted to post a much…

Vacation has been a little tricky so far. I’m away from my partner, my routine, my gym, my therapist, and my friends who know what’s going on with me. I’m essentially a single parent and my kid’s been clinging to me like a velcro monkey since Thursday, and since my family doesn’t even know I ever had a problem with opiates, let alone that I’m in treatment for my addiction. Sketchy? Why yes it is!

I don’t even like to admit that I have these thoughts, which probably means that I should fess up. Before I even got on the plane,…

I’ve started a group on the TSR site, which I am calling Running, Health & Fitness. As a person with mental illness and alcoholism, I have a difficult time finding other fitness oriented individuals within these communities to play with. Perhaps you do, too. If so, please join the group.

I also formed the group in hopes of offering anyone who is not currently exercising, but would like to start, a place to come for questions and support. I’ve been a jock all my life. I’ve been a competitive runner for years, and because of that I’ve researched proper eating, training,…

Throughout my life, I prided myself on being a compassionate person. It’s one of the things that I always know is true about me: I’m really, really empathetic. My friends love me for it. My lovers love me for it. Pursuing this attribute brought me to writing, and I think a deep empathy for others helps me be in touch with my own emotions…it helps me to make the emotional resonance of my writing vibrant and accessible, which is something else I like about me.

It’s kind of thrown me for a loop, however, to lose compassion for my husband. Here…

Accepting “life on life’s terms” is something that hasn’t been easy for me. Life is filled with unexpected things that come up. Some of these are good things but others can be ones that cause a great deal of frustration, sorrow, or anxiety. I’ve always been able to deal with changes fairly easily and like to think of myself as being flexible. But these are changes over which I have some control. It’s the changes that are beyond my control that seem to bother me the most. Some of those changes relate to a sense of loss that I had…

“I never would have done this before,” I thought, as I drove home from the girls’ night out. It was just a movie and pizza in the basement of a co-worker’s house. It was just 6 other women from work. You wouldn’t think it would be a big deal. You wouldn’t think it worth a thought, but six other women were six times as many as I would have been out with a few years ago. Six other women totaled more than twice as many as I had gone out with in five years at my previous job, and that was before I…

I have realized over the last two days that I’ve not been being very good to myself. I’ve been working too much and forgetting to take time just for me. My experiences recently with taking some quiet time out of my work day and the huge impact those stolen moments made on my mental state for the rest of the day reminded me to take notice of my own exhaustion.

This morning, I got up and went to yoga for the first time in a while. I’d been feeling too tired, too glum, too weighed down by the world to make it…

by George McGovern

Reviewed by Ginger B.

I was at a conference recently and this book was being given away as a “freebie” so, of course, I put it in my bag, not intending to put it on the top of my list of books to read. About a week after the conference I was at home, saw the book, and picked it up, not expecting a great read. After all, it was written by a politician (I voted for George McGovern in 1972, but a politician is still a politician), the event happened 14 years ago, and the book was already…

This weekend I had an opportunity to be around someone who I consider to be a trusted friend. Unfortunately, I also witnessed rage in this person that was blown entirely out of proportion to the situation that occurred.

I have suspected for some time that this fellow has adult ADD. He is a long-time recovering alcoholic. I’ve witnessed several other episodes of rage by him in the past.

I know that the rage triggers something in me that makes me want to get away from the person as soon as it happens. My inventory tells me that 1) I am frightened of…

by Ginger B.

I just watched a new documentary entitled “The Courage to Change: portraits of men in recovery”, with the subtitle “A collection of short films, audio journals, and other interactive media.” This is a 4 year labor of love by Andy Young, a certified alcohol/drug counselor and licensed professional counselor.

Andy writes, “”My aim was something creative and engaging like an HBO special, yet with clinical content based on my experience as a counselor…”

The DVD is a compilation of videos, audio segments and questions for consideration by the viewer. It is an eclectic source of information for mens’ issues, with…

This was sent to me by Jason J. who celebrates 3 years of sobriety this week. Notice the date it was written.

Till Next Time -

Your Humble Road Warrior

Special Promotions: Win $500 Worth Of Booze!
Monday, January 10, 2005, 1:29 PM

Dear Bill W.

So there’s this email that comes to me and it’s like a

fortune or horoscope or something. I must have signed

up for it but I delete anything with an unsolicited

weird sender name or hokey message. Anyway the last

one’s tag line read:

Your Soulmate Awaits: $500 Laptop Is Waiting For You! 

…and the message read:

Soon you will be faced with two equally tempting

choices.…

Whatever pretty word I tried to obscure it with, innocence, naiveté, I was really fooling myself, and no one else. The truth was plain to everyone. When I got it, though, I got it completely. Twenty five years of fooling myself led me to the sudden, and profound realization of the truth. I can never use methamphetamine again without developing the phenomena of craving which sends me down a path of self-destruction. Just like any other complex system, though, when one part of a life is radically altered, every other part is forced to change. When one old idea is…

I am honored to be contributing to The Second Road. In the future I will be addressing issues relevant to recovery and relationships. My hope is to both inform you and challenge your beliefs. I want you to step back and take an honest look at yourself and what you are doing in your recovery and in your relationships. New information creates change. In fact, I believe much of our suffering comes from ignorance and misinformation. Later I discuss several ways of looking at recovery, but before I do I want to share some of my story.

I have been…

Ah!!!! I remember the good ol’ days - comin’ off a binge or resurfacing from a blackout - my hangovers varied depending on the drug or amount of liquor I had consumed. Mostly they were of the jackhammer in the head kind - I would wake up (or come to) in the morning, head pounding, my stomaching feeling like I had just drunk a glass of vinegar that had been filled with dirty cigarette butts and left to sit for a week or so. I would drag my sad carcass into the bathroom, look in the mirror and say to…