My sponsor and I talked about guilt last night. It seems that I have an over abundance of that, even when I’ve nothing to feel guilty about. I have gotten better since being in the program but the guilt beast is still lurking in me, ready to challenge peace and happiness at a moment’s notice.

Another big thing for me is self-criticism. So if someone finds out that I am harsh on myself or have that streak of integrity that means I want to do the “right” thing, then it’s likely that I will cough up what ever it is you’re…

by Mark Harris

I am a mandatory reporter for a system I would not trust a single blood relative to. Nor could I wholeheartedly, unreservedly, recommend or refer any person who looks like a blood relative of mine. I have to honestly say that even if you are blond haired blue eyed and wealthy, that the system will take adequate care of you. To be sure, many parts of it will be happy to take your personal wealth, or insurance wealth, in the elusive pursuit of mental health and well-being. For the most part it will do well by you, by…

by Courtney H.

I applied for two professional positions this week. One would involve working in public relations for the University of Virginia. The other is training potential journalists for seven months in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I think I could live with securing either or neither of those jobs. Truth be told, the idea of living in Africa scares me. But I have always longed for that experience. That desire has grown over the past five years as I have watched several of my friends and younger sister travel to the continent to work in professional capacities while helping various citizens…

Angela, who has worked on this site, sent this to me this week-end. Lest we ever forget….

from The Richmond Times Dispatch

“A woman was killed and a man was hurt yesterday in a single-car crash on state Route 288 in Chesterfield County.

Virginia State Police trooper M.S. Meyer said Megan R. Ford, 30, of the 6100 block of Watchhaven Circle in Chesterfield County was flown by helicopter to VCU Medical Center, where she died shortly after the 12:40 a.m. crash.

Ford’s passenger and husband, Jon G. Brown, 29, was taken by ambulance to VCU, where he was being treated for injuries that were…

I finished the 12th step today!

I worked the steps with a group of women, all of whom are married to addicts. It’s been one of the most powerful experiences of my life. These women know more about me than anyone else has ever known, and they still love me. In fact, they love me more, and I love them. It was quite the love fest.

We laughed and cried and shared and made plans to continue doing this work together and to share it with others. It was a great afternoon.

We took a while off between the 11th and the 12th…

I’m an alcoholic, drug addict and codependent.  My name is Bill.

I had my 45th birthday in a treatment center. I was employed in a good job, making a good salary, working for a man I liked and respected, and doing a job I didn’t especially like, but at which I excelled. Nevertheless, not two weeks before my birthday I’d been sitting on one of the twin beds in a motel room, my home having been foreclosed on. Food was hot dogs from the convenience store across the street. Salvation, such as it was, was beer from the same source. The…

My doctor has been great with regards to tapering my dose. He’s been open to hearing about things that I’ve read online about tapering, and he agrees that slow is the best way to go. Our plan is basically for me to drop my dose by about 25% and then stay at the new dose until I stabilize. When I feel ready to lower my dose again, I can. This seems smart and intuitive to me, and I’m glad that he didn’t hand me a fast-set tapering schedule and order me to stick to it.

Tapering, so far, has not been…

I had a strange mix of good and bad today. Here’s the breakdown:

Bad:

• We fought this morning. He threatened to leave again. Apparently, ending our marriage means that he goes upstairs for a long time.
• I responded rather badly to his threats. I was frustrated that I’d tried to get my needs met, and that I’d been honest and compassionate in asking him a relevant question, and it resulted in a blowup.
• I cried through my meeting. I hate it when I do that. I want to talk, to vent, to get my stuff out, and instead, I cry and waste my time…

It’s not the job I want, but it is a job I’ll like and will be good at, and certainly the irony is not lost on me.  I’m designing closets, a space I know well.  (Now that you’re out of the closet, could you step into mine and decorate it?)

I had forgotten how much easier to get up in the morning when you have someplace to go and something to do -other than look for work.  I actually woke up half an hour before my alarm went off.  I’m aware that it is only a partial solution, but I am…

Ashley Bryan, 85 last Sunday.

The Warm Springs Gallery in Warm Springs, Virginia (population around 900) had an opening for a rare exhibition of his paintings. Bryan is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. He was one of the first persons of color to present images of children of color in picture books that were not stereotypical. He was, as Poet Nikki Giovanni put it at the opening, a real pioneer.

I was working, of course. On assignment. Yet I can’t remember when I’ve had a better time hanging out with anyone. I think I was not alone…

A life insurance salesman came to visit my work today. The office is small, young, and it’s all male except for me. The insurance salesman got us all together in a circle, and he started telling us about his different policies, some of the restrictions, and the many virtues of being well-insured to make sure that the people you love would be taken care of in the event of our untimely deaths. It was a common enough experience, but it oddly painful and hilarious for the wife of a heroin addict.

First, Mr. Insurance asked the fellow closest to him for…

I have to admit that I typically will defend the inappropriate, senseless, hurtful and sometimes illegal actions of an active addict or alcoholic as being a part of their disease almost 99.9% of the time.  What I mean by this is that, being an addict myself, I know the depths I went to achieve my next high, sometimes I hurt people emotionally, broke laws, stole from people, cheated, lied etc.  I did all these things because the driving force was my addiction and I didn’t care of anything but that.

Chip hesitated.  She didn’t know if we’d even find a topic in what she shared.  Chip has been sober for 12 years.  If she is bringing up a topic in a meeting, even if it is just to let us know the painful details of life, happening, there is a topic in it.

She just got home from Texas where  she attended the funeral of her brother and sexual abuser, who’s carefully planned suicide was likely a result of shame, resentment, and untreated alcoholism.  The minute she mentioned the word suicide, Dennis, a “30 day wonder” and unfortunate artifact of my…

What am I going to do?
What am I going to do about this screwed-up family I help out? I care a lot about the teen I mentor. I am getting more worried about the 12-year old daughter. I rarely see her. She is quiet as a mouse. That’s how she deals with the whole fucking mess. Worries me… But I don’ know what to do.
The dad is older–late 60’s, I believe. He’s totally enmeshed in the fucked-up-ness. Plus he’s got a world of  “issues,” quirks, and bizarre behaviors himself! But mom is the center of the storm. She is the eye…

by William C. Moyers

John McCain and Barack Obama were on the never-ending campaign trail again last week, and for once, one of the candidates actually talked about the never-ending war on drugs.

The problem is that Sen. McCain was doing his talking in Colombia, where the fight to control the production and distribution of cocaine to America never has succeeded, despite billions upon billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars being spent to do so. And what he said was nothing new.

“There is a long way to go to stem the flow of drugs into the United States of America,” McCain said. “The…

OK. I’ve walked through the door of the first meeting and I lived. Neither of the people who I know to be active members of DA were there, which unnerved me at the beginning. By the end of the meeting I was glad to have been able to have a first time experience that was all my own.

The group is very small. They meet once a week. Once I was there, though, I felt right at home. I clearly belong there. Because there are no other meetings it is going to be particularly important to place ‘principles befor personalities’. Perhaps…

Josh Hamilton’s story a reminder of the crossroads between Sport and Real Life

Posted by Ryan Terpstra | WGHN-AM July 15, 2008 18:11PM

Josh Hamilton was all smiles on Monday night, a far cry from where he was three years ago.

All of us have scars, some physical, some emotional.

Sometimes we joke about them. Say that chicks dig them. Sometimes we hide them. And some are too big to hide.

Josh Hamilton has scars. His body is painted with them in the form of 26 tattoos he embroidered himself with in the days of his drug addition. His eyes hold them as well, with the…

by Greg W.

July 15^th

It happens to me every year. I am not much of a morning person but there is that one morning that I wake up and immediately smile. Today was that day and I couldn’t place it. Was it watching Josh Hamilton (an inspiring recovering addict) hit 28 homers in a single round of the home-run derby at Yankee Stadium the night before? Was it the summertime? Then it hit me…it was July 15^th, the day that has surpassed all other important days in my life. It is the day that everything changed. I finally woke up on…

Thanks to Congress voting overwhelmingly to override the president’s veto, The Medicare Reform Bill (HR 6331) finally became a law! (If you’d like a FUN reminder of exactly how a bill becomes law, click here)

Apparently, Congress heard the screams from doctors, seniors, and the mentally ill. We bombarded them with our displeasure over The Shrub’s veto, and in a win for the system, our representatives responded.

This is big news for doctors, seniors, the disabled, and people like me–those of us with a mental illness! Doctors will be paid more. Private insurers will be paid less, as they’ve been overpaid for…

“I am hoping all of you will listen and hear me tonight. I am truly at a low point. The alcoholic in my life told me tonight that I am an embarassment. When I expressed my need for time and attention, I was recvd with a cold shoulder and told to leave. I actually drank too much tonight. I haven’t done that in a year at least. The alcoholic in my life does it regularly and i never know if they are alive or not, but tonight i did it and I am an embarassment to them because of it.…

funk: /fʌŋk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[fuhngk] Pronunciation Key - noun

–verb (used with object)

I am definitely in “a dejected mood.” I am not, however cowering. I am not in a state of great fright or terror, but I just want to join The Junky’s Wife and go shopping, eat my guts out, make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up (which ain’t ever gonna happen). I don’t…

This was sent to me by a friend who lost her youngest brother to alcohol and drugs almost five years ago. Mikey was the youngest of 6 children, had the ability to turn the the most mundane objects into works of art, was handsome, witty, was an excellent cook, an animal lover, a “neat freak”, was very well read and had an undying devotion to his family. He was also lonely, tended to take everything to the extreme, tried relentlessly to stay clean, and often did so for months at a time… only to go back into the dark, a…

My name is Chris and I’m an addict. By the grace of a Higher Power of my own understanding, strong sponsorship, the fellowship and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have not had to imbibe, ingest, inhale, or inject anything, to change who I am or to cope with the intolerable condition of my physical, mental, and spiritual life, for 18 consecutive months, today, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

Now that I’ve been off the drugs for almost nine months and I’m feeling more stable in my recovery from drug addiction, I’m starting to pay more attention to the myriad other ways that I’m dysfunctional. The main one that I am very tentatively starting to work on is my relationship with food (and eating, and body image.) Which is appropriate, I think, because my food/eating issues are very much connected to my drug-abuse issues.

Ah, food. This is the one area where abstinence just isn’t going to work. Too bad.

Now, food and I have had an effed up relationship, off…

Do you have any idea how hard it is to fill out a stupid job application and turn it in?

OK. That was a stupid question. Most of you probably do. My hangups are my own. Lots of people on felony probation get jobs every day. I’m the one who is down on me about it. One of the things that intimidates me most about them is that, I don’t know. Either I’m stupid or retarded or irrepairably brain damaged, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what happened and when.

I’m not really, absolutely sure when anything happened, or…

Sometimes we bloggers find that our text doesn’t play nice with the blogging system we use.  Copying and pasting from our editors into the blog pages can result in some unfortunate conflicts, format-wise.  I’ve noticed the problem here at 2ndRd as well as other sites on the Net, so I thought I’d offer this.  It might not seem exactly related to recovery, but if you’re writing about recovery much, it could help avoid resentments.

There are a couple of simple ways around this formatting problem.  The most obvious is to use the Rich Text editors on the blog page or on…

Einstein’s theory of relativity is known by many, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this bit of genius!

Sometime ya just gotta laugh a little!

Till Next Time -

Your Humble Road Warrior

About 18 or so years ago, the author Lawrence Block wrote a novel called Random Walk, about a young man who begins a journey eastward from Oregon on foot, on what he imagines is a whim.  Along the way he picks up followers, including a murderous character whose coming to terms with his past makes up a powerful subplot.

The book is clearly a parable for the recovery process, as well as a New Age venture into mysticism.  Like all Block’s novels, it is tight and well-crafted.  Unfortunately it fell flat on its face and is now out of print.  Nonetheless,…

Al-Anon has lots of slogans that help you to focus on working the program. One of my favorites is, “How important is it?”. When I think about the years that I spent worrying, being anxious and busting a gasket over insignificant crap, I know now that none of it was really important. In the grand scheme of life, there aren’t a lot of things that are really worth personal turmoil. The amount of energy that I wasted on criticism both of self and others, resentment, and a lot of other baggage never enhanced my life or anyone else’s. Instead, I…

I’m having difficulty keeping track of time. The days hurry by and I forget to do this or that, put things off until later and then suddenly it’s later than later and I’m too far behind. Discipline seems to be an element that I’m lacking and I’m not sure what that’s all about. I used to be fairly organized.

Sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with the Suboxone that I’m taking. I recall that time used to slip away from me when I was high, back during my active addiction. Now, I don’t really feel “high” from Suboxone,…