I don’t know if I can do this again, but of course I will. It’s 6:45AM. In 15 minutes I have to load up Puck and leave for the vet clinic. It may seem like no big deal, especially if you are not a pet owner, but Puck is my child-equivalent. It is a big, big deal. My heart has already sunk, too heavy to remain suspended in its usual locale. I feel so guilty for throwing that damn ball. I feel so sorry for the pain he is in and the severe pain he is about to endure. I…

I read an interesting talk by Bob Pearson who was General Manager of the AA General Service Office from 1974 to 1984, and then served as Senior Advisor to the G.S.O. from 1985 until his retirement. During the 1986 General Service Conference, Mr. Pearson made these interesting comments:

“Let me offer my thoughts about A.A.’s future. I have no truck with those bleeding deacons who decry every change and view the state of the Fellowship with pessimism and alarm. On the contrary, from my nearly quarter-century’s perspective, I see A.A. as larger, healthier, more dynamic, faster growing, more global, more service-minded,…

Today is yet another departure. I’m getting confused about what I’m leaving and what it is to which I arrive, if that makes sense. I suppose I wish it could all be in the same place, same time.

This two weeks with my family makes me wish they weren’t so distant–not just in geography either. For the first time in my 34 years, I question my mother’s decision to move me away from the family at age four. For the first time, I’m dealing with things beyond the immediate–beyond simply staying sober. I’m delving into a family history that brings up…

I had a very interesting experience yesterday.  I spoke to a group of first year medical students on addiction and recovery and several 12 steps groups.  I was paired up with a woman who was approximately my age and we both walked into the class, looking like their mothers dressed to go to a business meeting or a church service.  After we introduced ourselves I asked them to guess which one was the addict and which one was in Al-Anon.  The students shook their heads and said they couldn’t even begin to imagine which one of us was the addict. …

Reality TV couldn’t have hoped for more irony than this…

This morning, on the way back from the vet, moments after he and I discussed allowing Puck to play ball again despite my wariness (terror, actually), I stopped at a park to give him a few tosses. On the FIRST gentle, short toss my beautiful, happy, energetic dog, Puck, ruptured his other anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).

His second ACL surgery in the last 4.5 months is scheduled for tomorrow.

My sponsor says God wouldn’t give me more than I can handle. C’mon, God, isn’t this piling-it-on a bit?

Yes, I’m tired. Something we all learn early in sobriety to guard against. I can feel that my whole being is stretched a little thin. But the deal is, there’s not a lot I can do about it till the weekend. I’m deep in public radio fundraising, on deadline for NPR, and have a book proposal that just won’t come to heel nicely. So, tired or not, I gotta keep on keeping on.

The thing is, I’ve got enough sense to recognize fatigue as being a non-desirable state. When I was still drinking and using, I pushed myself to the edge…

Allen Berger, Ph.D.

Psychologist and Author of

“12 Stupid Things that Mess Up Recovery”

In my previous article I discussed the cultural forces that predispose us for addiction. At the risk of sounding paranoid I believe there is a cultural conspiracy against the development of our true-self. Our culture is not wise. On the contrary it emphasizes materialism as manifested by our obsession with “having” over a more spiritual focus on “being.” We are out of balance and the current crises poignantly reflect this reality.

Understanding our culture’s role is one part of the story, but this rest of the story is…

An unwelcome anniversary is approaching. In a few days, it will be two years since my 46-year-old friend, Kathy, tragically died after falling down her basement stairs.

Kathy was an RN at Generose, 2 East, Mayo Clinic’s adult psychiatric inpatient unit. That’s where we met. She was my primary nurse during my first admission to her unit. As my primary nurse, she spent a lot of time with me, and we quickly developed a bond. Through multiple admissions over 5-6 years, Kathy and I continued to cross paths. We developed a special bond. Nothing inappropriate, all professional boundaries were maintained, but…

Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article from AlterNet about two schools of thought in addiction treatment:

…

One camp, usually made up of law enforcement, prison guards and the “tough love” crowd, think we need to threaten people with jail in order to get them to comply with treatment. If someone relapses or drops out of treatment, they want to throw the person in jail for their failure to take treatment seriously. It is not uncommon to hear stories, whether from judges, to family members to people in recovery, all explaining that they needed the threat of jail in order to clean up.…

More and more I’m beginning to think that if one gets sober and stays sober it is entirely by happenstance; that no amount of effort, no profound experience, no treatment program, no great desire, no necessity, has the power to get and keep any of us sober. And I certainly don’t have the power to produce sobriety on my own. So if I can’t get sober because I want it bad enough, need it bad enough, have worked hard enough for it, have paid enough for it, etc., then every day that I happen to stay sober must be an anomaly. A…

I’ve been having a hard time getting anything done lately. I’m overwhelmed, with fatigue, schoolwork, bureaucracy, inventory at work, housecleaning chores, and doubts about my ability to do any of it. The past week or so I’ve felt my old anxiety starting to simmer under the surface, burning away energy that I can scarcely afford to lose.

So what to do when life calls and I simply can’t just take to my bed for a month or six?

I realized that part of why I was freaking out was that I was starting to feel like my “old self.” You know, the…

More fatigue today, napping doesn’t seem to alleviate it for more than an hour. It’s frustrating. Regardless, I was a little more functional today. I swam one mile rather than run one step. The swimming went better than I was expecting, although–surprise!–it did wipe me out for a couple hours.

I met with my therapist this morning. Boy, it’s been a long two weeks since I last saw her! There are some pretty big changes afoot in my life, and I’m feeling very overwhelmed. My therapist is especially adept at breaking things down and putting them into perspective. I appreciate that.…

“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

-Step 5

Today, I finished telling my Step Five “and to another human being” story to my online step group. It was a really interesting, purgative experience.

The first time through Step Five, I was working the steps with a group of women from my Nar-Anon, and this step was a major point of sealing our relationships with one another. We all became much closer after revealing ourselves to each other, and I remember feeling like it was really powerful to see how letting our guard down about…

Turf. Uttered with the slow, Southern drawl; turf.
I had such a physical reaction when the nurse spoke the word. It came up in regards to chaplains and pastors. I’ve been here in the South since the 9th. Since then my father has been discharged and transported, in an ambulance, from Jackson, MS to Birmingham, AL. He is now in hospice care, where the emphasis is on comfort, not care. It is where you go to die, but you get a lot of painkillers until that happens.

“Turf of the heart,” she concludes. Meaning the hospice chaplain and my Aunt’s pastor can…

It happened in a blink. Years ago, I wouldn’t even have noticed that the feeling came and was stuffed down again.

Today, I was looking for a sharp knife to cut a loaf of bread. There was one in the knife rack, but it was big, and I always like to use the smallest, dullest knife that will suit my purpose, because I have an extreme fear of death, um, I mean, sharp objects. I opened the dishwasher, which I assumed was full of clean dishes. I pulled out a steak knife and found it was covered in crud. The dishes…

I’ve been working the 12 Steps with an online group, and after a few weeks compiling our fearless and searching moral inventories, our group finished Step 4. When I shared some of my work with my husband, he was amazed at how thorough the work was. “You’ve done about a years worth of work in a few weeks!” he said. And he means it.

Mark started working the steps five years ago when he began his recovery and he is currently on Step 7. Part of this is due to the painstaking thoroughness with with Mark approaches problems, and part of…

I was at one of those meetings tonight where things just seem to fall into place.  There was hardly anyone there because of a memorial service for Jere, about whom I wrote a few weeks ago.  (I chose not to go; said goodbye already).  The two speakers failed to show as well, so the chair — a woman with about a year and a half — and another guy with about 4 years shared instead.  Naturally, since neither of them had a chance to think about it, their sharing was spontaneous and completely from the heart.  Really nice.

Both spoke of…

GREAT! I caught a virus yesterday. Literally, it came on in the matter of a couple minutes! Boom! I was sick! Very, very strange. Stayed in bed as much as I could. No exercise. Today I worked nine hours. That’s a long day in a hospital. Nine hours of interacting with, lifting, pulling, prodding, encouraging, instructing, and smiling for patients in pain–and their families–is incredibly exhausting. I am totally wiped out.

I hate feeling this wiped out, this exhausted, this dead. My brain is as dead as my body. It’s been a few consecutive days of fatigue now, even before I…

Because of my adventures in addict, I have a very, very low tolerance for addicts in the wild. A few days ago, I was paying for a faxed contract to an employer at the local UPS store, and there was a tweaky, twitchy, loud man in one corner using the office telephone. He had a bookbag, and he kept looking at me.

They can find me, and I can find them. I couldn’t stop looking at him, either. It’s magnetic.

I paid with a $10, and got back $8 in change. The man in the corner lit up when he saw me…

There is something going on with my husband, and I’m not sure what. He’s got a lot of opportunities facing him in terms of work. He’s gotten all of these opportunities on his own, and he seems to be doing a good job of suiting up and showing up for all the projects he’s found. It’s nothing steady yet, but it’s the kind of situation where one gig leads to another, which leads to another and another. If he doesn’t blow it, it might just turn out to be a great thing.

It is possible that a lot of his crappiness in…

I have been working on Step 4 of the 12 Steps, making my own fearless and searching moral inventory. This inventory is meant to contain my character defects, but also my character strengths. The problem is, it’s a lot easier to come up with a list of seventy-five million resentments than it is to come up with a handful of unqualified strengths. And I say “unqualified strengths,” because while there are many fabulous things about me, I’ve attached mental qualifiers to them all.

I’m caring, but I can spend so much energy caring for others that I don’t properly care for myself.…

I have been thinking about how most of my life I’ve loved in unhealthy ways. I have made a mess of love through my codependent behavior. I went into my marriage hoping to change the person that I loved from being a depressed unhappy drinker. I had tried on and off for several years before my marriage to figure out why I was willing to put up with the outrageous behavior of my SO. I guess as Tab states, it was the rose colored glasses that I chose to wear. If I had felt better about myself, I doubt that…

I’ve been having a tough time writing lately. I don’t feel I have anything interesting or valuable to say right now. I’m just feeling a bit blah. Training again after my DNF (did not finish) at the Twin Cities Marathon.
I’m tentatively planning to run another marathon November 2nd, but not feeling nearly as confident of meeting my goal, which is qualifying for the Boston Marathon. I did have a good 20-miler on Saturday, but still… I’m hoping I can improve my confidence over the next few weeks, otherwise I am doomed. I think not finishing has effected me more than…

I apologize for being out of the loop lately. I recently had surgery and have been down for a while. This brings me to my recent blog about medication in recovery. Such a fun and always heated topic in meetings. I recently went to my first meeting yesterday after being laid up for a while with my surgery. I brought up the topic and sure enough sparks flew! There is such an interesting and overwhelmingly diverse opinion in recovery about this topic. It is one of the reasons I love recovery—it is one of the places where vast opinions can…

At the meeting last night, we talked about how alcoholism sets up a Merry-Go-Round of blame and denial. There are three types of people who ride the Merry-Go-Round with the alcoholic.

One is the enabler who is impelled to rescue the alcoholic from the disease. The enabler by trying to save the alcoholic also is meeting a desperate need himself. What happens when the enabler steps in is that the alcoholic is denied the process of learning from mistakes. Instead, the alcoholic learns that someone will be there to come to the rescue.

The other individual on the Merry-Go-Round is the victim.…

Do you think that McCain has a right to bring Obama’s past addiction into a public light? Do you think Obama would be less, or more, of a good President because he has tried marijuana and cocaine?  Do you think McCain is doing this now only because polls show he is slipping, with almost every demographics showing support for Obama? Recently, McCain seems to be reaching for the lead not by promoting and educating us on his policies, but by making character attacks on Obama. Not very Presidential.

Per the experimentation with drugs, should we pretend that drugs don’t reach every…

Okay, that title is a bit misleading. I’m still in therapy, but I’ve cut back to every other week rather than every week. No big deal, right? I mean, that’s the point of working with a therapist, to get better. And that’s what’s happened. I’ve improved enough to cut back on therapy. So why do I feel so lost?

My sense of loss seems over-blown. If I had cancer, I’d be thrilled NOT to see my doc every week. It would mean my illness had improved. I guess this is just another difference between mental illness and most other illnesses. If…

So my husband is back home, somewhat against my will. He’s home against the part of my will that is sane, healthy, and serves my best interest. The other part of my will is thrilled. The other part of my will wanted him to come home for sure, with no reservations, no hesitations.

So far, it’s been ok. The sane part of me set some boundaries and made sure that we have a deadline for checking in to see if those boundaries are being met. The crazy part of me couldn’t wait to get my clothes off, get his clothes off,…

by William C. Moyers

It was hardly a senatorial moment. Standing in the kitchen of my home in Minnesota, Sen. Paul Wellstone grabbed a slice of pizza off my young son’s plate. But before he could take a bite, my son turned around and caught him.

“Hey, you, that’s mine!” he yelled. And then he burst into tears.

Politicians are supposed to kiss smiling babies, not make them cry. What could the senator do? He quickly grabbed his “Wellstone!” campaign button off his trademark black sweater and stuck it on my son’s pizza-stained shirt. In an instant, my son forgot about the pinched…

Sorry, I’ve been away. No reason, except too, too much to do. But, you know, I missed blogging, so, you know, I’m just going to find the time.

I spent Friday fretting our world economic crisis and the disturbing appearance of blatant racism in the American presidential campaign.

Saturday and Sunday, I spent a good part of the day scooting.

On a scooter.

A 151 blue teal blue scooter that allows me to travel curvy country roads at speeds that don’t annoy whoever’s behind me and reacquaint me with what it feels like to just be having fun.

Both days were beautiful. Warm and…