For the past several months, I have been working the 12 Steps around my own codependency, and this week, I completed Step 12. You may think that I am typing this post out for you to read, using my human arms and hands, but actually, having ascended to a higher plane of being, I am now a ball of pure white light, controlling the computer with the energy of my thoughts alone. I wish you could see me. I’m blinding. Actually, I suggest you turn the brightness on your monitor up while you read this just to feel the connection.

Ok,…

I’m trying to settle on a great resolution for the New Year, and I’m not sure where to begin. I feel like I’m in a much better place than I was last year, so part of what I want to do is to keep doing what I’m doing. Last  year, I think my resolutions involved drinking more water and doing lots of yoga. I’ve stuck to them pretty well, and both have helped me.

I think I want next year to be about the 11th and 12th steps. I want to put my spirituality first in my life and to continue…

SHOCKING, I tell you. New Scientist published a thoughtful article about cannabis policy that attempts to present the evidence in a unsensational manner.

There are just some days that I want to start over. Today was one of those. I won’t go into specifics but suffice to say that someone I care about has been more than a little irritable lately. I had a moment today that I wanted to say, “Okay, I give up. You can do whatever you like. But just leave me alone.”

It’s my fear and resentment rising up again. There are times when I feel wronged and can’t deal with it. I want to wallow in self-pity and think about what a jerk the other person is. It’s so…

One of the reasons I quit taking my antidepressant medication six months ago was that I honestly felt like it wasn’t doing anything for me any longer. I’ve been on-and-off antidepressants for many years, and as many of you may know, they have a way of crapping out after a while. Taking a break from a certain medication will sometimes render it effective if you need it again in the future, and since I wasn’t having any depression symptoms at the time it made sense to stop taking the medication.

My antidepressant of choice is Wellbutrin. Over the years, I’ve tried…

I listened to a lady in one of the meetings talk about her husband who had a seizure after two days of not drinking. She got him to the hospital where he was kept for a couple of days–it wasn’t a detox center but just part of the regular hospital. He still drinks heavily and she has come to Al-Anon to help herself gain some sanity.

One of the things that has been stressed to me is the importance of getting to know AA’s who are long-timers in the program. And to call upon them should a situation arise in which…

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can.
–Sydney Smith

I have read that we use all of our brains. The old myth about only using 10% is just that, a myth. But maybe it is true that we never fulfill all of our potential with what our brains can do. I know that I am undoubtedly capable of doing far more than I think I can. There are some days that I simply either don’t want to do a task or don’t want to finish what I started.

I’ve…

Over the weekend I attended an al anon meeting that was a bit out of my way, but I really wanted to try a new meeting and I am glad I did. I was able to see that I am one of the lucky ones. As sick as that sounds to me to verbalize, I know I am.

Before I go further let me give you a bit of background that I do not talk about much; While my husband was in the throes of his alcoholism aside from squandering all of his paycheck every week we went through a period…

A funny thing about depression is that a pretty clear sign, for me at least, that I’m depressed is my mind’s insistence that I am NOT depressed. It’s kind of like addiction that way, with a built-in denial process. I mean, if I try to look at it objectively, all of the signs and symptoms are there. So I try to decide that I should go back on antidepressant medication, and instead of just accepting this as the rational and effective way of dealing with this disease, I start rationalizing.

Maybe it’s lingering effects of my thyroid. Or it’s just because…

I remember a friend telling me that she found it hard at a particular point in recovery to go to Al-Anon meetings because there was almost too much progress in the rooms. So many people were at a place in their recovery where they’d moved beyond talking about a loved one’s alcoholism and were really focusing on their own issues. So, they would talk about how they worked through resentments around something a coworker had done or how they came to a new understanding of their fear of abandonment during a disagreement with a friend of where to have dinner. None…

It’s 6:00 on Sunday night and I just remembered that I’m supposed to be the speaker tonight at the 8:00 Sunday night meeting in the town where I live.  Someone asked me to speak a couple of months ago, but I declined.  I’m not sure why - everyone who has a computer can see my story in living color in 6 parts on The Second Road website.  I’ve told my story on the radio several times, spoken at prisons, rehab centers and been on a SAMHSA webcast on Recovery in the 21st Century.  Yet speaking in front of a small…

A friend of mine said recently that loving an addict is something like that movie Awakenings, where the catatonic people wake up for a bit and come back to themselves, but then slowly fade away again. The metaphor fit for my husband as well.

The last several weeks, he’s been back to himself. I’m afraid of losing him, so every time he says something shitty or does something addicty, I feel my insides clench. Yesterday morning, we were shopping together, and I was having trouble finding the store we were looking for. When he became upset with me, I was sure that…

San Francisco is about to open the first legal injection site in the country.

I’ve had a lot to say on the topic in the past. To sum up my view, context is key. A program like this can be an expression of despair, fear and/or contempt, or it can be a way to engage addicts and try to keep them healthier until the enter recovery.

Recovery is the key. I’d pose the following questions:

• Does treatment on demand exist? If not, does the facility consider it their responsibility to advocate for treatment on demand?
• Does the program view recovery as the ultimate goal?
• Does the…

A nice story from Weekend America about getting into recovery on a college campus and a campus recovery program.

Part of the tradition of 12 step recovery is that we are “quick to recognize where religious people are right,” and part of my tradition on Christmas Eve is to attend evening services at St. Michael’s Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral that is located just a few blocks from where I live.  The church I was raised in couldn’t be more different than traditional Christian churches, so I feel a little out of place there, especially at a high mass like the one they do at Christmas.  But the music program is so incredible and the building is so beautiful -…

I’m figuring out something new about myself lately. I’ve been driving myself mad with work, and I’ve done a poor job of figuring out when work began and fun ended. Becuase I play with my computer and work on my computer, I have a hard time knowing when one part starts and another part ends. I can’t close a project for work. I can’t do a damn thing right.

I found a great solution to this problem. I need to set up a space where I go to work. I need to get up in the morning, put on an outfit…

Thanks for the invite to write here, Second Road family.  Of course, I’ve been visiting for awhile, as well as knowing many of the voices here from your blogs. This is quite a repository of knowledge and experience for all things addictive and for the hope of recovery.  My name is Lou, and I have been posting at SubduralFlow for a year about my 25 year old son’s heroin addiction.  His 10 years of alcohol and drug abuse have put him on the treadmill of active addiction, rehab, sober, relapse, jail…and do it all over again.

Of course, I was on the treadmill right behind…

A few months ago, my daughter Janie brought her favorite stuffed animal over to a neighbor’s house to play. I meant to remember to make sure she brought Gigi home, but in the confusion of saying goodbye and putting on shoes and making sure her brother didn’t dash out the door prematurely, I forgot. We tromped home without her, and I rushed out the door not long after for a night out with some girlfriends, leaving the kids with my husband Mark.

I arrived home later that night, delighted after a wonderful dinner out, to find Mark looking frazzled. The kids…

I’ve found that holidays are the mile markers in my life’s highway. As I pass them, I can say: last year I was there, this year I’m someplace else. I can take stock of what’s different and what’s remained the same. And this is especially true as the end of the year approaches, and I send out cards with the usual cheerful summary of what our family has done. There was one year — either at the height of my husband’s acting out or just after he’d admitted his sex addiction and entered recovery — when I didn’t send any…

I would like to thank The Second Road for letting me be of service.  I consider it an honor to be asked to contribute to this site.  I learned early on in recovery that I would need to go to any lengths to stay sober; and I consider sharing my history of alcoholism and recovery through this site a means of going to any lengths.  My life today is one that, at times, I do not recognize.  The person I have become through the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is far removed from the person I once was.  I hope that by…

A patient sees me and says, “I’ve been trumped by the Third Step.”

Pray tell, what is the Third Step?

He mumbles much jibberish about letting people become your higher power and getting angry and how that is never acceptable but it happens when your ego is first and other people are not. He tells a story, and I’ll change it here, as I always do.  So let me tell you right now. I’ve changed the details of this story so much, if you think you know this person, there is no way.  You don’t. He is pure fiction.  But you’ve heard this story,…

Something to piss everyone off and challenge the premise of that recent Times article. A meta-analysis of studies comparing “bona fide” treatments found “no evidence of differences among treatments for alcohol use disorders.”

More interesting is this:

Although the variability of effects about zero was small, we also found evidence of an allegiance effect. Specifically, our analyses indicated that as allegiance to compared treatments became more unbalanced, the expected difference between treatments increased, in favor of the treatment forwhich there was researcher allegiance. Allegiance accounted for most of the variability in treatment differences in alcohol measures.

Not shocking to anyone who reads journals often.…

It’s Christmas Eve which has always been a special happy time. It’s still that way today. I can remember all the anticipation as a child. The excitement about Santa building. The curiosity that would come over me. Thinking about reindeer and whether Santa would get down the chimney. Whether I’d get switches and coal which my father promised if I was bad. I’d hear stories of his childhood where he got candy and an orange for Christmas. I’d feel so bad sometimes that I’d cry because I couldn’t imagine a Christmas with so little.

“The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

-Andre Maurois

My guru sent me an email this morning with this quote. Like a good guru, he left no explanation, so now I get to figure out what it is in the past I’m meditating on too obsessively.

I am visiting family, visiting a home which is something of a museum of my past. There are dangerous pictures, difficult people. There are mementos of my past, and there are people with their own complicated pasts that intersect messily with mine. There’s lots of past to fret about here, but…

This seems like wishful thinking to me. I could see him implementing more incremental reform, but not this:

Meanwhile, economists have been making the beer argument. In a paper titled “Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard argues that legalized marijuana would generate between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year — conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton “Free Market” Friedman himself.

And two weeks ago, when the Obama team asked the public to vote on the top problems facing America, this was the public’s No. 1 question: “Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that…

Just in case the holiday spirit was dulling your cynical side, here’s a story about white collar criminals and corrupt politicians are trying to save their skins with claims of addictions.

I’ve no doubt that some of them are truly addicts, but this pattern reinforces stigma associated with addiction being a convenient scheme to avoid accountability.

Prevention initiatives in the U.S. have often had an anti-addict tone to them. Federal prevention initiatives often make me queasy because of the policies they espouse and the hysterical tone of their education efforts. However, it’s good to see them start to embrace recovery. It’s especially heartening with meth when one considers the history of the crack epidemic.

Another hidden cost of addiction.