I came across a wonderful fable tonight. It is a metaphor for knowing when to let go.

You will have to follow the link, the cyber-bridge if you will, to read the beautiful story called The Bridge.

There was a man who had given much thought to what he wanted from life. He had experienced many moods and trials. He had experimented with different ways of living, and he had had his share of both success and failure. At last, he had begun to see clearly where he wanted to go.

Diligently, he searched for the right opportunity. Sometimes he came close, only…

I went out to dinner a few weeks ago with some old friends who were curious about my recent 12 Step work, having had no experience with 12 Step or recovery work themselves. I told them that I was finding the exercise of working the Steps around particular issues to be really helpful new tool for me. So they asked for an example.

“Well, for example, Mark often gets home late on nights when he knows I have yoga or meditation or 12 Step. He knows I can’t leave until someone is there to take care of the kids, he promises…

Nothing too exciting in the treatment facility survey. A few interesting contrasts between methadone providers and other providers:

Half (50 percent) of OTPs (opioid treatment programs) were operated by private for-profit organizations, compared to 29 percent of all substance abuse treatment facilities.

Facilities with OTPs providing substance abuse treatment services were most likely to offer outpatient treatment (94 percent), but least likely to offer residential (non-hospital) or hospital inpatient treatment (7 percent each).

Another interesting data point:

Over half (55 percent) of all OTPs provided both maintenance and detoxification. Thirty-seven percent provided maintenance only, and 8 percent provided detoxification only.

I don’t know of any local…

I’m struggling with boundaries. I’m always struggling with boundaries. I thought through a few of them last night that are still dangling around, and I wanted to list them in writing so that I could look at them. Sometimes, putting these things to words helps me.

I’m not setting boundaries around sleep. I get up with my husband and take him to the methadone clinic, which means that I never sleep eight straight hours. At the end of a few more weeks of doing this, I’m going to be a weeping wreck. I can see it coming, but I’m not doing…

After the meeting
waiting for Mark to come out,
I saw a good friend.

I think to myself,
“It’s quite a coincidence
seeing David here.”

“What are the chances
that we’re here on a weeknight
in the same church lot?”

But then it hit me:
I forgot that David is
a sex addict too.

These 12 Step meetings —
weeknight evenings in this church —
were how he met Mark.

After all these years,
holidays, birthdays, dinners,
he’s just our friend Dave.

Mark comes. I tell him
addiction’s forgettable;
laughter shakes our car.

So there’s this little muscle in all our buttocks called the piriformis and from what I could find out on Google, it’s one of the muscles that basically holds are ass to our leg - or something like that.  Well, when this little critter gets torn, you can be sure that you’re gonna get a lot of pain shootin’ down whatever leg happens to be connected to that flat little piece of tissue.

So there I am, at a yoga class and we’re doing a stretching exercise in pairs.  My partner happens to be the teacher.  We sit, back to back,…

I have boundless respect for the writer Indigo. In her recent post about her father, she wrote,  “I hope you find what you’re looking for at the bottom of the bottle, I’m not there…I never was!”

Inside, I have uttered these words over and over. On Monday, I spoke at my father’s funeral. Such a symbolic event is guaranteed to arouse emotions. It’s the type of event that brings a lot of attention to me, makes me squirmy.

I, like a cat dying, want to crawl away and be left alone. But not really.

In 30+ years time I did a good…

As I continue to grow in my recovery, I am finding that lots of people who I seek to advise me have lots of opinions about what I should do with my mornings and nights. Last night, my husband was waiting for me to go to bed as I went through my long, laborious ritual of self-care and God-seeking, and he finally had a mini-mantantrum to get my attention after an hour had passed.

When I began meditating with my guru, he started me out with 10 minute meditations in the morning and evening. I’ve now moved up to 20 minute…

I learned something after a wildly painful session of marriage counseling and a few days of my husband and I stewing with one another, avoiding one another, and passive-aggressively trying to hurt each other. My husband has been lonely, and he misses me. Imagine that.

In marriage counseling, I had expressed a desire to know what was wrong with him, and he told me that everything was fine, he was happy, and there was no problem. It clearly wasn’t true, as he got very angry when I started describing what I’d been experiencing as his reactions to me. I still, though,…

Since I started Suboxone treatment 15 months ago, I’ve had my Google Alerts set to track news and blog posts for mentions of Suboxone and Buprenorphine (the active ingredient in Suboxone). Many of the items alerted are news reports of drug busts, where the bustee was caught with some heroin or Oxycontin - and a few Suboxone pills as well. Other alerts are people posting on message boards looking for advice or support regarding the use of Suboxone. And then there are the Suboxone rants.

Usually I just pass up these angry blog posts. Today however I allowed myself to be…

Well, most of you know some of my darker secrets that I don’t share with just anyone.

You read about my recovery experience and offer support. Well, just for fun, here are 25 things about me that I bet you did not know. Yes, anyone on facebook has probably seen this chain mail challenge going around. It felt good to do, to think of myself outside all the things I’m always trying to fix. In fact, I almost did not stop at number 25. If you feel the urge, write one, share it, have fun with it.

1. I think I…

When addiction moved into my house, and settled in for a long stay, I hit the library, Borders, and the internet.  I was voracious in seeking information about causes, cures, and the latest thinking.  No scrap of information was inconsequential.  I combed blogs looking for that story that matched mine.

I learned a lot.  Sadly, I found many stories that matched mine.  Eventually, my pain overrode my pride and I went to AlAnon.  I learned I had played a part in this.  I found recovery stories, and I savored each like a piece of fine chocolate.

After awhile, I began to see disagreement in the recovery community. …

I am very excited to have the opportunity to share my journey with you all at The Second Road.  I never imagined my life would be like it is today, but I have come to realize everything happens for a reason.

I am a 33 year old recovering alcoholic.   The other day, I was trying to think of the very first time I ever drank and a memory played in my mind like a movie; every moment of every scene came back to me.  I had stuffed this deep inside my mind for so many years, but it finally hit me…

It was just three days of my life. Day two was definitely the most difficult. The fruit cleanse had one day remaining, and I didn’t feel so hot. I had a cup of coffee on day one to stave off a headache, but day two I went without. I was a bit head-achy and lethargic most of the day. I took two naps to deal with both, but by evening I was still head-achy, fatigued, and a bit nauseous. I ate some miso soup for dinner, which was allowed, and poof, I felt better. Must have been the salt…

Day three…

Here’s what can and will happen in therapy (and therapy is a microcosm, a miniature world, so some of us like it).  So here’s what can happen in therapy when the doctor puts a person in charge of his or her own drinking and that person wants to be in charge, believes it’s possible, really, to control it— when it probably isn’t.

Let’s take a marital therapy case.  The sober spouse, make it a she, is the one who doesn’t drink to excess or drink at all.  Someone like me, a therapist tells her, “Do not count his drinks. He’ll monitor his own drinking. Let…

I did it - last week - only got  9 days clean time, then my son was at the kitchen table smoking a camel light and I couldn’t stand it anymore.  About half of those 9 days were hell on earth.  My mind was overcome with the desire to suck the filthy, poisonous concoction that had been wrapped in white paper, to feel it blast into my trachea on its deadly trajectory to my lungs.  When I relapsed, the first drag was nothing, but by the third one, I felt light headed, a feeling that I didn’t especially like.  So…

The words strike one after another, “Your grandmother just called your dad is drunk again; she wants to know if you can come over and talk some sense into him”. I want to shut those words out, ignore my grandmother’s plea – nothing good ever comes from these confrontations. My silence puzzles him, “Can you give me a ride please”.  “Are you alright?” “No, I’m not, this is nothing new…sigh it’s the same dance, over and over again.” When we arrive I go directly to the basement where my grandmother is staying with my father  in the lower half of…

As part of my 40 days of yoga revolution, I am in the midst of a 3-day fruit fast. It’s actually not a fast, more like a cleanse. Three days of nothing but fruit, which began yesterday and ends tomorrow. It’s going pretty well so far. In order to avoid a headache at work yesterday, I did have one cup of coffee. I didn’t work today, and I’ve made it all the way through without caffeine.  Other than that one coffee, I’ve had nothing but fresh fruit for almost 48 hours. It’s been very interesting.

Fortunately, the coordinators of our 40-day…

His voice raises from the back room, like a call to arms, a warning for those of us in the home of what is coming next. My oldest stays calm, talks reasonably while my husband increases his volume a little at a time, unable to push his son’s button, he allows his to be exposed and pushed all the while the flashing red warning lights are going off through the rest of the house in my husbands attempt at pulling me in to rescue him. I decline and instead take cover, my youngest and I quickly, find a safe place…

I saw this yesterday and feared that alcoholism research was going the same route as research on psychiatric prevalence–finding implausibly high rates of disorders.

A 20% lifetime rate of dependence for men would either be false or demonstrate the uselessness of dependence criteria. Reading the press release left me confused about whether that 20% figure was dependence or the sum of dependence AND abuse.

This Join Together research summary suggests that it is the latter. (Whew! Especially since Marc Schuckit is the lead author. I’d be very disappointed if his research began to look unreliable.)

Some data points of interest about early use and…

Ed at The Second Road commented on my last post that “race of the person using the drug is probably playing a role in how the public perceives the danger of that drug.”

Ed is very right, though the current methamphetamine hysteria puts a white twist on the pattern. William White wrote an article on this subject and identified these themes:

1. The drug is associated with a hated subgroup of the society or a foreign enemy.

It’s important to remember how wrong we can be. America has a long history of drug hype that leads to bad policy.

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of…

His name was H. Carlton Bryan, III.
He was an alcoholic.
He is survived by a sister and a daughter.
At many points he was offered help to quit drinking.
Fear always triumphed.
With each decision his addiction made for him, the further he moved away from cultivating anything positive or successful. In a series of steps that seemingly happened slowly, he made it harder to ever turn back around.
Refrain only offered clarity, which was only a pain best numbed by the bottle.
Alcoholism was the result of every monumental problem in his life. He lost his wife, his child, his job, his health, his teeth,…

Jason Schwartz’s take on knowing your child had the alcoholic gene made me think.  What would I do differently if I was able to intervene today to stop my sons progression to heroin addict?  This post is not about regrets, or shoulda/coulda.  It is my feelings right now about what I would do if I had a time machine. I came up with 3 things, and I put them out here for consideration, but half of my heart believes there was no stopping him.

1) I would have utilized the family leave act when he ran away the first time at age 16.  I considered it at the…

Powerful evidence about the social costs associated with alcohol:

Carpenter and Dobkin then electronically examined the death certificates of every 19- to-22-year-old who died in the United States between 1997 and 2005.

Young people’s alcohol consumption increases by over 20 percent as they hit their 21st birthday. Meanwhile, death rates increase by 9 percent exactly at age 21. Carpenter and Dobkin traced this further, finding that the mortality jump was largest for motor vehicle accidents, suicides, and other causes plausibly linked with alcohol use. The correlation isn’t a slam dunk, but it is close. The authors estimate that reducing the minimum drinking age…

by Dr. Allen Berger

As we begin this new year we face many challenges. Our economy is in dire straights, terrorism poses a real threat to our security, our planet is suffering from overuse and abuse, but despite these ominous conditions we can maintain recovery and sustain our peace of mind and serenity. That’s the marvelous fact about recovery, we can remain clean and sober regardless of what is happening around us: Regardless of success, failure, conflict, pain, fear, disappointment, loss, or trauma. Recovery is not dependent upon what happens to us - it is however dependent upon how we react…

When I was little, my Brownie troop went to visit a home for children with disabilities. I got the impression that somehow all of us normal kids in our spiffy uniforms were somehow supposed to cheer their lonesome lives. At some point in the days preceding this visit, I also got the romantic notion that I would meet my new best friend there. She would be (in accordance with the only picture I had of people who were disabled) wheelchair bound, and thus, different and separate from other people, but otherwise much like me. In particular, she would (like me)…

“Let go and let God” is saying I’ve heard frequently from people in recovery. It’s one of those slogans, like “one day at a time” or “easy does it”, that are a kind of shorthand for a more complex idea. They have a ring of truth about them, these slogans; they seem like common sense advice, solutions that many addicts agree can be applied to any number of the problems that commonly crop up in recovery.

But I’ve always struggled with “let go and let God.” It’s a difficult idea for an agnostic like me to wrap my head around, and…

I know you all have been wondering, Where the heck is Diary of a Quitter? Did she finally fulfill the promise of her name?

I’m still here, still coping with what life throws at me. The past couple of months were fraught with thyroid and depression woes, and changes in medication that made me quite sick for a few weeks. Then I lost my internet connection at home, so I haven’t been able to post.

Things seem to be working out though, like they usually do. My new (old) antidepressant is finally working, and thoughts are starting to flow again. One of…

A few days ago, I got a visit from the big, whining baby of a manchild beast that lives inside my husband’s body. Mostly, he’s doing a good job of keeping that part of himself tucked away, but it slips out now and again.

I am frustrated with myself and with him, and I am frustrated with not knowing what to do with my feelings and how he is struggling to process his feelings effectively. I can see the resentment seething in his face. He hasn’t been to a meeting since we had our fight, and seems to have no plans to…