I am afraid. I am afraid. I am afraid.

I am afraid that my husband will leave me. I am afraid that I will leave him. I am afraid that this pain will never stop hurting in just the same way, over and over again. I am afraid he will be with another woman. I am afraid he will relapse. I am afraid I am not doing something right, something crucial. I am afraid of facing more pain, and I am afraid of this pain. I am afraid of leaving or staying. I can’t tell which hurts most.

I am afraid of…

This article from Counselor does a good job pointing out some of the limitations of the push for evidence based practices.

The whole issue is a double-edged sword. Measuring your own outcomes is a good thing, but it’s no small burden for a treatment provider. (Imagine if every doctor had to measure their outcomes.) The adoption of and evidence-based practice (with some measures to assure fidelity) could relieve providers of this burden, but it comes at the cost of autonomy–which no one likes. Providers also hate that the process for identifying evidence-based practices is so political. (Consider the case of MRT.)

Note the…

Well, here we are - the last day of Alcohol Awareness Month - and I must first express my gratitude to Alix M. who has diligently (and I mean work your butt off diligent) contacted writers and made sure that every single day during this very important month, a new story was posted about someone’s journey on the ferris wheel  of addiction and recovery.

I have been honored to write the last entry:

What Recovery Means To Me:

Being able to look people in the eye

Knowing that I can be trusted driving other peoples’ children in my car

Asking for help when I need…

It’s been awhile since A. Miles has shared about her life and the happenings in said life.

I’ve been hard at work, y’all.
I find myself pretty connected to the seasons, and I notice that my spiritual growth can be likened to a hardy perennial, which flowers over many seasons in their lifetime. Recovery and transformation require such diligence, and each step and barrier I take and surpass creates a new flower. Often I stop and admire such “flowers;” full of gratitude and wonder over how these “things” unknown to me just five, ten years ago could actually suffocate my true potential…

There are many days that I attempt to post blog entries, only to delete them entirely or archive the posts for a later day. The ultimate outcome is that the entry never gets published. I can’t tell you why this is. My best guess is that my mind is very fluid and I’m not one to get hung up on any one particular issue or topic for long. What might constitute a hot topic at 9:00 AM will more than likely get shelved for the next hot thing at 11:45 AM. God forbid I don’t finish that entry and 3:00 PM…

I’ve got plans for tomorrow that are going to keep me away from the computer, and I knew I wanted to squeeze in one last blog post today. So first thing in the morning I began the day right: by panicking because I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about. I didn’t have an idea! Ack! What if I sat down and couldn’t think of anything? Well, you can see (tongue firmly planted in cheek here) how very catastrophic that would be. There I was with the threat of writer’s block looming in front of me ominously (and…

In one of the Alanon pamphlets on detachment, there are a series of bullets representing the things we learn in Alanon.  Two of them are the following:

In Alanon We Learn:

Not to create a crisis, and

Not to prevent a crisis if it is in the natural course of events.

I am in a quandary right now.  How does one know if they are “creating a crisis” or allowing a crisis to occur “in the natural course of events?”  This has been gnawing at me for the last several days, since I have found myself in situations where I really don’t know if …

We are very happy to introduce Dr. Michael Stein, our newest blogger at TSR.  He is an Internal Medicine physician, who obviously has a gift for writing and a special interest in recovery.   We’re going to let him get started by writing from his heart and see how you, our TSR members, want to proceed.  Maybe he can write a “Question and Answer” column, or you can ask him to write on specific subjects - it’s your site, so let’s see what happens.  I just reviewed his latest book, “The Addict”,  - the story of a year in the life of…

I’m so glad you guys found me, you Second Road people.

Because you know I love to talk, but am basically too shy to do that, just talk to people.  So instead I listen for a living, and occasionally, when I have something worth saying, let it roll, the mini-psychoeducational lecture, or the observation about how a person is operating, and maybe suggest, hypnotically of course, a better way.

But blogging, as you who are here well know, allows all of us to talk ad nauseum, and no one is interrupting, and no one necessarily even knows who we are, so we can…

Sarah Allen Benton
therapist, author, speaker

I feel as though I have lived two lives—a drinking life and a life in recovery.  I began drinking at the age of 14 and recall that right from the beginning I was blacking out, vomiting, and unable to recognize the danger I was in. These events felt ordinary to me, and I quickly began to live for them.  I was truly infatuated with alcohol from my first experiences. It just felt right—even when it made me sick. My love-hate relationship with alcohol had just begun.

I thrived on the social aspect of college and found that…

A Mother’s Desperation
The story of one mother’s attempt to rescue her daughter from her heroin addiction -a more complete telling of the story introduced in the centerpiece show, Addiction, from the HBO Series.

Our prayers are with this family, and all the others going through similar circumstances.

My husband has a court date coming up, and he is blowing it off at hyperspeed. It is impressive to me the ways that he can ignore things that would drive me absolutely insane. I am glad to be in recovery and to approach his problems with clarity that they are, indeed, his problems. I am glad that I’m not obsessing.

His probation officer told him to get in touch with his public defender and to make a probation payment before his court date. He hasn’t done either of these things. I’m not sure what he is expecting to happen. I’m…

Earlier this month, Jason here at The Second Road linked to an article by Nina Caplan, a writer who shares her experience of going without alcohol for a month. What struck me in reading her piece was how boring she found life without alcohol. “So I did it. It’s not difficult. Just dull,” she writes. And, “What else did I learn after a month of stone-cold sobriety? That it’s over-rated.” That is the stereotype of sobriety and the fear of almost anyone facing recovery, whether from alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, food or codependency (aka addiction to addicts): What am I going…

Chad shares with us how he found God in living, after coming so close to loosing everything. Thank you for submitting your story Chad. We celebrate your 17 years and wish you many, many more–one day at a time.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

17 X 365 = 6,205

Today I’ve reached the seventeen year mark in my sobriety.

On the first day I was sober, if you would have told me I would still be sober seventeen years from now, I would have laughed at you. On the twenty ninth day of my sobriety, if you would have told me I would still…

Funny how the process of recovery works; how we go through phases and stages and, as long as we are committed to the process, more is revealed.  I’ve learned something recently that has surprised me in a way that I didn’t think was possible.

People know very little of me unless they put some effort into it.  I can’t tell you how often people are surprised to learn that I’m gay, for example.  It isn’t the most obvious thing about me.  What I do show people is usually kindness and patience.  I show them my lovely manners.  I iron my jeans…

At the end of winter, I realized I was depressed. I’d let myself get into quite a state, and I went to our county mental health clinic to get some help. I got an antidepressant and something to help me sleep. The antidepressant did its magic, but I was still struggling to stay asleep, so at my follow-up appointment I asked about other medications. The nurse practitioner prescribed me something else, and now I can sleep and sleep and sleep. I can sleep forever. It’s wonderful, as I’ve been getting increasingly drained by waking up again and again throughout the…

When my husband was still active in his sex addiction and I was still unaware of it, we lived our life (as many living with active addiction do) enveloped in fantasy. We frolicked inside a rainbow in a castle made of pink cloud fluff. We grew roses straight out of our heads, and the bees that hummed around our heads courting the flowers would drizzle their honey straight into our mouths. We were love and romance. I was his dream and he was mine. Everything seemed perfect, except when it didn’t quite.

Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse…

by William C. Moyers

A new illicit drug grabs the headlines every couple of years.

In the 1980s, it was cocaine, and then, at the end of the decade, it was crack.

“Date-rape” drugs, such as GHB, got a lot of attention in the ’90s, and the media’s drugs of choice for most of this new millennium have been methamphetamines and Oxycontin.

But suddenly, an old drug is back in the news: marijuana. The Minnesota Legislature is debating medical marijuana. In Washington, D.C., advocates and opponents of legalization are parsing President Barack Obama’s utterances about the weed’s role in the war on drugs. Even…

Jason Schwartz contributes a lot of great policy blogs to TSR–important stuff that we hope you all read! It’s an honor that he contributed his story here because most of his blogs are not personal.  Jason is the clinical director at Dawn Farm, a place that almost makes me wish I still needed rehabilitation, or that I lived in Michigan. Dawn Farm provides a continuum of quality services for men and women with drug and alcohol problems. Since 1973, Farm programs have offered help-never turning people away for lack of funds. They have a 74 acre farm and a goal to…

Meditation has been a great help to me in recent years, helping me calm and center myself. For the last several months, I have been sitting with a group once a week and meditating for forty-five minutes. I have been meditating regularly for shorter periods of time, but I still find that stretch of forty-five minutes to be incredibly difficult. And I’ve been noticing a pattern lately:

When I first sit down, my mind is tumbling forward and my body is tense, as if I’ve been moving fast but inertia prevented me from noticing or feeling the movement until the brakes…

here are some exerts from a stop smoking programme booklet…

“the key to success is ‘want power’ not ‘will power’”

“practice saying ‘no’ and going without”

“get support from friends and family… to put up with you if you are tense and irritable… who give you encouragement when you are finding it difficult and tell you not to give up.”

“throw away all your cigarettes”

“your goal is to get through today. deal with one urge at a time and beat it.”

“do things that help you not to smoke and avoid things that make you want to smoke”

“avoid smokers and spend more time with non-smokers”

“avoid places…

Today’s guest post is from blogger Mary Christine, who has been sober since July 24, 1984.  I was 10 years old in ‘84, and I just bring that up because at 10, I was a big geek. I would have laughed if you told me I would wind up as a meth head at 25. It’s always easier to loose sight of your goals than it is to get back on track. Stories like Mary Christine’s are inspiring and remind me how deep my appreciation for life runs now that I came close to loosing it all! Thanks Mary!

I was…

When I was a child, I had the best cat ever. No animal past or present could compare. It wasn’t that he had a sweet disposition. He was almost universally mean, awful and belligerent. When almost any creature approached him, he’d snarl, hiss, scratch, bite. He would chase away dogs several times his size with his yellow eyes blazing. And it wasn’t that he was beautiful. He wasn’t. Or perhaps he may have been as a kitten, but I wasn’t fond of him then for it to make any impression. When I loved him, he was ragged and scarred. His…

Do nicotine replacement gum and lozenges cause mouth and throat cancer? Of course, they’d still be lower risk than tobacco but it’s an argument against long term maintenance on NRT.

When I first engaged with the wonderful world of bloggery, I was pretty careless with my anonymity. Actually, I was reasonably careful, as I never imagined that people would actually read my blog. I figured a few friends who were worried about me and who enjoyed my writing would keep up with it, and I’d use it as a way to communicate what was going on so that I didn’t have to tell the same story a million times to different people. It felt good to write it all out. I knew that anonymity was important, as revealing who I…

I’ve given a lot of thought to what today should mean. Five years seems like a good chunk of life, then again at times it’s almost as if time has stood still. Am I different? Better? Wouldn’t we all like to think so about ourselves? To believe that in a span of a few years we improved our outlook, understood just a little more about life as we know it. For some people that thinking is a must to go on, to find some semblance of serenity within them.

Five years ago I had my last drink. How do I feel…

My inbox has been bombarded with stories based on this study. The qualitative study consisted of 20 (Yes, 20.) kids who were a subset of 63 and their reported reasons for smoking pot. These 20 were a subset of 63 pot smoking kids participating in a larger study. A quick read of the study reveals that the authors uncritically accept the premise that marijuana is an effective treatment for a myriad of problems and their citations reflect a bias for self-medication theories. The study looks like a conclusion in search of evidence. The reported reasons for use of marijuana by…

From Foreign Policy:

There are two distinct “drug problems.” First — logically, not in importance — is the damage that drug toxicity, intoxication, and addiction can do to people who consume drugs, and lead them to do to other people. That we might call the “drug problem” proper.

. . . illicit markets sometimes generate violence and disorder, and the higher prices they create stimulate income-producing crime by some drug users. The enforcement effort also generates harm: arrest, incarceration, bribery, gunfights between enforcers and dealers. The problem of the illicit market constitutes the second “drug problem.”

. . . Both no-brainer “solutions”…

This time in the Wall Street Journal. More of the same. The growing chorus of voices calling for legalization, regulation and taxation makes one ask, where are the other Kleimans calling for something other than the status quo or legalization?

Today’s guest post for Alcohol Awareness Month comes from a man, maybe a superhero, whose stories and reflections will put a grin on your face,  a thought or two in your brain, and love in your heart. He shares his stories on his blog and is deeply committed to working a 12 step program.

DEAR READER

Whenever I have the opportunity to tell my story, so that another might identify–and thereby receive help, I begin with this excerpt from page 202 in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, in the chapter “Women Suffer Too”. This tells me–and maybe you–exactly the place from where I…