I don’t remember how it was I first noticed the little bird huddled at the edge of the sidewalk. Did I hear it cheep or see a faint movement? But there it was: a little chick that had fallen out of a nest somewhere. It was fuzzy grey with bulging blind eyes and one of its legs was twisted unnaturally out beside it. I stopped in the middle of my evening walk and stood there wondering how best to help it. I didn’t think I could find its nest or return it there, and besides, it was injured. I certainly…

I’m thinking a lot today about walls.

I’ve learned quite well to protect myself from my husband by throwing up great, big, frozen, insurmountable walls. I hunker down behind them. There have been good reasons for me to feel the need to be safe, and I’ve learned out of a strong sense of survival. It works well in the short term, and it keeps me from following my husband off a cliff, which is my immediate, instinctual response.

It doesn’t, though, truly work. As long as I can construct a big enough wall to keep me far away from his pain, I…

• AMA meeting: More to do on tobacco control
• Outpatient alcoholism treatment - 24-month outcome and predictors of outcome
• Healthcare Reform Must Prioritize Treatment for Addictions, Mental Health, Report Says
• Comparing retention in treatment and mortality in people after initial entry to methadone and buprenorphine treatment

Technorati Tags: tobacco, outpatient, treatment, policy, buprenorphine, methadone

I’ve been journaling for going on fifty years, off and on. During that time I’ve filled up ledgers, spiral notebooks, diaries, the back pages of pilot logbooks, and several megabytes of disk space. My current drug of choice is the pocket-sized Moleskine notebook with the graph paper pages, or a similar one sold by Target for about half the price. Over the past few years I’ve started putting everything in it: shopping lists, notes to self, jotted addresses and phone numbers, the better to create a true daily record.

I say “drug of choice” because journaling has become an ingrained habit with…

I’m not dead set against lowering the drinking age, (see here) but I find it odd that in making the argument to lower the drinking age, John McCardell offers very troubling statistics without any serious interest in their cause:

at one major university, student visits to the emergency room for alcohol-related treatment have increased by 84 percent in the past three years. Between 1993 and 2001, 18-to-20-year-olds showed a 56 percent jump in the rate of heavy-drinking episodes. Underage drinkers now consume more than 90 percent of their alcohol during binges. These alarming rates have life-threatening consequences: each year, underage drinking kills…

Ok, so I’m a little behind on my Lost watching. Somewhere in the middle of the season my husband and I just couldn’t find time to watch TV together, so we are only now getting back to those episodes we so faithfully recorded. Last night we were watching the episode “Whatever Happened, Happened” in which (warning to those more behind than I am: stop here if you don’t want to know) a young Ben Linus is in danger of dying from a gunshot wound and all eyes turn to surgeon Jack Shephard to save him. And Jack… grows some boundaries.

That’s right,…

I stopped writing on my blog for a while recently, mostly because I had so saturated myself with the subject of sex addiction that I began to feel that if I wrote or read one more word about it, I’d puke. This feeling of being fed up to my teeth coincided with a sense that I had finally arrived at a point in my recovery where it was all about me. Sex addiction was my husband’s disease, and I was done focusing on my husband. I knew I had my own serious issues and that I still needed recovery, but…

Maybe I’ll be stating the obvious, but those of us in the mental health biz talk a lot about enabling, and the rule, of course is, DON’T.

Don’t make it easy for someone to stay addicted. Don’t bring him a beer, even if he’s your father and that’s what you’ve always done. If your mother’s half in the bag at your graduation, get really mad at her. Create such a fuss that she thinks, Good golly. I have a problem. I messed up. I better change.

If (s)he is your partner, you don’t go with him to the bar. And if (s)he comes…

I am in counseling to deal with the sexual abuse in my childhood. I’ve been going for a few months now, and we are only beginning to touch on the fringes of the childhood stuff.

It’s sucky. It’s hard. Apparently, I’m really angry with my parents.

Today, we talked about a peripheral story to the sexual abuse. A friend of the main perpetrator in my life would sometimes touch me inappropriately. Between the ages of 10 and 16, this guy would push himself up against me, shut himself in rooms with me, and generally show up in places where a grown man…

A 2004 study carried out at the University of Colorado found that around 15 per cent of Caucasians have a genetic variant, known as the G-variant, that makes ethanol behave more like an opioid drug, such as morphine, with a stronger than normal effect on mood and behaviour. This variant seems randomly distributed among the population: it emerged through mutation, although the factors affecting its selection remain unknown since, like all genes, it does not operate in isolation. . . . The Colorado study tested the DNA of moderate-to-heavy drinking students to determine whether they had the G-variant gene. They…

I hate to say it, but I think we’re going to be seeing more of this.

When I clicked the link, I was expecting to see it focus exorbitant salaries in boutique treatment programs. It’s a little surprising that this is happening in the program with so much public funding. The current market is rewarding programs with entrepreneurial spirits and that is a double-edged sword. It can be good because it rewards programs that respond aggressively to community need rather than waiting for someone to hand them capital. The downside is obvious, from this article. It can foster an unhealthy…

For some, alcohol is a fuel; for others it is a vice. Numerous artists have called upon alcohol as a muse, even Winston Churchill attributed his six part memoir to alcohol. Churchill said, “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Mark Twain is quoted as saying,“My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”

Many addicts in recovery are likely to agree that the truth, for us, is: “It has taken more out of me than I have taken from it.”

While a direct genetic link between alcohol and creativity has not been…

Intervention, on A&E, is a popular show examining various addictions and the effects on the addict and their families. Click on the image above to see the lineup for this season, as well as past episodes. Full video can also be found on their website.

Tonight’s episode:

After being molested as a child, Nicole developed an unusual eating disorder–she was unable to swallow. By age 16, she weighed just 68 pounds, and doctors inserted a feeding tube into her stomach. The tube was supposed to be temporary, but 16 years later, Nicole still relies on the tube and can’t swallow any food or liquids.…

I get a notice from Google Calendar in my Gmail every morning.  Most of the time, it tells me that I have no events scheduled for the day, apart from the odd subscription or Internet charge coming due.  What a relief that is: “You have no events scheduled today!”

I like certain events; don’t get me wrong.  I love having dinner with the kids and their families, excursions to the marsh to look at birds and critters with my honey, granddaughters’ birthday parties, visits to family in North Florida, the occasional movie, meetings, a new gadget to play with.  Stuff like…

How often does a guy receive an Email from a girl he’s never met? And that girl has no obvious ‘designs’ on him? And she does not know him? And in the message is a poem, sort of dedicated to him? And how often then does the guy sort of just ignore it in his mind, as if—as if twice each day he finds a poem dedicated to him in the inbox?

My name is Steve and I’m an alcoholic. I did write a short bio on TSR in May 2009, but otherwise I try to find someone with which to…

Everyone, everywhere: Stop everything, and go buy this book:Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality. I borrowed it from a friend, and it is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while.

I’m only a few chapters in, but I’ve already been floored. So far, the emphasis is on restoring sexuality to its spiritual center…recovering the human-to-human connectedness that can get lost when we objectify each other. It’s beautifully written, and it seems a bit more like a poem than a book in some ways.

The author is distinctly Christian in his descriptions of God, but as I…

Yesterday, I took my kids out to the park and watched my son, long and lanky, swing his way to the top of a climbing structure formed from a maze of ropes. Like many autistic individuals, mastering motor skills can be a challenge for him. He was late to walk and it took months of assistance before he could learn to use a playground ladder. Now he jumps and hangs and grasps in a way that’s astonishing to me and is the result of hours of single-minded and obsessive climbing. His hands are roughly calloused, as if through a lifetime…

i watch the dawn

spreading a hint

of light over far eastern skies

melting away

deep shadows dark

drying up tears in my eyes

light that shrinks shadows

changing the forms

that haunt into those of ease

displacing the dark

with rays of hope

i gratefully soak in some peace

another day

is granted to me

to live a life worth living

to do what’s right

to make amends

give back what to me’s been given

picture: http://onixa.deviantart.com/art/Let-it-fly-127498417

read more

I have spent my share of time cyberstalking the women my husband has acted out with. (Hey, I’m codependent; I’m really, really good at focusing on people who aren’t me.) And I’m not alone. Focusing on and obsessing about the activities of acting out partners is an unhealthy behavior nearly every partner of a sex addict engages in at some point. During my last binge googling the name of one of my husband’s former lovers I realized I was engaging in a form of emotional cutting, purposely causing myself pain (and getting something from it).

Since then I have been tempted a…

My husband and I met up with an old friend tonight. It was a guy he’d known at the beginning of his active addiction, and they’d lost each other as both of their diseases had spiraled out of control. I remembered that this kid had recently gotten married and had a newborn, so I was excited to bump into him and hear how the baby was doing. He looked fatter, happier, and clean.

The boys chatted for awhile about small talk, but eventually, the topic of his child and wife came up. He explained that his wife had asked him to…

The King and the King of Pop had a good deal more in common than musical innovation.

Elvis, son of an unsuccessful Mississippi sharecropper, came from hard times and rose above them.  He reinvented popular music by successfully combining the three main aspects of American music tradition: mountain or “country” music, popular ballads, and soul.  Not only did he do that, he helped facilitate the frame of mind that led to the civil rights reforms of the ’60’s and ’70’s, by bridging a cultural gap that had — except for jazz — remained largely untouched.  He did that on his own,…

I roll my eyes as a cluster of neon clad girls buzz, “The way the sidewalk lights up as he walks is so cool! I love that song.” Michael Jackson and that stupid Billie Jean video. Cool? Whatever. He’s so overrated. I mean, if you wanted to talk about enduring cool, who could really compete with Men Without Hats? The girls put “Thriller” on the stereo for the three thousandth time that night, crooning and shrieking as I strap on my Walkman and coolly pop in a cassette for some band that has long since faded into obscurity. My friend’s…

I seem to be on a Nar-Anon vacation. In my time attending Nar-Anon, I’ve never done it before. I know lots of people who have, and I’ve always thought, “Why in the world would anyone stop attending meetings?”

And now I find myself stopping attending meetings. I don’t mean to be stopped, but I am stopped, anyway.

I’m not sure why. I heard from my sponsor tonight, and she said that folks are asking about me. I should call folks. I miss my friends, but I can’t seem to get myself to a meeting.

I’m working on my steps with my Al-Anon sponsor…

I’ve been in an odd place lately, where I feel like I’m in some kind of siginificant transition. I’m not sure what’s ending and what’s beginning, but it’s sure gotten me reflective.

I met some new friends tonight, and we were kind of talking about our life stories. I realized that I have something of a testimony, now. I’ve been brought to my knees, and seen the light…like what I always heard might happen to me in my childhood, in hymns and sermons and stories. I heard these things, dismissively. I heard them like background noise…like so much blah, blah, blah.

Until…

With the story of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s week-long disappearance to visit his mistress in Argentina buzzing about, we’re faced yet again with images blasted through the media of a public figure tearfully apologizing for his infidelity, while his job hangs in jeopardy.* And in the wake of this story, the same discussions will repeat themselves that have echoed down from all the scandals past. Why did he do it? What does it say about our society? Should he keep his job? And, my perennial favorite, was he justified in cheating?

Yes, rest assured, people will whisper about the cause being…

Does this strike anyone else as naive? In writing about the FDA’s new powers to regulate tobacco, more specifically the FDA’s power to regulate nicotine yields, Saletan says:

This is what drug warriors don’t understand: There’s always market competition, whether you like it or not. Prohibition just means that the competition is between legal and illegal products. To beat illegal products in an already-addicted market, you need sufficiently attractive legal alternatives. Then, by regulating and manipulating the legal products, you can ratchet down the harm and addiction. That’s how you bring the market under control.

Come on. If we took this approach…

Richard G. Hartnett

     Getting sober, whether from active addiction or co-dependency, is an opportunity for us to finally get to understand ourselves.  The 12 Step programs of recovery suggest a process of self-study, uncovering the forces at work inside us.  When our emotions calm down enough for us to reflect on our interior dynamics, we begin to discern various kinds of forces that influence or affect us in different ways. 

     The more we observe the different movements within us, the more clearly we can distinguish them.  On the one hand, there are the impulses or urges that lead to our…

A study of medications (and placebo) for alcoholism finds that expectancy is a better predictor of outcomes than the medication (or placebo) that they are prescribed:

Double-blind placebo-controlled trials are intended to control for the impact of expectancy on outcomes. Whether they always achieve this is, however, questionable.

Reanalysis of a clinical trial of naltrexone and acamprosate for alcohol dependence investigated this issue further. In this trial, 169 alcohol-dependent patients received naltrexone, acamprosate or placebo for 12 weeks. In addition to being assessed on various indices of alcohol dependence, they were asked whether they believed they received active medication or placebo.

While there were…

Not much has changed since my last post. You know, the one where my vehicle of life came to a screeching halt at the bloody end of a dead-end road and I no longer recognized my life? Yeah. That post.

Some bright spots: I have found a therapist that specializes in the very thing that is ripping my life apart and I have found that people actually give a damn and want to be of service when you ask for help. Imagine that.

Time to get brutally honest: while I don’t want to blow my sobriety (8.5 years,) the thought of checking…

This is the cure for our contemporary cultural worship of economics and hopefully for its creep into “behavioral economics” and thinking about addiction.

Technorati Tags: addiction, economics