Thank you for my husband’s kindness to me over the last few days. I’ve felt your love for me flowing through him, and it is my favorite way to receive your tenderness. His kind words, thoughtful actions, and sweet caresses make my life so much brighter.

Thank you for my big, fat, funny dog. She keeps trying to eat the cat food while I’m working at my desk, and we keep fighting about it. She keeps coming and laying her big old fat head in my lap, and it’s made me smile.

Thank you for my students, and bless them. Thank you…

One of our goals at TSR is to be  a venue where artists in recovery can share their talent with others.  One of the effects of active addiction is a thwarting of our artistic side and recovery offers an open door where we can share our talents freely.  This short story was read to me by a friend in recovery and I asked him if I could put it on the site.  He was listening to NPR one day and they invited writers to submit a 3 minute piece, beginning with the sentence, “The nurse left at five o’clock.”   Here…

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He’d actually been better than usual in this morning’s version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I’d found him in the end.

I’ve had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I’d…

Our marriage needs a toilet. We need a place to put the poop. Right now, we don’t have a place.

We need a safe place…a clean, well-lighted place, even. A place with nice wallpaper and soft tissue for cleaning up the stains and smears. We need some shelves for organizing supplies. We need a decent time and a set of rules to play by.

Right now, for instance, my husband has disappeared. I left for a minute to run an errand for him. I came back, and he’s gone. I hate it when he disappears. Also, I can’t find my cell phone,…

Warning: this post is self-satirical in nature. It should not be read by the sarcasm impaired.

So, you know, I’m not really codependent. (I hate that word anyway. Sincerely I do.) I just like to do nice things for people. Really nice things. Like that time in college when my boyfriend’s parents were going to come for a visit and I helped out by vacuuming his carpet. Only he wasn’t actually my boyfriend, but I wanted him to be, and I didn’t, technically, vacuum the carpet, I went a little overboard, which really was not my fault because I couldn’t find a…

It’s the Day of Atonement. While I’m not Jewish, something in the redemptive drive of the day has infected me, as it has for the last several years. I don’t know if it’s my many Jewish friends or if it’s just something in the hint of fall that I can smell in the air, but it feels like a day for making things right.

I went to an Al-Anon meeting tonight, and the topic was steps 8 and 9. I’ve recently finished working those steps with a sponsee, so there’s a lot of amendment, forgiveness, and atonement happening in my life.

There…

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I’ll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen’s autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn’t the one closest…

I don’t know about you, but I have had a tendency to equate “relaxing” with the negative phrase, “doing nothing.”  I don’t know if it’s because I had to multi-task even as a teen-ager just to get by, or if it’s because our culture constantly infuses our brains with doing things “faster,” or maybe it’s because I’m just wired that way.  In one of my last posts I wrote about staying  in the middle of the road, and how I have been trying, over the past several months, to get closer to that middle line, even if it curves or…

by William C. Moyers

And now the rest of my answers to questions posed a few weeks ago by Kelsey S., a 16-year-old student at Mallard Creek High School in Charlotte, N.C.:

Question: If the government gave more funding for drug treatment, do you think there would be a positive change?

Answer: There is no doubt that we need to reconfigure the war on drugs to expand resources for proven prevention programs in high schools, for research by scientists exploring the neurobiology of addiction, and for treatment at licensed facilities that can demonstrate successful outcomes. Today the federal government spends about $21 billion…

More evidence for the argument that lowering drinking ages would lead to more alcohol and drug problems later in life. The point about age of first use vs. regular use is interesting and offers some interesting questions about goals and strategies for prevention programming.

Background: Many studies have found that earlier drinking initiation predicts higher risk of later alcohol and substance use problems, but the causal relationship between age of initiation and later risk of substance use disorder remains unknown.

Method: We use a “natural experiment” study design to compare the 12-month prevalence of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition, alcohol and substance use…

A few months after I first met Mark in college, we ran into each other in a campus dining hall. As we chatted, he admired my high school class ring. I held my hand out to let him see it more closely, and peering down at the ring, he said, “Would you mind taking it off?” So, I took off my ring and handed it to him, expecting that he wanted to look at it more closely still. To my utter astonishment, he simply said “thank you,” pocketed the ring and walked away. I stood there in the lobby, open-mouthed…

I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but good for him. Whether one agrees with him or not, it’s something we all take for granted and it deserves discussion.

The video featured two attractive women.

It was shot by an onlooker.

It hit YouTube by storm.

You’re no doubt thinking “sex,” but let me assure you the women kept their clothes on. Unfortunately, that was the only ladylike thing about them.

On the video, they appeared intoxicated, swore like sailors, got in fights, then screamed, shoved and cursed until security finally took them away, one in handcuffs.

This was not a women’s penitentiary. It was…

Tonight’s Sober Salon will be hosted by TSR blogger Rahcovery Miles, AKA A.Miles. The chat starts at 8pm EST.

Tonight is more like an online meeting than the Q&A that we sometimes have with hosts. The topic is Your Coming Out story. The 12 Traditions address the importance of anonymity:

1. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.
2. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

Yet, outside of the rooms it is likely we’ve all shared our personal…

I get such a jones for my husband after about 24 hours away from him. It does me good to get away and to remember how the normals live–but I miss him. I miss his face. I miss the way he looks at me. I miss the way we play. I love coming home.

There was a while during the worst of both our sicknesses when I didn’t want to come home to him. We couldn’t communicate, and I couldn’t enjoy anything. I couldn’t see beyond the miserable past and the terrifying future, and I missed a lot of good time.…

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me — or at least like the me I used to be — find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of…

Presentations (hopefully video too) will be up next week. I’ll post a link when they’re up.

Sarah Zemore gave a great presentation on the evidence for the effectiveness of 12 step groups. It was powerful and well organized. I found a link to an identical presentation here.

She very effectively rebutted the Cochrane Review from a few years ago by making the following points. (These are based on notes I took and are incomplete. Hopefully they post video so that you can see her complete rebuttal for yourself.)

• It was limited only to randomized trials and ignored the overwhelming observational evidence.
• It included…

I have gone to spend the night with relatives, and I was excited to get to sleep in a bit. My husband’s body is really, really attached to going to the methadone clinic early, and I never get much of a chance to sleep past 6 or 7.  I tend to stay up late as well, so it just doesn’t bode well for sleeping at my house.

I was so cozily in bed this morning. I was under a great pile of blankets, as the house I’m in is very air conditioned. I had turned on a fan for some nice…

“Where’s the ketchup?”

“Don’t you remember?” asks Mark, a little exasperated. “We had this conversation,” he says as he begins to describe it to me in elaborate details: all the full sentences I said to him in response to what he said to me about some colossal ketchup accident and grocery store followup fiasco.  I wish I could remember, it was probably funny.

“Sorry, honey. I just don’t.  I, um…  I wasn’t looking you in the eye when I said any of this, was I?”  I’m embarrassed, because I’m fairly certain he’s not making this up.  I know, we both know, that…

Last Sunday I was grocery shopping when a call came in from my mother. I let it go to voicemail and planned on returning her call later. I am notorious for disregarding the function of my voicemail. Often times people leave important information on those things, but I rarely check. An hour later a call came in from an unrecognized number and I had a feeling to accept the call.

It was my mother’s friend letting me know that Mom had been hospitalized. Two days later they finally pinpointed the source of her severe illness, a virulent case of salmonella poisoning.…

When talking about my own codependency, one of my favorite tongue-in-cheek lines (which came out of a recovery group I’m in) is: “I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!” Whether I forgot a birthday, miss a deadline, stick my foot squarely into my mouth (or sometimes my keyboard, as the case may be) or am otherwise imperfect, I’ll quip (often internally), “Oh no! I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!”

So imagine my surprise when I flipped a my copy of recovery writing queen Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go open to a random page today and…

The University of Michigan will host a conference tomorrow on How AA/NA Work and will stream it live here. The presenters include some very big names. Here’s the agenda:

Friday, September 25, 2009
9:00 am - 4:00 pm

Picture this:
There you are standing in line at Starbucks, zoning out until you get to order your five adjective beverage. A harmless, cute woman turns to you and says: “Can I please buy your drink?”

Do you hesitate? If so, Why?

You’ve heard about the Free Hugs guy, right? Juan Mann’s sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives. So he started giving out free hugs and it caught on, worldwide. Actually, just this past Monday I saw a girl outside the school library, holding a sign up that said FREE HUGS.

Okay, sure. It takes…

Two interesting findings about underage drinking. The first on the relationship between early alcohol use and chronic alcohol problems later in life. The second looks at the relationship between early alcohol use and poor judgment later in life.

We’ve known for some time that there is a relationship between early drinking and alcohol problems later in life. What’s been unclear is the nature of that relationship. Does early exposure to alcohol cause changes in the adolescent brain that lead to problems later in life? Does early exposure facilitate the expression of genes that are related to alcoholism? These two theories would…

I know few partners of addicts who (whatever they may think of 12 Step) don’t look forward with breathless anticipation to the glorious day when their addict reaches Step 9. Wonderful, special Step 9. Step 9: making amends to those who have been harmed. Step 9 where the focus is (for once, it feels) on all of us long-suffering codependents. I wanted my husband to start recovery at Step 9 and spend every day for the rest of his life working it. I wanted him to feel, deeply and in perpetuity, every little hurt of mine and to spend each…

I logged in to my e-mail tonight for the first time in a busy few days, capping a busy few weeks in which we’ve done everything from smash up my car (we are all fine, but it had to make a trip to the body shop to render it safely drivable again) to visit the ER (totally unrelated to the smashing of the car, but again everyone is fine) to host a party for my daughter’s entire first grade class. If I could afford to go to a body shop for humans (otherwise known as a spa, I believe), I’d…

This was previously published at whatmesober.com. A couple of remarks may be at odds with bits I’ve previously published here at TSR.

I let my 20th anniversary go by without any specific remarks, although I alluded to it in several places, but it seems appropriate to make a few comments. I mean, one is without question an “Old Timer” at 20, and we’re supposed to have all that wisdom and say really deep stuff, right?

Well, in my case, not.

I have found that over the years I seem to have less and less to say, both at meetings and when writing. That’s…

Been sailing some choppy seas of late. Despite my failure to post here, I’ve stayed well connected in my recovery circles. I’ve had to – the beast came back.

I’m not looking for pity or shame. You poured out compassion and good advice when I slipped last month. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated your words. I guess I just wasn’t really ready to listen. Even though I stopped using, I spiraled down further, into depression and self-destruction. Then I used for a week. Then I asked for help and stopped it again.

I scared people who care about me. Their…

HOUND OF HEAVEN

My Marathon

All over the blog world I read about Peeps training for this or that marathon, and then, well….doing it.  Running. Competing. Loving it.

Yesterday I read “Junky’s Wife” blog HI GOD, about being reintroduced to God, from Whom she had been running. In the final sentences she wrote a phrase:  “…even though I ran from you for so long.”

This reminded me of the “Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson, something which I slept through in St Xavier High School, but remembered years later.  The opening words are SO me:

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I…

For so long, I heard the phrase: When the pain of staying outweighs the pain of leaving, you will go (and not a god damn second sooner). Meaning, when the pain of staying in my dysfunctional relationship became greater than the pain (fear) of leaving it, only then would I leave.

I always tried to imagine this, what this day would look like. I imagined a relapse so bad, so deep in it’s own ooze, that I would have no choice - the pain would be too great. But, it never was. The pain of his using was never to great…

From the International Harm Reduction Association:

‘Harm Reduction’ refers to policies, programmes and practices that aim primarily to reduce the adverse health, social and economic consequences of the use of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs without necessarily reducing drug consumption. Harm reduction benefits people who use drugs, their families and the community.

Not bad for a definition developed by a committee.

[via drugscope]