Creative Commons, photo by Jeff Christiansen

I rashly went out Halloween costume shopping a few days ago. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Well, I know I needed to pick up a costume for my daughter — Yes, a few days shy of Halloween. I’m totally on top of it as a mom. — but for some reason I thought maybe I could find something cute for myself. You know, something suitable for a 40-year-old mother of two married to a recovering sex addict. There must be tons of costumes to fit the bill, right? At the very least there had…

Creative Commons, by websuccessdiva

“When are you going to start a blog?”

“Have you ever blogged before? Since you’re a writer, it seems like you should have a blog…”

“I’d love to be able to read your thoughts about these things…you should start a blog.”

Damn it, people! Everyone in my non-anonymous world is hounding me about starting a blog. When these things happen in my life, I am becoming more and more sure that I’m meant to be doing something different. God won’t leave well enough alone.

I am experimenting with non-anonymous blogging…or less anonymous blogging. The catch is, to protect the anonymous blogging,…

Creative Commons license, photo by snogglethorpe

“So at my meeting last night, I wanted to say that sex addicts are hot, but there were a few newcomers, and newcomers don’t think that’s so funny,” I told my husband Mark as we were getting ready for bed. Mark laughed. He knows my running joke; if I’m ever looking for a relationship again, I’m going to go to a 12 Step meeting for sex addicts: given my history of being attracted to addicts, at least that way I’ll end up with someone in recovery from the start.

“Why don’t they think it’s funny?” Mark…

When I first found out that my husband Mark was a sex addict, I threw myself into the thing that had always saved me in the past: research. I had graduated at the top of my high school class, gone to an excellent college and had a successful career thanks to my ability to analyze problems and find the answers. When I became a mother, I researched. When my son had speech delays and was eventually diagnosed with autism, I researched. So, when I found that Mark was a sex addict, I researched.

I read about sex addiction and looked for…

Creative Commons License, photo by "geishaboy500"

Silk is a sexy fabric. It’s smooth and soft and falls in glistening ripples like waves. Years ago, shortly before I moved to another state to be with Mark, I sent him a pair of silk boxers as a gift, and he wrote me an erotic letter about them in return. When I arrived in my new home, he had lined our bed in silk. At my bridal shower, a friend gave me a silk nightie for my wedding night and I was married in a dress of silk. I told my husband Mark I…

“The tenant in Unit 1 has a drinking problem, so I didn’t take him seriously when he would call with complaints.”

Those were the very words spoken to me by my apartment manager on Monday morning.

I have lived in my apartment building for close to two months and the unit downstairs from me has been an ongoing problem. The man who lives in this unit has a few problems with sound control. Through my walls and floor, I can hear him carry on conversations. I can hear his stereo. Several times I have been awakened at 3 AM by his television…

I’m at the tail end of the flu, the funk, a cold, a virus - whatever you want to call it.  It laid me  flat for a few days.  I’m talkin’ in the bed, sweating, freezing, can’t shower or even brush my teeth kinda sick.  I’m talkin’ wanting to burn the sheets kinda sick - even the dogs wouldn’t come near me kinda sick.  I am now literally sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Everyone has it, but when I got it, it was happening to ME!  It’s all about me, remember?  I’m an addict - it HAS…

Sometimes, after a few bad days, I feel somewhat speechless when things return to a kind of normal. Yesterday was so lovely. We had a particularly powerful church service. We spent time with family, and we worked on an art project together. My husband finished some work and got paid for it. I’d worked myself into a frenzy of exhaustion and worry through projection and fear. I’d lost track of myself and my God’s plan for me, and it’s so easy to fall into a vortex of negativity when I forget to slow down.

Sometimes, I’m speechless when things go right.…

One morning, eight years ago, I turned on the desktop computer my husband Mark and I shared and called up the keystroke logging software I had installed. Mark didn’t know that the computer was secretly taking notes on every character he typed, and I didn’t want him to know. He had been staying up late at night on the computer often enough that I was concerned about it. I’d asked him what was going on, but he said he was working, and just playing around on the Internet, blowing off steam. It was no big deal.

When I opened the file,…

I’m just finishing Undrunk - A Skeptic’s Guide to AA, by A. J. Adams (Hazelden, 2009).  Undrunk may be the most lucid explanation of what AA is (and is not), how it functions and “how it works” that I’ve ever read, including all of the AA-Approved literature.  It is at once a primer for the reader who just isn’t quite sure, an explanation for newcomers, and a great narrative of a personal journey, written with eloquence and wit.  Along with being funny (at least to those of us who have been there), it’s almost never boring.

Still, as impressed as I am…

Anchorage, AK is taking some very aggressive steps to address public drunkenness in their community:

The new mayor, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has created a staff position and a task force devoted to addressing homelessness. The police recently gained the authority to dismantle homeless encampments with just 12 hours’ notice. Citizen groups are patrolling parks where homeless camps have been the site of rapes and other violence. But in perhaps the biggest and most controversial break from how the city has handled the problem in the past, a Salvation Army detoxification and alcohol abuse treatment center has begun accepting chronic inebriates who…

Eight years ago, in spite of the fact that we were both exhausted by caring for our infant son, I found that my husband Mark was staying up later and later at night. He had to be up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work, yet I would wake some nights at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. to my son, wailing for a feeding or a diaper change, and find Mark’s side of the bed empty, cold, untouched. Then I’d glance to the bedroom door and see the eerie blue glow of the computer screen in the next…

I’ve just diagnosed myself with a strong need for some gratitude. While I include thanksgiving in my prayers every day, sometimes, it’s still useful to write out a list. It helps to make sense of things and get perspective, and I am in a real quagmire over the last few weeks.

• I am grateful for my church community. I am grateful to be the kind of woman who can have a church community. It’s a real miracle. I am grateful that my church community is so passionate about service, so intelligent, and so loving.
• I am grateful for my recovery community. I…

It’s late and I’m tired. But I’m going to try something that I’ve not really tried before: Structure.

Since it “works if you work it” and I used again yesterday, I think it’s time to work it.

To the four or five people who read this blog and know me personally, I haven’t told everyone yet that I’m starting over, again. Tonight I told my Friday night group and my sponsor. And now I’m telling you. That’s all I can handle for today.

So without fanfare or drama or swearing or crying, this is my plan, based on the suggestions of those wiser…

• A brief history of scholastic inebriation (Too bad they missed Robert Smith whose U of M fraternity brothers called his father to fetch him because his drinking was out of hand.)
• Claims injection site dropped Downtown Eastside crime ‘very much exaggerated,’ say cops
• Battling Addiction With Those Who Know It Best
• New UK study suggests minimal relationship between cannabis and schizophrenia or psychosis
• Cocaine exposure during pregnancy leads to impulsivity in male, not female, monkeys

I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I’d never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners. We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first…

The Big Picture sets its lens on drug use across the globe.

I don’t like it that people can pick up the story in medias res…but not that artful in medias res…people kind of blindly, accidentally bump into you, read something, and then start commenting based on where you are, right then, in a particular post about a particular angle of a particular relationship on a particular day. Suddenly, folks see so clearly that you need therapy, recovery, spirituality–all things that I am pursuing as if my life depended on it (because my life does depend on it).

There was a time a few years ago I’d written about the battle of the…

Chuck Lane writes a two post take down on medical marijuana.

As turned off as I am by anything that includes the word “druggie”, he more or less states my position. Personal drug possession should be among the lowest enforcement priorities and should not result in incarceration. If there is or was a legitimate medical marijuana movement it’s been co-opted by people whose goal is decriminalization of recreational use–a defensible position but a dishonest approach to achieving it. Finally, this just isn’t the way we do medicine.

“Is it ok if I talk about something that’s kind of supposed to be for potty time?” my husband asked me this morning.

We were on the way to work. It was 8:45. I had a class that began at 9:00. I was nervous, as the chair of my department said he is going to observe all the classes before the end of the semester, so he could show up any day. Instead of saying, “No, baby, I think this isn’t a good time,” I said, “Sure.”

We proceeded to have a horrible fight. My husband yelled and cursed at me. I cried…

I feel like a zombie…instead of roaming the streets looking for brains, though, I’m on a hunt for jobs. I need more work. I don’t have enough time for the work I have, but it’s not enough. I don’t know when I’ll tuck in more work, but I must tuck it in.

I need something different.

Really, I need a vacation. I won’t be getting one, though. I want somebody to do something different, and I don’t want it to have to be me. I am afraid to make any moves, like telling my husband that I’m not paying for any more…

After recently writing down my life story and sharing it with my Al-Anon sponsor as part of my work for my third step, I found a lot of patterns I’d not seen before. One of the most common in my life is that I am constantly looking for love, appreciation, and admiration…especially from men.

I find admiring eyes on me to be intoxicating. I love loving, but more than anything, I love being loved. I think back to when my husband and I first started being involved with each other, and his love for me was almost worshipful. The ways he’d…

An emerging market.

I wonder what this means for addiction recovery and treatment messaging:

A study that will appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health tracked the ways in which party affiliation related to people’s responses to identical information on diabetes.

Participants in the study read a mock news article on the American Diabetes Association lobbying Congress for greater attention to Type 2 diabetes, the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Some people read a straight news report, with minimal mention of what causes diabetes. Others read one of three versions of the story: one that pegged the…

BIG DOG–little dog

Today October 20, 2009, I have lived 13,000 DAZE without a drink or drug–how ’bout that?  How did I DO it?  I didn’t drink…and I didn’t die!

The following post is not related

with the above statement!

THE PAST:  WHAT IT WAS LIKE

After a very scary and painful encounter with a German Shepherd 30 years ago, my number ONE fear was of dogs. (”He’s friendly, loves children, loves cats, our dog simply  would not know HOW to bite you!”).  Yeah, right! This monster, after growling that deep, almost unheard sound, and baring his yellow-brown teeth–which became fangs–took a flying leap…

This will be a departure from my usual fair. I see most of the blogs on this site deal with the trauma and the chaos we get ourselves into with our addictions.  They continue into our recoveries inevitably.  I guess they stay with us forever, no matter how far down the road we go.
Life just isn’t fair.  Everything has a price.  There is no Never Never Land for us or anybody. We made a mess of ourselves and those around us.  That’s just “Life being life.”   I’ve discussed with a friend about someone being themselves.  As if my friends…

by William C. Moyers

In my 12-step meeting a few days ago, a woman stood up and announced that she was new to the group and that she had 36 hours of sobriety. She was greeted with a rousing round of cheers and applause. Sober people tend to do that; it’s as much for themselves as it is for the newcomer. “Hooray for her, and thank goodness it’s not me” is the expressed but unspoken sentiment among fellow travelers.

I clapped, too. Then my skin tingled as the hairs stood upright on my neck and arms. I shuddered. Once, I was counting hours,…

Alix, here at The Second Road mentioned a couple of weeks ago that this will make 100 posts from me.  Hard to believe that I spent that much time blogging here; even more surprising when added to the 435 posts on my own blog.  Add that to the nearly 2000 meetings I’ve been to and the hours I’ve spent with sponsors and sponsees and the time spent in service to groups and it appears that I’ve averaged three hours a day of work on my recovery for the last 1000 days.

I know that seems like a lot.  The truth is…

I just completed the third step with my Al-Anon sponsor, and it involved telling my life story. I had to write it all out, from beginning to end, with particular focus on the parts of my life where I felt like God had been particularly involved in a situation. It was an interesting exercise…I began with my family before I was born, and I went all the way up to today.

Finding all the places where God touched my life was truly enlightening. Particularly, looking at the ugly times, like the sexual abuse. I’d never regarded the denial that kept me…

The LA Times paints a pretty sympathetic picture of Project Prevention, a program that pays addicted women to get themselves sterilized or use long term birth control. It closes with the following:

Project Prevention makes sense to me. Although a few thousand IUDs might not make a dent in the problem, the bluntness of the gesture turns up the volume.

And it brings drug-using moms in on the dialogue. Thank you for helping me do the first responsible thing I’ve ever done with my addiction, one mother wrote in a letter to Harris, who solicits a life story from every client.

“They’re not bad…