Earlier this month, I decided I was going to set aside one day each week for spirituality and health, a sort of personal Sabbath. I picked a day of the week and made some rules for myself and set about my spiritual experiment. This week will be my fourth “Sabbath,” and while three weeks is hardly enough to see substantial change, I have noticed some interesting things:

1. It’s hard to break out of my routine and not do my usual work. It’s like the first time I sat in meditation and was there for about fifteen seconds and thought, “Ok, is this…

I’ve been on a little spiritual sabbatical of late.  Actually, my spirituality is  not so much on sabbatical as are the methods that I use to express it.  I was born and raised Roman Catholic - I think I already told you that I went to Catholic grade school, high school, college and grad school.  I left “The Church” in my early twenties, only to return in my early thirties when my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  I made the standard bargain with God - “Save my mom and I’ll come back.”  I came back.  My mom died.  But…

Hi God. It’s me.

I’m struggling with a little bit of anxiety tonight. My husband is at a men’s fire pit. I want him to come home, and he’s not home yet. It reminds me of other times when he wasn’t home. I know where he is. I want him to be there, even, but I want him to be here, with me, at the same time.

I want this removed from me, please. When we were first married, I relished my alone time. I relished my privacy, and I enjoyed when we’d have some space. I always welcomed him back, of…

You know why I hate the word codependent? (And although I have taken on that label, I still truly do.) It has the word “dependent” right there in the word. Weak, wussy little “dependent.” It practically whines at you: “I’m so helpless. I can’t do anything for myself. Waaaa! Someone do it all for me, I’m just not capable!” And that’s so not the way I’ve seen myself. In fact, the only word with “dependent” in it that I’ve ever associated with myself is “independent,” which adds that nice little “not” before its dependent. I don’t need help, no sir,…

Thank you, thank you, thank you, God, for the many blessings you’ve given me. This year, there have been new friends, new lessons, and important changes in my life and in my relationship with my husband. Thank you for those lessons, even the hard ones.

Thank you for providing me with the resources that I need for all the hard times, for the relapses and the abandonment and all the little stuff in between. Thank you for the gift of wonderful, loving girlfriends who are always ready to eat with me or pray with me or talk to me on the…

On Thanksgiving morning, I needed to run out to the grocery store for a few last minute items, and if the parking lot of my local store was any indication, I was far from the only one. As I weaved my way slowly through the traffic at the front of the store looking for an available space, I noticed a man standing in front of the store holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign bearing the words, “Please help.” I thought about the family I had at home, the friends we would be getting together with later that day and the feast…

Now and then, I get a real hankering for justice. I start obsessing about how my husband should be carrying around a little bit of my pain for me. I think that I should sit him down and explain to him all the ways that all the various things he’s done have hurt me. I want a witness, and I want it to be him. I want to recite my litany of offenses. I want him to look at me and to see all the bits and pieces of my heart. I want to hand it to him.

And man, when…

Norman rockwell

Hey Peeps I LOVE the video stuff prominently displayed (FINALLY!) on the top slab of these TSR pages. Thank you Sooooo much! What a fine improvement! Gives me another reason to stay up all night!

Also, I’m taking a few days away from my other blog.
Hope you don’t mind my intrusion into your spaces here

BEEN THERE
NOW I’M HERE

Several meetings I’ve attended the past few days have begun with great topics, e.g., “Acceptance”, “Anonymity”, “Honesty”, “Step Nine”, “Tenth Tradition”, to name a few. Seems like after about a half-hour, one member or other has brought up a current-affairs topic regarding world…

It’s another morning after - but this time it’s just a food hangover.  I went to a 12 step marathon yesterday and ate my weight on carbohydrates and tryptophan.  Now I’m moving just a little slow.  My whole attitude towards Thanksgiving and the holidays is general has changed over the years and continues to do so.  Of course, when I was a child, Thanksgiving was the day that we had to get dressed up and sit at the kids’ table.  The food was good, but I remember it as mostly an “adult” event.  Christmas, however, was magical.  My father would…

I regularly receive  gratitude lists from my friends in the program.  I, however, rarely write one myself.  Today I am going to make an exception.

I am grateful for being clean and sober (we hear that all the time, but it is the truth)

I am grateful for a kind, loving, tender-hearted son who is the joy of my life.

I am grateful for my family members (the ones who are talking to me), and all my friends for their continued support of letting me be who I am.

I am grateful for this wonderful job that lets me live, work and practice my…

My 12 Step group had some difficulty recently around a reading that listed some of the behaviors partners of sex addicts might have in common. Many of the women in the group found it triggering, because they felt the list of characteristics implied there was something wrong with them, that they were “sick” for reacting to an insane situation in a way they felt was normal and understandable, or that they were being told they must have reacted in some way that they hadn’t simply because they were part of Club Partner-of-a-Sex-Addict. I knew that feeling. I had had it…

by William C. Moyers

It took 13 years, but I finally appeared on a stage in front of an audience on Broadway.

The Capri Theater on Broadway Avenue in a gritty stretch of North Minneapolis was filled with politicians and civic leaders, ministers and a couple of donors with deep pockets. My real affinity was for everyone else in the crowd — the crack addicts and alcoholics, who share my illness.

“When I ain’t clean, I’m on the streets, and been on the streets more them last four years than I want to be, except when I been locked up in the joint,”…

It’s me.

I have been fighting with you a lot over the last few days. I don’t know why. I know who will win this fight. I’m glad you love me even when I pick fights with you.

I’m hurting, though, because there are needs I have that only you can meet, and I really don’t want you to be the one to meet those needs. I really, really want my husband to see me, hear me, and love me in the ways that only you can. I’m sorry I don’t want you, but I don’t. I want him.

I don’t know why.…

This post includes some spoilers.

It’s been a long time since I nerdily reviewed a movie, but my husband and I went to see New Moon this weekend, and I just couldn’t resist writing a post about it. The movie is a vampire love story. No, actually it’s a vampire, werewolf, human love triangle. Bella (a human teenage girl) is the object of affection of both Edward (the 109-year-old teenage-looking vampire) and Jacob (the teenage werewolf). It’s also a stunning portrait of codependent craziness.

Picture Mark and me, cuddled up in a dark theater, surrounded by shrieking teenage girls. On screen, shimmers the…

It’s a little weird when things get too quiet. I wait, quietly, for the next, big blowup. Sometimes, I’ll even spontaneously combust. I’ve grown accustomed to action.

I had a fight with my husband last night, and then I had a fight with God. I was feeling neglected, tired, and worn out. My husband tried to comfort me, and I was all prickly, and finally, I pricked him just right. It was like a volcano.

I hope that one day we won’t need this volcano anymore. I am proud of him - he’s got a new job, new friends, and is doing…

Always a sucker for both science fiction and anything vaguely related to time travel, this season I’ve started watching ABC’s new series, Flash Forward. The premise of the show is that everyone on Earth simultaneously loses consciousness for approximately two minutes and sees visions of a few minutes of their lives six months in the future. The show follows Mark Benford, the FBI agent leading the investigation into the cause of the “blackout,” as well as the lives of several intersecting characters, and then examines how their visions of the future affect their actions in the present.

The interesting thing about…

“Compassion is not a virtue - it is a commitment.”  So writes Brene Brown in her book ,”I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)”, a book about women and shame issues that I am currently reading and will review in the near future.  As I read this line I had to stop and put the book down.  The words were immediately absorbed into my flesh, my organs, my mind, heart, spirit and soul.  How often have I considered being compassionate as some kind of lofty virtue that I “bestow” on others?  How many times has my compassion just…

I’ve been working through the 12 Steps again, more slowly this time than my last time through. This week, I worked through an exercise where I looked at patterns of compulsive behavior in my life and I was struck (again) by how powerfully my life is dominated by fear and by how much I react from a place of fear.

I’ve engaged in everything from shoplifting to underage drinking to unprotected sex out of fear that I wouldn’t fit in, that I wouldn’t be liked, that I would be rejected. I overeat out of fear. I stay in relationships and run…

I’m sitting in a tattoo shop while my husband finishes his first tattoo in a shop in several years. Perhaps I shouldn’t be as excited for him as I am.

I missed this world. I have missed sharing this world with him. I have missed the smell of latex gloves, the smell of the green soap, and the grimy, colorful artwork. I have missed the artists and missed the customers. I’ve missed the stories and the lies and the drama. I mean, I’ve had plenty of stories and lies and drama.

I was talking with one of my spiritual leaders today about…

Hi God. It’s me.

I wanted to talk to you this morning before I get too busy to remember to give this day to you. We’ve got a lot going on at our house lately with my husband’s new job and some things going on with my own. Please take care of those for us. Don’t let us get our will or our fears in the way. Wherever we are holding something back from you, please loosen our grips. If there is a part of me or my husband that we’ve compartmentalized, complicated, restricted, or otherwise hidden from you, please…

So here we are, in the 21st century, plugging into online recovery. Most Americans spend a fair portion of the day docked at their computers, for various reasons. Work, facebook, email, recovery blogging, facebook, more facebook.  Trust me. I study this stuff.

I found a couple of  articles today that discuss how easily we share private matters through online social networks. And how that can come back to haunt us. Over here in our sphere of the world, recovery bloggers try to maintain anonymity while discussing life shattering, personal matters. Matters that involve ugliness, taboos, crime, love, divorce, loss, addiction and…

Today would have been my father’s birthday. He would have been 65. There within lie a lot of “IFs.” The biggest being IF he had not been an alcoholic who always lost battle with the drink.

But he did. He lost many battles before he was finally taken off the field earlier this year.

I was told he had been sober for 2 years, the longest time in his life in 40 years. Yet, when I cleaned out his room, I found a book bag with two empty fifths of vodka. I carry that bookbag with me everyday. It is the one…

I decided to fast today. I’ve been experimenting with fasting to see what the big deal is with it. In most religious traditions, fasting is a discipline that is meant to bring us closer to God.

I want to be closer to God.

I’ve never pulled off more than a sunup to sundown fast, and that’s my plan for the day today. I’ve noticed that my mind always seems a little sharper on the days that I’ve fasted. I don’t fool myself into believing that I’ll be able to experience the full benefits of fasting until I am able to do it…

Last week, oddly inspired by the humorous book The Year of Living Biblically, I decided I wanted to try to add a little Sabbath into my own life. Couldn’t I use a day of rest once a week, even if I didn’t have an organized religion backing me up? And because I’m not part of any organized religion, I’m not bound to keep my Sabbath on a Judeo-Christian Saturday or Sunday. In fact, I didn’t want to. After all, if you have kids (or maybe just if you have my kids), you’ll know that “rest” and “the kids have a…

“What am I going to say to people? I mean, they’re going to ask, ‘What are you doing these days?’ and what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to make small talk anymore, let alone tell them what’s been going on,” I told my friend Jess after she met me at the airport.  She didn’t answer, either because she wisely clued in to the fact that I was speaking rhetorically or because she was (as she later told me) feeling sick at the time. I’d flown to my old home town for a high school reunion, after…

A few days ago, The Junky’s Wife sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Lois Movie!” (Yes, I am shamelessly piggybacking on JW’s superior recovery research skills and pop culture knowledge.) Now for most people, that might imply that a new Superman film is coming out. After all, in spite of the fact that Google seems to think it’s Family Guy’s Lois Griffin, isn’t Lois Lane the world’s most famous Lois? But if you have spent time working a 12 Step Anon programs for friends and family members of addicts, you have Lois Wilson, founder of Al-Anon and wife of…

“You and your husband’s commitment to service is vital. It’s like lifeblood to our community. Thank you both for all you’ve contributed to us.”

I read it again and again, and I realized a few other things as I was reading it. I’d been rushing, as it was time to pick my husband up from work.

My husband was at work. That’s a big deal, and it’s new. It’s happened so quickly that I almost missed it. I’ve been working way too much lately, and so his acquisition of a new job has been something of a nuisance…it has required a lot…

We know that “We are everywhere.” New technology from Ann-e helps addicts utilize, support and connect with the recovery network.

From About.com:

You are in recovery, but you have a sudden urge to pick up. You are away from your home base and your 12-step contacts, but you need to talk to someone, anyone who understands. You feel isolated and you need to connect with someone else in recovery.

Now, there’s a app for that.

Annie’s idea for a peer-to-peer phone application was inspired from a shopping encounter where she recognized an addict’s need for help and the loneliness many addicts feel when…

“The level of sexual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can’t believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there’s this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her glasses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report.”
~ A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically

Warning: the links in this post lead to material that may be triggering to sex addicts and their partners.

Years ago, when my husband Mark and I were first…

I just read a blog written by The Junky’s Wife that ended with a comment about all we have to do is wait,  and pray about whatever it is we’re trying to work through - and that’s it.  Ya know how sometimes you  can read a sentence and it hits you like a ton of bricks?  Well,  that little group of words just knocked me for a loop.

For the past several months I, like everyone else on the planet, have been going through some rather difficult life decision-making processes.  It doesn’t matter what they are.  You have yours and I…