As long-time readers of my blog know, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. After all, setting a specific goal is great if you hit it, but disheartening if you don’t (which, let’s face it, I usually don’t).  But for the last few years, I’ve kept up the practice of setting an intention word for the year; in 2008, I picked “happy”, and in 2009, I picked “God.” And both years have been quite successful, in a progress-not-perfection sense.

I’ve decided that my word for 2010 will be “health.” I plan to continue focusing on my mental, emotional and spiritual health, but I hope to…

We had friends over tonight. It’s the first time we’ve had friends over in a long, long time. There have been folks, yes, but it’s been in emergency situations or when my husband is tattooing someone. This is the first time in years that we’ve had people over for dinner.

It might not seem like a big deal, but it feels like a victory for us. Having a space that is reasonable for guests…space that isn’t completely chaotic with the evidence of our mutual and separate craziness…it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to do it. We are able…

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. (”See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!”) We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I’d even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and…

Today my delicious morning starts with 10 hours of sleep and a stout, steaming cup of coffee. My Grad school professors keep hammering the importance of reading news in order to create better news and so I make my morning rounds.

The “Aughties” (not the 80’s) are coming to a close tomorrow night. It feels like life should be bigger and better than it is, after all this current decade is the one in which the 21st century and 3rd millennium began. Paul Krugman wrote a great piece today referring to this passing decade The Big Zero. Financially and politically we…

Just days before I discovered my husband Mark’s sex addiction, we were shopping in Target, when we passed a young woman. “Hi, Mark!” she chimed, smiling brightly. Then she turned to her shopping companion, a man who was glowering at Mark, and said, “Jimmy, this is my friend Mark, you know, the one I’ve told you about. I’ve been having such a great time with him lately!” Then turning back to us, she introduced Jimmy as her boyfriend and chatted for a while before cheerfully parting with: “Well, it’s been such fun to run into you here. Bye, Mark! See…

“For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

-2 Corinthians 4: 6-7

I keep bumping into this idea from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, and I love it. Since the beginning of my adventures in seeking God, my image of what God looks and feels like in my life is bright, white light…a glowing…

I had a memory a few nights ago. I was making some hot chocolate for my husband and me, and I had gotten some of that whipped cream in the squirt can to go on top. As I made a pretty whipped cream mountain on top of his mug, I remembered an incident from back in college.

I was with an ex-boyfriend, and we were riding around in my car. I’d begun to get these stirrings. I’d kind of been thinking that the way I was living didn’t make sense. I was kind of tired of all the drugs, drinking, and…

“You know,” joked my husband Mark, “I think you ought to be paying me royalties. You wouldn’t have anything to write about without me.”

“I know. It’s true. That’s the sad life of a codependent. My problem is being all wrapped up in your problems. But you haven’t given me much to write about lately anyway.”

“Well, do you want me to go out and do something addicty for you so you can write about it?”

“No, that’s okay. Please don’t. I have a lot of other things to write about.”

“Yes, but no matter what you write about, I’m your inspiration. I’m your…

It’s a small thing, really; a minor annoyance.  It’s the sort of thing that happens to people all the time.  It happens to ‘normal’ people.  It’s a human problem, so I realize that my response to it may be disproportionate.  But to me it symbolized something greater.

Last night I lost my car key.  I was on a date (I’m dating again, which is huge).  Parked in the structure.  Went to a movie.  Left the theater and on our way to the car I realized my key was gone.  Then I realized that I must have placed it in my right…

One day, early in his recovery work around sex addiction, Mark and I were standing in line at the grocery store, when I commented on a headline on one of the news magazines. “I can’t look,” Mark said.

“What?”

“It’s not good for me. Those magazine and tabloid covers are awful. I hate the grocery store checkout. There’s no place I can safely look.”

I hadn’t thought about it before, at least not in terms of recovery. Most of the magazines were insipid and pandered to the worst in people, but when I wasn’t tuning them out, I was mocking them. I never…

“I can’t hear this song without thinking of you,” I said to Mark as The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” came on my music mix a few days ago. It reminded me of falling in love with him in college: how he made me scream, and laugh, and promise to run away with him, how dreamlike and obsessive it was, and how I lost him for a time.

There are thousands of songs in my iTunes library at this point, collected over decades, and nearly every one has an association with some person or event. Play “Footloose” and I’m with giggling with…

I hate confrontation, but I am afraid I find myself in a position where I have to have one. With my boss.

My paycheck bounced.

I am trying to save up some money so that I can declare bankruptcy and my paycheck is bouncing.  I cannot stand it.  My student loan and my car payments are due as is the bill for the attorney that kept me out of jail two years ago and my “Cost of Supervision” – the surtax I pay for being a dangerous criminal.  It’s Christmas.  And I’m barely getting by.  And my paycheck bounced.  I’m so mad…

Thank you for visiting my planet. I can’t imagine why you would. We are such an ugly, stinky, terrible lot. But thank you, anyway, for loving us and coming down to join us for awhile.

I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you for so long. I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you, and that I still don’t sometimes. Tonight, I can see how foolish it is not to trust you, but sometimes, I’m so afraid that you mean me harm.

I am away from my husband, my most precious thing. Tonight, I am trusting that you have him in the palm of…

It’s kind of like being forced to eat vegetables, except for the part where I really like vegetables. I’ve taken on a few writing projects lately that are making me tired, and I just committed to one more. They aren’t work projects…they are my own. It’s been a long time since I’ve written stuff, just for me, outside of the recovery writing I do here and that I did on my old blog. I’ve done tons of freelance writing work over the last few years, but very little writing.

Just writing. Just me and some words, wrestling it out.

I’ve been doing…

Tonight’s chat with Margaux starts at 8pm EST.  Bring some hot chocolate and pull up a seat at your computer.

The focus this month is on getting through the holidays and the topic tonight is “Being away from a loved one because they were/are living in addiction.”

In Margaux’s words:

“I plan to focus mainly on practices of detachment, self-care and, most importantly, ways of cultivating gratitude during a time when many of us find it hard not to think about what we don’t have and resent that we’re not receiving. I’d love for you to join me and share your ideas and…

A few days ago, my daughter Janie walked into the kitchen, which my frantic holiday baking had turned into an indoor winter wonderland, covered in soft mounds of flour and dustings of sparkling sugar. “What are you making, Mama?” she asked.

“A pie for a potluck dinner with some friends,” I answered.

“Mm,” Janie said, “Is it a cherry pie?”

“No, it’s apple.”

“Is apple your favorite kind of pie, Mama?”

“No, actually my favorite is blueberry. Although I really like cherry too. I like both of those better than apple.”

“Why didn’t you make blueberry then? Or cherry?”

“Actually, come to think of it, I’ve never…

Support for twelve-step programs’ emphasis on powerlessness?

It doesn’t end there. In a third study, the researchers contrived to influence beliefs about self-control by giving student smokers a bogus implicit test of impulse control. Later, the students were challenged to watch the film “Coffee and Cigarettes” whilst abstaining from smoking. They were promised a greater cash reward the more difficult they made the challenge for themselves. In this case, students given bogus test feedback indicating they had high self-control were more likely to opt for greater temptation - holding the cigarette in their hand rather than having it on the desk…

A lack of perceived need for treatment is still a key reason for the low rate of treatment in people with alcohol-use disorder and for the lack of progress in reducing the scale of this problem, according to an analysis of recent large surveys in the United States.

In the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) dataset, 7,009 respondents met the diagnostic criteria for an alcohol-use disorder (dependence or abuse), among whom 89.6 percent said they did not perceive a need for treatment or counseling for their alcohol use in the…

Early returns from a Massachusetts initiative offering free smoking cessation treatment:

When Massachusetts began offering virtually free treatments to help poor residents of the state stop smoking in 2006, proponents hoped the new Medicaid program would someday reap benefits.

But state officials never expected it would happen so soon.

New state data show a steep drop in the smoking rate among poor people. When the program started, about 38 percent of poor Massachusetts residents smoked. By 2008, the smoking rate for poor residents had dropped to about 28 percent, a decrease of about 30,000 people in two and a half years, or one…

• Costs associated with parity were in line with, or even below, the projections.
• Most health plans responded to the parity law by lifting limits on the annual number of days allowed for inpatient treatments and the number of visits allowed for outpatient treatment.
• Concerns arose over the use of “medical necessity” clauses to authorize treatments and control costs. Medical necessity is typically defined as the need to supply a service for a condition that could endanger life or cause significant illness, suffering or disability and for which there is no adequate, less costly…

In a jail recently, I watched a slow, shuffling queue of men in the rain. The sight of these addicts lining up outside the dispensary for their drugs must be one of the saddest and most shameful in our prison estate, yet giving them drugs is now the cornerstone of policy throughout western Europe – the argument being that we should accept that the addicted…

The Boston Globe offers a good summary of the recent U.K. row over drug classification:

In the long and tortured debate over drug policy, one of the strangest episodes has been playing out this fall in the United Kingdom, where the country’s top drug adviser was recently fired for publicly criticizing his own government’s drug laws.

…

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title “Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances,” ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug…

I’ve always thought that I wanted to know the truth. When my husband slips, I’ve always believed that it would be better if he would reveal to me what happened. Sometimes, though, when I get the truth, I think I could have fared better without it.

A few days ago, my husband confessed to having money months ago that he spent on pain pills. He’d done some work and not told me about it, and he’d spent the money on drugs. I knew that he’d relapsed then, but I hadn’t known about the money.  He felt like he needed to get…

It was so much easier in the old days when I could pop a handful of pills and/or guzzle a bottle of Vodka and numb my way into that zone of least resistance.  Although the re-entry process back into life was always accompanied  with shame, guilt and often a major reversal of my peristaltic system of digestion, I conveniently forgot all that discomfort the next day when I went through the act of destroying my brain cells and bodily organs, and wreaking havoc on every other part of my life.

Now I have to face the disappointments, the sadness, the joys, …

Hi God. It’s me.

I wanted to take a few minutes right in the middle of my day to thank you. Thank you so, so much for the way my life is taking shape over the last few months. Thank you for the changes in my work. Thank you for my new friends and mentors. Thank you for the work you are doing in my husband’s life and for the people you have put around him for support and encouragement.

Thank you for friends. Thank you for community. Thank you for the sweet, warm people you’ve put in my life to buoy…

I got to share some of the best medicine I’ve ever gotten today. A friend was struggling with her husband, and she’d thrown him out of the house in a fit of aggression last night. When he came home this morning, she’d sheepishly welcomed him back.

I know that roller coaster. I know that feeling: I should make him leave! I don’t want him to leave, ever!

That conflict is so hard to digest. I was in that spot myself, and my Al-Anon sponsor recommended a 30 day prayer. It was one of the best, most clarifying things I’d ever done to…

Whenever I ask my HP to help me understand something, in this case humility, I am usually overwhelmed with opportunities to practice that for which I have just asked.  I wish the request would just drop down from above and wrap me in a beautiful (but simple….because I am humble) blanket of a soft, downy demeanor that would be admired by all as “being humble.”  But alas, my HP does not work that way.  Whenever I request a trait that I would like to have, I am always rewarded with many, many situations in which I have the opportunity to…

Last night my husband Mark and I stayed up past midnight finalizing the details of our Christmas budget and to do list. We divided up the errands and agreed on which of us would buy for whom and how much money we would each use to do it. I (in an uncharacteristically organized fashion) made a detailed list of everything I’d volunteered to take care of as well as a few other things that occurred to me. I set it next to my computer along with a calendar showing my deadline for each item, so that I’d be ready to…

Greetings!

We will be keeping the chat room nice and warm this Sunday, with another session of holiday preparedness featuring this weeks hostess, A. Miles. The chosen topic for the “meeting” is “How to avoid getting overwhelmed by the holidays.”

The chat starts at 8pm EST and you have to bring your own hot chocolate!

Next Sunday, same time, same place, blogger Margaux will be your hostess. The topic will be “Being away from a loved one because they were/are living in addiction.” She has a great post up now on her blog site, Love in the Time of Addiction, about working through…

Someone I grew up with drank (still drinks) a lot. And over the years, I’ve struggled with her alcohol use. Year after year, the incidents around her drinking have piled up. There was the time she was laid off and spent the next several years living rent free in a home her parents owned, spending her days drinking and watching TV, rarely bothering to get dressed. There was the night of her brother’s wedding, where she was found vomiting in the bushes outside the reception site after overindulging in the free alcohol. And there were the trash cans full of…