The autopsy has been kept private, the cause of death is unknown, but that hasn’t stopped theories about Michael Jackson’s demise from thriving like immorality at an OK! magazine pitch meeting. One hypothesis in particular is quickly gaining followers, especially in the eating disorder community — that the King of Pop was killed by anorexia….
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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 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…

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,…

Last night I had a call from a family member who’s having problems with another member.  Seems the addict who’s been living with her and her spouse off and on during periods of “trying” to stay clean has not been following the house rules: a meeting every day, no phone calls to the ex-boyfriend/enabler, etc.  And, of course, no using.

The caller, who has had previous experience with codependency and enabling, was trying every way she could think of to justify not tossing her house guest out on her butt.  Her evident pain while we were talking, and her obvious desire…

Life is full of suffering. We suffer because we want things.  Sometimes they’re things we have that we don’t want to give up, and sometimes they’re things we don’t have, may never have, and want anyway.  But the worst kind of want is for things that we know we’ll never have.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with “stuff. ” It’s when getting what we want becomes the whole point that we stray off the path.

I used to know a guy who played the 12-string guitar, an instrument famous for its intractability about staying in tune. …

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring….

~ Edgar Allan Poe, Alone

May fifth a year ago, my oldest daughter got married for the first time, at age 38. She waited a long time, but ended up wed to her teenage sweetheart, a guy we’d known since he was sixteen.

He’d had his troubles over the years, difficulties that my wife and I — and most folks here — can relate to, but he’d been clean and sober for a long time, and we welcomed him with open arms. He came complete with a gorgeous 18-year-old daughter he’d raised as a single parent. She loved our daughter, daughter loved her, and we came…

Let me say at the outset that I am a firm believer in AA, NA and the other 12-step fellowships, just in case no one has noticed. They saved my life, the life of my wife, and of my best friend, his wife, my son-in-law and many of the other people who are most important to me.

However…

It worried me early on, and continues to worry me nearly two decades later, how some people in the rooms seem afraid to allow their knowledge of alcoholism — not their program, but alcoholism — to progress beyond the middle of the last century.…

In which our hero discusses how to be a good codependent.

Michele and I are sort of the go-to people in our family when it comes to addiction. In addition to both having had extended bouts with alcoholism and similar chemical complications to life in the Real World (well-known to the family at large, as our recovery has been), both of us have worked in the field of addiction treatment. She, in addition to her real world experience, is a Social Worker, Certified Addiction Professional, and Certified Mental Health Professional, presently a key person in a detox facility, and does private…

It’s ridiculously easy to hide out at meetings and cut down the benefits of a 12-step program by at least 50%.  All you have to do is

Hiding Out At A Meeting

get there right on time (or, if you don’t mind being rude, a couple of minutes late).  Then you sit in the back, don’t raise your hand to introduce yourself, and if anyone approaches you just give your name and keep conversation to a minimum.  Walk straight out after the meeting is over, avoid speaking to anyone, and leave the area.

Simple, right?  And just the kind of thing we’re good…

Around the 12-step rooms we are frequently told that we should not “take another person’s inventory,” often used in the sense that we ought not criticize another person’s program. The rationale behind such statements seems to be the fear that since (presumably) that person is doing the best they can, it might be bad for their recovery to tell them to their face what we believe they are doing wrong.

While this is no doubt true (addicts and alcoholics of every stripe being less than fond of criticism), it is certainly within the purview of their sponsors — although it should…

Our older daughter, age 39, and her husband, age 40, are on a trip to Tennessee to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, and Dad has been checking the weather radar, texting information about the tornado warning along their route, reminding them that their new Mercedes is rear-wheel drive and to watch out for hydroplaning, and so on and so on….

Now there’s no question in my mind that they appreciate the information. It’s interesting, however, how I feel compelled to carry out this exercise in fatherhood — not to mention codependency. My daughter is an uncommonly sensible woman. My son-in-law has…

How judgmental am I?  Plenty.  It’s a character defect that I’ve worked hard to change, with only limited success, ever since I’ve been sober.

It runs in the family. My grandmere was one of those old French women who could never give a compliment without modifying it with a matching putdown.  ”She’s pretty, her, but look at that dress!”  My mom was the same way.  She’d drive down the road commenting on every fool that came across her path.  An otherwise quiet, gentle soul, she never missed a chance to point out a shortcoming.  Thankfully, that didn’t carry over to…

I was thinking again. Head for the hills.

We go to meetings, we talk to people over coffee, we share over the phone, we take meetings into institutions, and all the other 12th Step work that we’ve come to enjoy, most of us.

Occasionally someone will pop up and say, “Hey, I really liked what you said,” or we’ll be leading a meeting and sort of see the little light bulb go on over someone’s head. But did you ever stop to think about all the shy folks — the ones who listen but don’t comment? We’re communicating our ideas about…

Through the years, I’ve noticed an odd propensity among people being treated for all sorts of maladies: the tendency to take medications until they feel better, and then stop.

You see this in a variety of situations.  Folks taking antibiotics take them for two or three days, and then when the symptoms begin to abate, they stop even though it says on the bottle to take the entire prescription. Then the infection comes back, and they have to take an entire new course of antibiotics to knock it down, assuming that the bug hasn’t developed an immunity from having been allowed to…

Buddhism has been, and will continue to be, an integral part of my recovery program. I have been practicing for some years with greater or lesser effect and, interestingly (to me, at least), over that time I moved from being a “seeker” to an agnostic. However, Buddhist philosophy is not really religious in nature, and I have had no problem adjusting my personal beliefs to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, along with the Precepts that we take when we formally profess to follow that path.

In our Second Road chat this past Sunday, I jokingly mentioned to Humble…

Every so often around the 12-step rooms you’ll hear someone say, “My name’s X, and I’m a grateful recovered (alcoholic, addict, codependent, etc.)” I think you probably hear it more around the rooms of AA because there’s a reference to being recovered, as opposed to recovering, in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

A few months ago I decided to try it on for size. I began referring to myself that way — as a recovered person, a recovered alcoholic/addict, and so forth. I stopped after a bit, though, because it made me uncomfortable and I thought it made me seem…

I used to tell people that I had no choice about getting sober — that I knew if I didn’t I was going to die.

But that’s not really true. I did have a choice. I could have said no. The fact is, I was scared not to, but that’s only because I was lucky. “Scared” could have gone the other way. I could have been more afraid to give up the life I knew than of whatever was ahead.

I don’t believe in gods. But I believe in miracles. The very fact that I am not a believer keeps me in…

Stress is the number one cause of relapse.  We can call it relationships, or illness, or PAWS, or too much work, or whatever we want.  Ultimately, however, it is stress that does us in, because using was the way we always dealt with stress before.  If we are faced with highly stressful situations before we have learned other effective ways of dealing with them, we are likely to be overwhelmed (or simply get tired of dealing with real life) and turn to the old ways.

I was thinking about that today while reading about the current economic problems.  There’s a lot…

Y’know, ridiculous as it sounds, my alcoholism has prepared me for the coming trials and tribulations better than one might have thought.

I was just reading about an ophthalmologist in Boca Raton who lost $4.5 million in savings in the Bernard Madoff deal, along with his grandkids college money, and about $25 million of his kids’ and neighbors’ savings.

Now, one is inclined at first to think, hey — he had it, now he’s finding out how the po’ folks live.  But think about it.  This guy is 78 years old.  He worked all his life to get what he…

I can think of no better poster child for the Twelve Step addiction recovery plan than James Frey. This is despite the fact that Frey argued extensively against the Twelve Steps method in his addiction, uh, “memoir” A Million Little Pieces, calling it spiritual nonsense. He wrote, “I’d rather have [relapse and death] than spend my life in Church basements listening to People whine and bitch and complain. That’s not productivity to me, nor is it progress. It is the replacement of one addiction with another.” Frey instead decided he could beat his addiction through sheer willpower.Soon after, there he was,…

My-Wife-The-Shrink and I are getting ready to move from the apartment we’ve lived in for eighteen years. They say the average family in the US moves once every seven years or thereabouts. Actually, that was some years ago; it’s probably a good deal more often now. Whatever the case, all I can say is that the “average” family must either have a far greater tolerance for change than I do, or else the average family must be really screwed up and at each other’s throats constantly.

First, let me say that I don’t even begin to want to move. Moving is…

And no, it’s not recovery-related. I never promised nuthin’.

Humans have been around for quite a while. Even if you accept Bishop Usher’s figure of 6011 years ago (as of October 22nd) for the date of Creation, there have been 300 generations of us. If you prefer evolution, the figure expands to at least 7,500 generations in the case of Homo sapiens, and much longer if you include our cousins who preceded us.

The main thing distinguishing us from the other members of the hominid family is our big brain. Not only has it permitted us to develop intellectually, it has…

I often hear newcomers, people who haven’t yet completed a 4th or 5th Step, talking about how they made amends for this and that in their lives. While I certainly admire anyone who is trying to clear up some of the wreckage of the past, I sometimes wonder about their concept of amends. Since the holidays are coming up and conversations with family members and old friends may be imminent, I thought I might make a few comments about amends and the 9th Step.

First of all, let me say that I’m old-school when it comes to the Steps. I believe…

We live in such a diverse society in the USA (and most other Western countries) that we sometimes have difficulties coming to terms with the holiday season.  In my family alone are Evangelical Christians, Catholics, Atheists, Methodists, people who don’t know what they are (and don’t care) — and at least one Buddhist Agnostic.  I can extend that, by listing friends and acquaintances, to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Secular Humanists, a Quaker, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Episcopalians, and a bunch of recovering alcoholics who are too scared of what God might be thinking and won’t admit to any beliefs at all.

Thank goodness for…

Some readers might want to pass this along, or post it elsewhere.  Feel free.

Social occasions that involve people in recovery — especially early recovery — can pose some perplexing problems for the hosts. On one hand, a host who is aware of a guest’s need to avoid mood-altering substances may wish to do what is possible to keep from exposing them to temptation. On the other hand, social drinking is a part of everyday American culture. Most social gatherings involve some drinking by some of the guests. A host may be at a loss as to how she ought to…

Thanks to Barbara O’Brien:

“Hungry ghosts are pitiable creatures. They have huge, empty stomachs, but their mouths are too small and their necks too thin to take in food. Sometimes they breath fire; sometimes what food they do eat turns to ash in their mouths. They are doomed to live with incessant craving.

The Hungry Ghost Realm is one of the Six Realms of Samsara, into which beings are reborn. Understood as a psychological rather than a physical state, hungry ghosts might be thought of as people with addictions, compulsions and obsessions. Greed and jealousy lead to a life as a hungry…