I was on the treadmill this morning running my morning mile when my parents woke up and came downstairs to join me. I felt good, having run a good mile in a decent time and decided to join them outside. They were in town for a night on their way home from Baltimore. I was doing my little dumbbell routine that I do every morning on the deck while they were sitting and pulling on their morning cigarette.

My father looks at me and said, “Ya know Jennifer, I don’t understand, you work out everyday and you don’t eat a…

I have been sober now for over ten years and my life is a wonderful gift that I cherish dearly. I am still in so many ways, new to this world—this sober world that is. Intimate relationships are the one area where I am still on an extreme learning curve. No matter how much therapy I’ve done, how much I mediate, how many self-help books I read etc. I can’t seem to get this whole relationship thing down. I know in recovery we strive for spiritual progress not spiritual perfection. I do feel as though I have made significant strides…

I have to admit that I typically will defend the inappropriate, senseless, hurtful and sometimes illegal actions of an active addict or alcoholic as being a part of their disease almost 99.9% of the time.  What I mean by this is that, being an addict myself, I know the depths I went to achieve my next high, sometimes I hurt people emotionally, broke laws, stole from people, cheated, lied etc.  I did all these things because the driving force was my addiction and I didn’t care of anything but that.

As of late my life is a stream of flowing change…ever moving and always shifting. The plan I had—ha—just saying that is funny, isn’t it. But, anyway, the plan I had of course isn’t unfolding in my life. In the rooms there is a saying—if you want to hear your higher power laugh—tell your plan for your life. It is so true. I still don’t know what is best for me all the time and just when I think I have it all figured out…WHAM! It all changes.

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…and stick it in your mouth. I remember hearing this old timers slogan often when I first came into the rooms of recovery over 10 years ago. I have to admit I found it quite offensive at the time but that was of course because I thought I knew everything. I would share incessantly at meetings about everything in my life whether it pertained to recovery or not, sometimes taking up 10 or more minutes of a 60 minute meeting. Talk about self-serving. But I was green and didn’t know the ropes until an old timer approached me after a…

There is a great tool in the program of recovery that I often use to help me determine if I am in balance or way off. It is HALT. I am sure you may have heard of it but if not it stands for:

Hungry

Angry

Lonely

Tired

It is a little acronym to use whenever you are feely funky or just simply off base. This little acronym holds so many answers to the why’s of moods our addiction can play out in negative ways in our lives. I was always told early on in recovery if I was feeling squirrelly to HALT…