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…

by Mark Harris

It’s the primary season here in Oregon, having already voted, I’m pretty much over it, but amused at the smoke and mirrors drama around Senator Obama and his former pastor.

Statements that the pastor said, made many, including myself, consider statements of fact, regardless of the Senator’s disavowal of them. In any case, if you are willing to believe your government is capable of doing nasty things to you, what are you willing to do to protect yourself beyond complain? Conspiracy theories while entertaining, really engage your fear, and not so much your faith in yourself, essentially creating a…

by Jennifer Storm

Having an active addict in your life is probably one of the most excruciatingly painful experiences a person can have. The word powerless cannot even begin to capture the utter devastation, hopelessness and futility one can feel while being in the presence of an active addict. It is gut-wrenching and heart-breaking to watch someone you care about make all the wrong decisions.

Almost every time I travel and speak with my new book, Blackout Girl: Growing Up and Drying Out in America, inevitably the question comes up “How can I help an active addict?” I see the…

by William Cope Moyers
The end of the school year is here for millions of college students. It’s a time for final exams and report cards, commencement ceremonies and parties. And while many will celebrate what they’ve learned over the years, their eduction won’t include lessons on the dangers of alcohol and other drugs. Some are likely to pay for their ignorance with serious consequences.

Dear Mr. Moyers: I’ve worked as a substance abuse counselor for over 20 years. The last three, I have been employed at the university level as their prevention person and counselor. I also teach a substance-abuse class…

I watched my story in multiple parts on The Second Road’s home page and felt like I’ve stripped naket in cyberspace. I’ve shared my story in private and very public forums now for years, I’ve had the most inimate details published all over but haven’t experienced this before. Now, my drug story is “out there” memorialized on the internet. I can imagine now being held to a standard where every future deviation from the video version will be subject to criticism a la the author of “A Million Pieces” I’ve no doubt offended many of the same traditional recovery stakeholders.…

by Mark Harris
Black History month is everyday for a lot of us, myself included. The cultural amnesia that is promoted as part of American culture is a primary component of what makes up an addictive society. Primarily when you forget who you are, you don’t care where you came from or where you are going. There is a saying among my people “It got so bad, it got good to them.” In short you basically take addiction as normal behavior, a normal lifestyle.

I’m on one of my walks downtown, and this kid, ok he’s twenty, not a little kid, but…

By our guest writer, blogger In Repair.

I’m not good at future planning. I don’t plan at all. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I don’t have a day planner and I don’t have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

~Heath Ledger

I walked in the door after work on January 22, 2008, to my husband asking, “Did you hear about your *boy*?” I had no idea who he was talking about. When he told me Heath Ledger had died, I felt a bit of a knot form in my stomach.

“How? Why? Are…

by Mark Harris

Recently in headlines in our local paper, two people claimed that being forced by the courts into 12-Step based treatment, was tantamount to being forced in the Christian religion. These particular relapsing patients, claimed this was violating their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion. There are a number of effective recovery frameworks for addictions of all kinds. Their basic common bottom line is stopping addictive behavior, and replacing the addictive behavior with a non-addictive lifeway, often involving some sort of cultural or spiritual framework.

While bearing a superficial resemblance to Quaker’s meetings, or Unitarian support meetings, with its…

by Mark Harris

Pearls of wisdom are generally acquired at the cost of great pain. It is often best to learn lessons the hard way, as many of us did, because you don’t forget them easily. When Isho warned against casting pearls before swine, he was saying in effect “If they can’t see your pain, they cannot understand your wisdom, and in their race to stuff themselves, they will tread your pearls into the mud, even if they are the keys out of their particular pig sty.
In my case one of my personal favorite pearls I accreted in the form of…

by Mark Harris

While bearing a superficial resemblance to Quaker’s meetings, or Unitarian support meetings, with Christianesque references to a higher power, or God, Twelve Step programs are not in fact a religion. While 12-Step treatment practitioners indeed often fanatically adhere to non-scientific beliefs, rather than evidence based or culturally proficient praxis, people who cannot assimilate into their particular cultural world view are often discharged as non-compliant. I myself frequently engage in repair of those treatment failures, and train others to do so also. The Twelve Steps of AA and NA were created by two well off white men in the…

Mark Harris, M.A., coordinates The Recovery Center, a project of the Multicultural Substance Abuse Prevention Program at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. As a national, state, and local level consultant he has written successful grants, co-authored curricula, and worked in successful and innovative prevention programs in California and Oregon. He has provided technical assistance to numerous community coalitions on Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, Gang and Violence Prevention, and other Multicultural Issues.

Mark’s writing will grab you, make you think, and will be sure to elicit a response. We welcome Mark as a regular contributor to our site. Read what…

ALCOHOL

“How could this have happened! The last thing I ever thought I would allow myself to do was to become an alcoholic! I mean, I accomplished every reasonable goal I set for myself, and this was not one of them. I MUST be able to control this. I WILL NOT DRINK too much tonight.”
Then I did it again…I drank too much. I became someone I did not want to be.
After one or two drinks it was if my brain said, “You have got to keep this going; don’t stop now. This is the way you really want to feel”. My…