I just got back from a meeting where I picked up a 3 year medallion.  Three years can go by in an instant.  Three years can also move like molasses dripping from a Maple Tree in the dead of winter.  I’ve experience both these extreme during the past 1095 days (who’s counting?).   Some of the time I was on top of the world…secure, steadfast, confidant.  Some of the time I was under the covers (literally), a place that I have often substituted for the numbness that the ingestion of chemicals used to give me.  Some of the time I’ve been…

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…

“The tenant in Unit 1 has a drinking problem, so I didn’t take him seriously when he would call with complaints.”

Those were the very words spoken to me by my apartment manager on Monday morning.

I have lived in my apartment building for close to two months and the unit downstairs from me has been an ongoing problem. The man who lives in this unit has a few problems with sound control. Through my walls and floor, I can hear him carry on conversations. I can hear his stereo. Several times I have been awakened at 3 AM by his television…

In the process of my personal life drama it was suggested to me that I might be incapable of feeling strong emotion and attachment.  I have been accused of being cold and detached and various other character evaluations.  Considering that I was referred to as overly emotional and needy for the better part of my young adult life, I found these observations to be puzzling. 

As a nearing forty, sober nearly 9 years, fairly even-tempered person, I can say without hesitation that I have grown exponentially in recovery.  Sobriety has taught me how to reign in my neediness and hold my…

I came out of hiding because there are some things in the blog world that simply can’t be ignored. Additionally, I welcome an opportunity to focus on something other than my own personal drama. My head has been ensconced within a bubble of transformational life stuff and quite frankly, I need an escape. Since none of you are buying (kidding!) I decided that a tribute post was in order.

Many in Blogland are familiar with Steve E. of Another Sober Alcoholic, TSR contributor, Master of the Blong, and all around good guy. My good buddy Gabriella Moonlight and I had the…

Sorry I have been gone from the blog scene for a while.  I am deep in the process of getting my second memoir, Leave the Light on: A Memoir of Recovery and Self-Discovery ready.  It will be released by Central Recovery Press in April.  Check out CRP, they are an amazing new publishing company out of Las Vegas, they also happen to have several great rehabilitation facilities in the country.  www.centralrecovery.com  I tend to get exhausted in the writing process and when I go to blog it’s like the pen’s run dry.  But I think my pen is now running over…

My marriage may be falling apart.

I want a cigarette right now.

My husband is just as miserable as I am.

A vodka tonic with two limes sounds good.

This has been going on for years.

I could score an eight ball just 20 yards from my house.

I can’t eat and I can’t stop crying.

My husband has a prescription for Hydrocodone in his briefcase.

I want the pain to go away.

To be continued….

When I was a little girl, my four older brothers used to torment me for sport. Holding me down and dangling spit loogies over my face was a good one. Wrapping me up in blankets like a burrito and yanking me about the house was another one. The one I hated the most was 52 Card Pickup. They would take a neatly stacked deck of cards and toss them about in the air over my head and then have me pick them up once they were scattered across the floor. It never occurred to me to say no. They were…

As a mother to two school age children, I have come to realize a new challenge in sobriety: socialization offers from parents that center around booze. In the past few months I have been invited to several adult only activities by the parents of my children’s friends, only to find upon further questioning that the activity is centered around alcohol. I thought I had this socializing thing mastered. The work events that I have had to attend for either myself or my husband are few and far between, and most of the time they are family friendly events that don’t…

I’ve given a lot of thought to what today should mean. Five years seems like a good chunk of life, then again at times it’s almost as if time has stood still. Am I different? Better? Wouldn’t we all like to think so about ourselves? To believe that in a span of a few years we improved our outlook, understood just a little more about life as we know it. For some people that thinking is a must to go on, to find some semblance of serenity within them.

Five years ago I had my last drink. How do I feel…

Dear  Friends,

Our Executive Director and founder of  The Second Road just received news last night that her father has metastatic cancer.  Melissa lost her sister last winter to breast cancer and, has since that time, legally adopted her sister’s 5 children, thereby making a major change in her life.

As I write this she is driving back home to be with her dad and her mom.

I ask special prayers, thoughts, and lots of light and serenity for Melissa as she faces yet another example of life on life’s terms.

Thank-you,

Till Next Time-

Your Humble Road Warrior

…

I am very quiet this Sunday morning. Thinking, thinking, about something Syd posted over at http://fine-anon.blogspot.com/, which you can read here… http://fine-anon.blogspot.com/2009/04/my-rejection-saga.html.

I came across a combination of words what feel like magic. These being: ‘what facts do you have to back up your feelings’. Huh? Lemme explain.

I’ve always jokingly said that I was a criminal in my previous life. Because if anyone in authority (cop, boss, hubby???) asked me something I didn’t anticipate, didn’t know where it was going, stopped me at a roadblock, I’d immediately start shaking, feeling guilty, think I did something wrong. So I asked my therapist…

He who is supposed to be my other half feels more like a stranger to me and I cannot shake how ironic it seems that we are recovering but moving farther apart. As if the heavens were to show us just how much of a say we have in the matter, and I feel as though the earth were laughing at our persistence to find one another again, flicking us away as I would a bothersome gnat on a humid summer afternoon.

But is it true really that nothing comes easy? I remember long ago when things came easy in my…

Written by William C. Moyers

They were total strangers. But their experiences were defined intimately by a common illness, which propelled their lives into the public spotlight this past week. Only the endings of the stories differ.

Employees in Minnesota stumbled upon the frozen body of Jeffrey Scott O’Donnell in an iced-over pond at a golf course in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Authorities aren’t sure how long he had been dead, but nobody who knew the 42-year-old man had heard from him since the first frosts of last October.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul reports that his family said Jeff…

“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”. - Arundhati Roy

She decides to take one last walk through the apartment she has lived in for the past six years. Voices overlap, echo, haunting memories built within these walls. Closing her eyes she can see the beer bottle smash and shatter against a wall, the resounding thump as a fist lands and cracks a door…..a window implodes out in slow motion as a body is pulled back in to the fist on the other side. All these memories carry…

I got an email from someone who is married to an alcoholic asking my advice and my immediate reaction was I am not qualified. But then I read her story and I heard her tell me things about her life that sounded almost identical to my own, alcoholic husband, children who need a father a wife who needs a participating husband and I knew I was qualified and I knew I had enough information in my own arsenal to help her understand how I got to where I am.

This reaching out that she did was something I was incapable of…

What lies beyond the AA meetings, forums and the Big Book? Most would say for the Alcoholic/Addict not much. We do service work to help remind ourselves and help those who are newcomers find encouragement to keep living and striving for a sober life. I do believe we need those rooms and the people in them within our lives; I also believe that’s not all there is to a life of sobriety. Lost within our addiction we find ourselves loners, discouraging any close contact with the outside world. We allow ourselves to be imprisoned and lonely, our only true family…

by William C. Moyers

No politics, no pontification over policy, and no sparring with public officials. This week’s column goes back to the fundamentals of helping people get help.

Dear Mr. Moyers: Professional treatment is not the only way to get sober. For people who can’t afford or won’t go for treatment, why don’t you refer them to Alcoholics Anonymous? It works! Be sure to tell them to go to a lot of different AA groups so they get to know many sober members and see that there are many different kinds of AA meetings. It’s in those meetings that people find…

I remember sitting at the bar with a male friend on both sides of me concerned (neither would protect me in the end). Somehow I knew there wasn’t enough alcohol to dull my senses to what was awaiting me when I went home. I’m quite sure at one point or another, logic had spoken up and whispered I didn’t have to go through with it; I could walk away and start over. My one true friend echoed from the contents of the bottle in front of me eschewing I wouldn’t feel a thing if I had imbibed enough to dull…

There is a certain kind of fear that washes over me at times. A leftover, if you will, of the old days. I wasn’t a high functioning alcoholic, although I tried to make it look as if I was. I was never able to pull off stable employment or long term relationships. I never had close friends. All of it the result of my love affair with the bottle and my keen knack for being able to turn a good thing into a train wreck before noon on any given day.

Every semester that I attempted school, I would prep myself…

Who are in a place where there is despair, living daily with an alcoholic or a dry drunk I want to encourage you to pick up their big book and read the chapters for the wives/spouses and the chapter for the family.

Read it twice or three times if needed. The chapter for the family is what I have read now four times in the past week, to remind myself that change takes time and work, but always it leaves me feeling hopeful for what my part in this change and this process can be.

It never occured to me to pick…

The moment your child is placed in your hands at birth, that moment of clarity that you can’t deny…the promise you make to yourself that she will never have the life you had.  I couldn’t stop remembering that promise as I stared at the picture before me with tears streaming down my face.  How could she, where did I go wrong? Didn’t she learn anything from me? My eyes are spellbound to the image on the monitor in front of me.  All those haunted words whisper in my ear, the accolades she had given me for taking the high road…

People know that I moved 2,600 miles across the country after I got married. What most people don’t realize is that a large motivator for that relocation was my fragile sober state and my utter fear of relapsing yet again. People also recognize me as an intensely private individual who doesn’t socialize much and has little contact with her family. What most don’t know is that I used to be very social and come from a large family that gathers several times a year for large family parties. I choose not to be present.

Kristin Then and Kristin Now are vastly…

Someone tried to give me an out, a reason for my Alcoholism…It came about rather innocently. She had asked about the reasons behind my drinking. What wasn’t so innocent was her statement afterwards, “I perfectly understand why you drank, you needed to save yourself. Unlike me, I drank simply because I liked the taste of liquor. I guess that makes me the worst of us both.” I stared dumbfounded, uncomprehending what she just said, and backpedaled away from the insinuation that I had a perfectly logical reason to drink. When I could finally close my mouth, I asked her a…

To read Part 1, click here.

After my first experience with alcohol, I remember regretting many of my actions that day.  I was embarrassed I couldn’t handle myself like some of my friends.  During this time, I was also dealing with depression on and off (more on than off).  This brings me to my second drinking experience. 

I was sitting in my room with all my family in the house and remember feeling uneasy and panicky (is that even a word).  I decided I would go and sneak 2 beer from the fridge outside and take a bath.  The first beer tasted…

Over the weekend I asked my husband to listen to me and to talk after if he wanted to, then I went through the short list of items in my head that I needed to say, that I needed him to hear, mentally checking them off one at a time, making sure I was watching how I said what I was saying so that if need be at a later date I could stand behind my words, my promises to myself.

Nothing too exciting in the treatment facility survey. A few interesting contrasts between methadone providers and other providers:

Half (50 percent) of OTPs (opioid treatment programs) were operated by private for-profit organizations, compared to 29 percent of all substance abuse treatment facilities.

Facilities with OTPs providing substance abuse treatment services were most likely to offer outpatient treatment (94 percent), but least likely to offer residential (non-hospital) or hospital inpatient treatment (7 percent each).

Another interesting data point:

Over half (55 percent) of all OTPs provided both maintenance and detoxification. Thirty-seven percent provided maintenance only, and 8 percent provided detoxification only.

I don’t know of any local…

I am very excited to have the opportunity to share my journey with you all at The Second Road.  I never imagined my life would be like it is today, but I have come to realize everything happens for a reason.

I am a 33 year old recovering alcoholic.   The other day, I was trying to think of the very first time I ever drank and a memory played in my mind like a movie; every moment of every scene came back to me.  I had stuffed this deep inside my mind for so many years, but it finally hit me…