My husband Mark, I have to admit it, hates fish. And people fish evangelize him all the time. I used to too, in my pre-vegetarian days, when a trip to the aquarium would make me hungry. The problem, you see, is never that people were different and have different needs and tastes; the problem is that Mark has never had “good” fish. “You’ve never tried really fresh fish. You haven’t tried this fish; it’s not a fishy fish. You haven’t tasted fish the way I make it. You haven’t been eating fish the right way. Try this. You’ll like it.”…

I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I’d never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners. We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first…

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me — or at least like the me I used to be — find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of…

I would like to announce the “Scootin for Recovery” ride, or pilgrimage, currently on the road–and possibly coming to a town near you. That is not the official name for the ride, in fact, there isn’t one that I know of…but I will send a TSR tshirt to the person who can come up with the best name for this 2,000 mile scooter ride.
Blogger Steve E. has taken to the road for recovery with a rough itinerary that includes stops in:

Orlando FL
St Augustine FL
Jacksonville FL
Charleston South Carolina
Columbia SC
Charlotte North Carolina
Richmond Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
Norfolk VA
Newport news VA

Return via alternate route TBA

He has…

I’m not one to keep busy during the summer, at least not in the sense of running the kids from place to place, activity to activity. Yet, not being busy — whether inside inside the house playing board games or (more often) just keeping the kids from driving each other crazy, or outside swimming or at the park or at a library or museum — isn’t always relaxing. Well, it is for the kids: just not entirely for the mama who has to make sure that those kids stay fed and safe and moderately hygienic, the mama who (since those…

A little less than a year ago, I moved my blog to its own URL, and when I did so, I had the opportunity to reread many of my old posts as I updated broken links (still not all fixed, by the way). As I did, I noticed that, whether I wrote about them explicitly or not, I could see the phases I went through, like rings on a tree: here was the fire that burned my bark; here was a season rich with rain; here was mild and pleasant weather; here was the drought that left me parched. With each…

There is so much wrong with this story, I don’t even know where to start… Gentle Path linked to a story about an “investigative report” in which a reporter burst into a closed Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) meeting, cameras rolling, to attempt to interview group members. (The only version of the report publicly available is one remixed with editorial comments is available here.)

I understand, very well, the fear and misunderstanding that surrounds addiction, and sex addiction in particular (why do you think I blog under a pseudonym?), but this kind of sensationalist coverage of recovery meetings is the worst way I can think of…

When I found out about my husband’s sexual addiction, it felt like my emotional landscape faded from bright vivid color to monochrome shades of black and grey. I had three primary emotional settings: fear, anger (shading into full on rage) and heartbreaking sadness. And I’d display these by alternating between screaming, crying and sitting mute and paralyzed. My early experiences with 12 Step meetings were with partners of sex addicts who were in much the same state I was. There was a lot of anger and hurt in that musty little church room, and it was hard, as I slowly…

“Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?” Mark asked the other day, “You said, ‘I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!’”

“Really? I said that?!”

“Yes, you did.”

“That’s completely insane, and exactly like something I would say,” I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of…

Like many people, I walked into my first 12 Step meeting never expecting to wind up there, with no clue what to expect other than what Hollywood had taught me (which I soon learned was nothing accurate). The meetings I first started attending were for friends and family members of sex addicts, and they were tiny, just four or five women sitting in a circle in a church meeting room. After lengthy, scripted readings (those fifteen to twenty minutes certainly never make it into the movies), there would be time for “sharing.”

Because our group was small, sharing was less structured…

Nobody told me that, and honestly, I’m not sure I would have been able to hear them if they did, but man-o-man it is an important thing to realize.  That’s  my experience anyway.

You see, this isn’t my first rodeo.  I had over 2 years sobriety on another occasion and I suffered a major illness.  I had meningitis.  I spent several days in the hospital on serious painkillers.  I went home with more of them, and when they weren’t really cutting it for me anymore I reached out for the chemical that was always my first love - crystal meth.  I…

Five months ago, after a four and a half year hiatus, I once again started attending a 12 Step group for partners of sex addicts. I had just finished working the Steps with an online group and my intention was to join the group and work the Steps in this group the good old-fashioned way, with a real life sponsor. However, the group I’m attending, which is the best fit both for my schedule and my philosophical leanings, is brand-new and tiny. There are people in the group who have worked the Steps in other programs before, but no one…

Did you know that The Second Road has about 100 recovery videos in its vault? Some incredible survivors offered to have their recovery stories filmed. Ruth tell us how she came to understand the disease of alcoholism and had a spiritual awakening. She got into a 12 step recovery program and discovered her higher power, G.O.D. or Good Orderly Direction.  Follow the break for the featured video clip. You can also watch Part 1 of her story, here, and if you have a YouTube page, friend us and subscribe to our videos!

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A blogger known as Prayer Girl has a profound post up today, titled “You are not Alone.”  If you didn’t notice the hyperlink attached to her name, visit http://oneprayergirl.blogspot.com/2009/04/thursday-4209-you-are-not-alone.html to read the post. Indeed, it is a comfort, a miracle, a wonderful thing, despite all the anxiety that might surround your first meeting, to walk in and discover that You Are NOT Alone.  Visit her post to either recall or to learn what transformation is possible in recovery. 

When I first started going to S-Anon (a 12 Step recovery group for those affected by someone else’s compulsive sexual behavior), I was immediately struck by how small the group was. If we had seven or eight people in the room, it was a big meeting, and ten people was huge. Most nights there were just four or five women (always women) huddle together in folding chairs in a church meeting room. But a few doors down, ten times that many people would be at the Sexaholics Anonymous meeting on the same night.

As I struggled to find this one meeting…

I was recently reading a book on Buddhism and the Twelve Steps that describes a meditation exercise in which you label your thoughts: “desire,” “aversion,” “thinking.” The author mentioned one woman who was surprised at how much of her thinking centered on desire: I want, I want, I want… Thinking about thinking? That’s hot. Of course, I wanted to try it. Oo, right away, “desire!” But as my day progressed, I noticed: 1) that the exercise was really hard and 2) I spend most of my time planning for the future, specifically what I want to say in the future.…

Wind lashes the trees.
The water churns angry white.
I can’t let this be.

Sacrifice a goat.
Strike a deal with the unseen.
Beg storms for respite.

I’m too busy to
board windows, batten hatches
or leave the storm’s path.

Against all my will
the storm comes rushing in, then
skies clear without help.

This, my fool’s errand:
To prevent the hurricane,
save him from himself.

I am powerless
over the rushing maelstrom:
over addiction.

Do I think I could
command the winds or the sea?
Or reason with them?

I can fight the rain
or admit powerlessness
and find true power.

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to act as secretary for my 12 Step group. However, after just one meeting in my new role, I contracted the raging, beastly stomach flu direct from the bowels of Satan and had to hand the secretary duties right back to the former secretary, the one and only person whose contact information I had. This week, I was feeling better, and as I prepared for the meeting, I began to think about ways I could make my part of things run more smoothly. I decided that at the end of the meeting, during the…

I went out to dinner a few weeks ago with some old friends who were curious about my recent 12 Step work, having had no experience with 12 Step or recovery work themselves. I told them that I was finding the exercise of working the Steps around particular issues to be really helpful new tool for me. So they asked for an example.

“Well, for example, Mark often gets home late on nights when he knows I have yoga or meditation or 12 Step. He knows I can’t leave until someone is there to take care of the kids, he promises…

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…

After the meeting
waiting for Mark to come out,
I saw a good friend.

I think to myself,
“It’s quite a coincidence
seeing David here.”

“What are the chances
that we’re here on a weeknight
in the same church lot?”

But then it hit me:
I forgot that David is
a sex addict too.

These 12 Step meetings —
weeknight evenings in this church —
were how he met Mark.

After all these years,
holidays, birthdays, dinners,
he’s just our friend Dave.

Mark comes. I tell him
addiction’s forgettable;
laughter shakes our car.

When I was little, my Brownie troop went to visit a home for children with disabilities. I got the impression that somehow all of us normal kids in our spiffy uniforms were somehow supposed to cheer their lonesome lives. At some point in the days preceding this visit, I also got the romantic notion that I would meet my new best friend there. She would be (in accordance with the only picture I had of people who were disabled) wheelchair bound, and thus, different and separate from other people, but otherwise much like me. In particular, she would (like me)…

I know you all have been wondering, Where the heck is Diary of a Quitter? Did she finally fulfill the promise of her name?

I’m still here, still coping with what life throws at me. The past couple of months were fraught with thyroid and depression woes, and changes in medication that made me quite sick for a few weeks. Then I lost my internet connection at home, so I haven’t been able to post.

Things seem to be working out though, like they usually do. My new (old) antidepressant is finally working, and thoughts are starting to flow again. One of…

Four years ago, I was sitting in a 12 Step meeting when the secretary announced available service positions. “Would anyone like to be secretary? Please,” she said, sounding a little desperate, “It’s really not much work. You just come in and read the script.” The room went silent and I felt the way I did in school when the teacher would ask a question that I sort of knew the answer to, something I didn’t feel entirely comfortable answering but would if I had to. Every silent moment was torture: my need to take care of the rest of the…

When Mark first started in recovery, he used to get frustrated with his sponsor, because no matter what the problem was, his sponsor always had the same answer, “Work the Steps.”

“I’m angry at my wife.” Work the Steps.

“I’m struggling with a flirtatious coworker.” Work the Steps.

“I’m worried about my finances and scared of losing my house.” Work the Steps.

That would have driven me crazy too. (Good thing I never got a sponsor, huh?) Yet I find myself thinking something similar whenever I run into a problem:

“I get so fed up with the way my daughter acts when she’s tired.” I…

I got together this week with a dear old friend of mine and caught up for the first time in a long time. She’s been busy with work and family crises. I’ve been busy with the perpetual too much that I always heap on my plate. But she got our annual holiday card and letter a while back and made the New Year’s resolution to get back in touch, which was one more resolution than I made. And she even kept hers. Impressive!

Knowing she’d read the annual update, I figured there really wasn’t much she wasn’t aware of, but as…

Although I’ve just finished working the 12 Steps with an online group, I haven’t been to a real life 12 Step meeting in over a year. I went to meetings weekly in the first year after I learned of my husband’s sexual addiction, but I stopped going regularly about four years ago. The meetings stopped being good for me — or maybe I stopped being good for the meetings — in any case, I got to a place where my group and I just weren’t good for one another. However, I’ve been starting to think that maybe it was time…

When I first found out about my husband’s addiction, I saw recovery as a destination. Mark would get into recovery, work the 12 Steps and our life and our marriage would go back to something resembling what it had been. I wasn’t quite sure how it could, but there were a tantalizingly finite number of Steps (twelve!) that seemed to promise they could walk us right back to somewhere close to where we ought to be. The idea of a lifelong journey seemed to big and too exhausting: sort of like the idea of never drinking again must seem huge…

Step 7: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

I’ve been going through the process of working the 12 Steps around my own personal craziness, and last week, I reached the point where I was supposed to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. Whew! That has so many problematic words in it. I mean even if we forget about “shortcomings” (because, let’s face it, don’t most of us want to keep on keeping on with the ignoring in that department?), we have words like “God” and “ask” and “remove” and (trickiest of all) “humbly.”

I don’t know about you, but I…

My husband and I have a special association with the weekend that marks the end of daylight savings time (or rather the weekend that used to mark the end of daylight savings time, since the powers that control such things have moved it around lately). Nineteen years ago, on the day we turned the clocks back, I met Mark. We joke that things were meant to work out that way to give us an extra hour together.

And while the time doesn’t change for another week yet, Mark decided to honor the old daylight savings weekend with a gift. He took…