Jacob Sullum enjoys a gotcha moment with Mark Willenbring.

Before I knew my husband was a sex addict, I knew that he liked flirting with other women. Probably a little too much. I could tell he got a thrill out of it, and I worried that he would accidentally take this “entertainment” too far. He’d lead some poor woman on and she’d get aggressive and Mark would find himself in bed with her before he knew what hit him. So I had a brilliant solution; I would be the other woman. I would give myself a new name, a new e-mail address and a new look (complete with a…

Someone I grew up with drank (still drinks) a lot. And over the years, I’ve struggled with her alcohol use. Year after year, the incidents around her drinking have piled up. There was the time she was laid off and spent the next several years living rent free in a home her parents owned, spending her days drinking and watching TV, rarely bothering to get dressed. There was the night of her brother’s wedding, where she was found vomiting in the bushes outside the reception site after overindulging in the free alcohol. And there were the trash cans full of…

We are quickly approaching the holidays, which can be an intense time for a person in recovery.  From Thanksgiving to New Years, the holidays are loaded with triggers.  Living sober day to day presents ample challenges as is, but the holidays also re-introduce memories, family situations, extra demands and difficult situations.

Instead of the season becoming a reason to relapse, try to relate the significance of each holiday to your recovery while taking the necessary precautions to retain your sobriety.

Think about some of the steps listed below, utilize the ones you need as tools, and please, share your own suggestions with…

Always a sucker for both science fiction and anything vaguely related to time travel, this season I’ve started watching ABC’s new series, Flash Forward. The premise of the show is that everyone on Earth simultaneously loses consciousness for approximately two minutes and sees visions of a few minutes of their lives six months in the future. The show follows Mark Benford, the FBI agent leading the investigation into the cause of the “blackout,” as well as the lives of several intersecting characters, and then examines how their visions of the future affect their actions in the present.

The interesting thing about…

Today would have been my father’s birthday. He would have been 65. There within lie a lot of “IFs.” The biggest being IF he had not been an alcoholic who always lost battle with the drink.

But he did. He lost many battles before he was finally taken off the field earlier this year.

I was told he had been sober for 2 years, the longest time in his life in 40 years. Yet, when I cleaned out his room, I found a book bag with two empty fifths of vodka. I carry that bookbag with me everyday. It is the one…

“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…

While I was away on my mini vacation a few weeks ago, I relaxed with some cheesy movie watching. Among the brainless, feel-good flicks I watched was Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which stars Matthew McConaughey as Connor Mead, an alcoholic sex addict trying to turn his life around at his brother’s wedding. Well, I don’t think the movie actually refers to him as an alcoholic or a sex addict, but given the fact that, in an effort to numb his feelings, he trashes the wedding cake looking for a drink and tries to get the bride’s mother into bed, it’s probably…

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…

We arrive aside the bonfire and a few people greet Frank like they are acquainted with him. They look at me and I’m sure they’re wondering what on earth I’m doing there. I set down the blankets nearby and tell Frank to let them know that anyone is welcomed to them.

The bonfire is giving off an enormous amount of heat, and my face tingles as the hot air hits it. But what I notice most about the air is the smell; a peculiar scent that I’m not familiar with. It’s a combination of wood and rubber and paper. It burns…

A new study offers some answers to the questions provoked by studies finding a strong relationship between early drinking and dependence later in life. Those questions center around the nature of this relationship: is the early drinking related to genetic or environmental factors that predispose the person for alcohol dependence? or, does early drinking change the brain in ways that leads to alcohol dependence?

This study determines that “genetic risk accounts in large part for this association.”

Technorati Tags: alcoholism, research

I drive to a nearby convenience store, and when we pull into the stall he looks confused. Without saying a word, I get out of the car and go into the store. I emerge a few minutes later with a six-pack in tow. I get back into the car and hand him one of the beers. I lean over and put the rest in the back seat, and he looks up at me. “I know, Frank. It’s OK; you’re OK.” He pulls back the tab on the can, and all at once it produces a “crack” sound that is all…

I notice that the restaurant is really busy. There are numerous waitresses and waiters and they scatter about the floor like cockroaches do when someone turns on the light. In the booth next to us is an infant, and he’s crying. His mother is holding a pacifier to his face trying to stuff the nipple in his mouth in an attempt to quiet him. I look at her and she flashes a half-smile at me, looking somewhat embarrassed about the commotion. I smile back as if to tell her not to worry, that the fussing doesn’t bother me in the…

It’s 4:30 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s the fifth of August and summer has once again come to the island of Oahu with a vengeance. It brings with it unrelenting heat and humidity. I’m sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic and I know from past experience I’m going to have to crawl home inch by inch, mile by mile. A song comes on the radio and it is one of my favorites. I reach for the volume dial and crank it up. The song begins to blast through the speakers, and saturates the inside of my car with sound. I turn…

Heroin better for addicts in recovery. Really? Recovery? Really?

Here’s the abstract.

Raises some interesting questions about the future of the word recovery.

There’s been discussion in recent years about being more inclusive with concept of recovery to make room for medication-assisted recovery, serial recovery, partial recovery, 12-step, faith based, secular, solo, etc. To be sure, many had defined it too narrowly. But, at what point does it lose its meaning? Could we get to the point where people using their drug of choice under medical supervision are considered to be in recovery? Is this headline an indication that it is already losing its…

From the LA Times:

Of the many things that long-term alcohol addiction can steal — careers, lives, health, memory — one of its most heartbreaking tolls is on relationships. Alcoholics, researchers have long known, have a tendency to misread emotional cues, sometimes taking offense when none was intended or failing to pick up on a loved one’s sadness, joy, anger or disappointment.

The misunderstandings can result in more drinking, and more deterioration of relationships and lives.

How does alcohol do all that? A new study finds that the brains of long-term alcoholics, even those who have long abstained, often differ from nonalcoholics’ in…

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….

Sorry for all the recent tab dumps. Enjoying summer with my kids, work is busy and having a hard time keeping up with the blog.

• Methadone users ‘more likely to carry on injecting’
• Pilot Alcoholism-Treatment Program Targets Gays
• Effects of Voucher-Based Intervention on Abstinence and Retention in an Outpatient Treatment for Cocaine Addiction: A Randomized Controlled Trial
• Unforeseen Benefits: Addiction Treatment Reduces Health Care Costs
• The tripod of recovery (Food for thought about assessing a person’s spiritual dimension.)
• Using propensity scores to adjust for selection bias when assessing the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous in observational studies
• Meaning-Centered Therapy (A great reminder of how deficit focused assessment can get.)

Technorati…

June 10th of this year, my long deceased maternal grandfather would have been 100 years old. He was a gentle man with many talents, one of which was story telling. Most everyone in my extended family has a favorite memory of him sitting in his favorite deck chair with his pipe or cigarette, holding court with some odd tale extracted from his past. Like most of those on my mom’s side, he was funny in a way that couldn’t be bought. Hilarity was commonplace on that side of the family and I imagine, to those looking in from the outside,…

A 2004 study carried out at the University of Colorado found that around 15 per cent of Caucasians have a genetic variant, known as the G-variant, that makes ethanol behave more like an opioid drug, such as morphine, with a stronger than normal effect on mood and behaviour. This variant seems randomly distributed among the population: it emerged through mutation, although the factors affecting its selection remain unknown since, like all genes, it does not operate in isolation. . . . The Colorado study tested the DNA of moderate-to-heavy drinking students to determine whether they had the G-variant gene. They…

For some, alcohol is a fuel; for others it is a vice. Numerous artists have called upon alcohol as a muse, even Winston Churchill attributed his six part memoir to alcohol. Churchill said, “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Mark Twain is quoted as saying,“My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”

Many addicts in recovery are likely to agree that the truth, for us, is: “It has taken more out of me than I have taken from it.”

While a direct genetic link between alcohol and creativity has not been…

A study of medications (and placebo) for alcoholism finds that expectancy is a better predictor of outcomes than the medication (or placebo) that they are prescribed:

Double-blind placebo-controlled trials are intended to control for the impact of expectancy on outcomes. Whether they always achieve this is, however, questionable.

Reanalysis of a clinical trial of naltrexone and acamprosate for alcohol dependence investigated this issue further. In this trial, 169 alcohol-dependent patients received naltrexone, acamprosate or placebo for 12 weeks. In addition to being assessed on various indices of alcohol dependence, they were asked whether they believed they received active medication or placebo.

While there were…

Not much has changed since my last post. You know, the one where my vehicle of life came to a screeching halt at the bloody end of a dead-end road and I no longer recognized my life? Yeah. That post.

Some bright spots: I have found a therapist that specializes in the very thing that is ripping my life apart and I have found that people actually give a damn and want to be of service when you ask for help. Imagine that.

Time to get brutally honest: while I don’t want to blow my sobriety (8.5 years,) the thought of checking…

It’s almost 6:00 in the morning. I’m sitting on my back deck, coffee to my right, cigarettes to my left, laptop on my lap. One of my doggies is lying to my right, chewing on a rawhide bone and the neighborhood is taking on that beigy-gray color right before one sees the forehead of the son peek over the Eastern horizon. I’ve been up for an hour – ever since I heard the dogs bark, saw the car driving in a staccato semi-circle around my cul-de-sac and saw the man/boy get out of the car in front of my yard…

Another study finds that depression tends to follow alcohol problems rather than cause alcohol problems. My guess is that the popularity of self-medication theories won’t suffer at all. Why is that?

Conclusions - The findings suggest that the associations between AAD and MD were best explained by a causal model in which problems with alcohol led to increased risk of MD as opposed to a self-medication model in which MD led to increased risk of AAD.

This is a longitudinal study. I look forward to seeing more about the responses to treatment for alcoholism and depression.

Technorati Tags: depression, alcoholism, research

…

There are many days that I attempt to post blog entries, only to delete them entirely or archive the posts for a later day. The ultimate outcome is that the entry never gets published. I can’t tell you why this is. My best guess is that my mind is very fluid and I’m not one to get hung up on any one particular issue or topic for long. What might constitute a hot topic at 9:00 AM will more than likely get shelved for the next hot thing at 11:45 AM. God forbid I don’t finish that entry and 3:00 PM…

Sarah Allen Benton
therapist, author, speaker

I feel as though I have lived two lives—a drinking life and a life in recovery.  I began drinking at the age of 14 and recall that right from the beginning I was blacking out, vomiting, and unable to recognize the danger I was in. These events felt ordinary to me, and I quickly began to live for them.  I was truly infatuated with alcohol from my first experiences. It just felt right—even when it made me sick. My love-hate relationship with alcohol had just begun.

I thrived on the social aspect of college and found that…

Earlier this month, Jason here at The Second Road linked to an article by Nina Caplan, a writer who shares her experience of going without alcohol for a month. What struck me in reading her piece was how boring she found life without alcohol. “So I did it. It’s not difficult. Just dull,” she writes. And, “What else did I learn after a month of stone-cold sobriety? That it’s over-rated.” That is the stereotype of sobriety and the fear of almost anyone facing recovery, whether from alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, food or codependency (aka addiction to addicts): What am I going…

Chad shares with us how he found God in living, after coming so close to loosing everything. Thank you for submitting your story Chad. We celebrate your 17 years and wish you many, many more–one day at a time.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

17 X 365 = 6,205

Today I’ve reached the seventeen year mark in my sobriety.

On the first day I was sober, if you would have told me I would still be sober seventeen years from now, I would have laughed at you. On the twenty ninth day of my sobriety, if you would have told me I would still…

Jason Schwartz contributes a lot of great policy blogs to TSR–important stuff that we hope you all read! It’s an honor that he contributed his story here because most of his blogs are not personal.  Jason is the clinical director at Dawn Farm, a place that almost makes me wish I still needed rehabilitation, or that I lived in Michigan. Dawn Farm provides a continuum of quality services for men and women with drug and alcohol problems. Since 1973, Farm programs have offered help-never turning people away for lack of funds. They have a 74 acre farm and a goal to…