One thing most addicts have in common is a history of childhood abuse or neglect. According to research by sex addiction expert Patrick Carnes, 81% of sex addicts were sexually abused as children and 97% were physically and/or emotionally abused or neglected. But quote those statistics to some (especially those of us who have been badly hurt by addicts) and you’ll hear, “Big deal. I had a rough childhood too, but I didn’t get so drunk I missed my job interview or spend my child’s first birthday with a prostitute or shoot up in a rest stop bathroom instead of…

Creative Commons license, photo by snogglethorpe

“So at my meeting last night, I wanted to say that sex addicts are hot, but there were a few newcomers, and newcomers don’t think that’s so funny,” I told my husband Mark as we were getting ready for bed. Mark laughed. He knows my running joke; if I’m ever looking for a relationship again, I’m going to go to a 12 Step meeting for sex addicts: given my history of being attracted to addicts, at least that way I’ll end up with someone in recovery from the start.

“Why don’t they think it’s funny?” Mark…

Been sailing some choppy seas of late. Despite my failure to post here, I’ve stayed well connected in my recovery circles. I’ve had to – the beast came back.

I’m not looking for pity or shame. You poured out compassion and good advice when I slipped last month. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated your words. I guess I just wasn’t really ready to listen. Even though I stopped using, I spiraled down further, into depression and self-destruction. Then I used for a week. Then I asked for help and stopped it again.

I scared people who care about me. Their…

This is not what I thought it would feel like to be 35, I told Linsey. She asked what I meant: Did I think I’d be the Composer in Residence for some college orchestra? More successful, career-wise? A better dad?

Not really more of anything, actually. The only way I knew to say it was, I thought I would be less lost.

The weeks after a relapse, even a quickly aborted one, are inevitably brutal. I’ve screwed up my brain chemistry: things that should feel good feel bland, things that should feel bad feel excruciatingly painful. Food for thought next time I get a…

A good article on the relationship between gratitude and happiness.

A psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Peterson regularly gave his students an unusual homework assignment. He asked them to write a “gratitude letter,” a kind of belated thank-you note to someone in their lives. Studies show such letters provide long-lasting mood boosts to the writers. Indeed, after the exercise, Peterson says his students feel happier “100 percent of the time.”

…The biggest bonuses come from experiencing gratitude habitually, but natural ingrates needn’t despair. Simple exercises can give even skeptics a short-term mood boost, and “once you get started, you find more…

What is your definition of “sanity”?

Last night’s step study ended before we got to this question in our Celebrate Recovery workbooks. I didn’t get to share my answer. So here ya go…

Sanity is stopping this relapse before the demon in my head possessed me again. Thank God I’m not in my addiction today.

Sanity is having friends like you, that I’ve never met, who encourage me and pour out heartfelt empathy and solid advice when I’m at my worst. I appreciated every one of your comments last week.

Sanity is leaving the most uncomfortable counseling appointment I’ve ever had, and knowing what…

Researchers hypothesize that depression is an adaptation rather than dysfunction:

One reason to suspect that depression is an adaptation, not a malfunction, comes from research into a molecule in the brain known as the 5HT1A receptor. The 5HT1A receptor binds to serotonin, another brain molecule that is highly implicated in depression and is the target of most current antidepressant medications. Rodents lacking this receptor show fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress, which suggests that it is somehow involved in promoting depression. (Pharmaceutical companies, in fact, are designing the next generation of antidepressant medications to target this receptor.) When scientists have compared the composition…

My husband has taken to his bed for the last several days. He is down-dosing from his methadone a milligram every other day, and it’s been tearing his mood to shreds. He wakes up in the morning, and we go to the clinic together. He comes home and watches a little television. I usually fall asleep with my head in his lap. I get up a little later, get dressed for work, and he goes outside and works in the yard. I come home between classes to be with him, and we usually hang out until it’s time for my…

At 40 days off cigarettes my back and ribs hurt me so much that I couldn’t move and for some reason I decided that I needed to see a chiropractor.  So I went to see one, had an exam, took a ton of x-rays, got an adjustment and was told to ice my ribs and come back the following Monday.

Well, that night I couldn’t get out of a chair I sat down in.  I tried to lie on the floor thinking it might help and instead it made things worse.  I called my mom and asked if she had anything…

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

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I am afraid. I am afraid. I am afraid.

I am afraid that my husband will leave me. I am afraid that I will leave him. I am afraid that this pain will never stop hurting in just the same way, over and over again. I am afraid he will be with another woman. I am afraid he will relapse. I am afraid I am not doing something right, something crucial. I am afraid of facing more pain, and I am afraid of this pain. I am afraid of leaving or staying. I can’t tell which hurts most.

I am afraid of…

At the end of winter, I realized I was depressed. I’d let myself get into quite a state, and I went to our county mental health clinic to get some help. I got an antidepressant and something to help me sleep. The antidepressant did its magic, but I was still struggling to stay asleep, so at my follow-up appointment I asked about other medications. The nurse practitioner prescribed me something else, and now I can sleep and sleep and sleep. I can sleep forever. It’s wonderful, as I’ve been getting increasingly drained by waking up again and again throughout the…

Day 105

Early in my crazy-person career, I visited my college’s medical center because I was so depressed I wanted to kill myself. This was a problem.

I was grabbing life by the throat. I got out of bed most days at sunrise and jogged. Then came the black vinyl planner, filled with lists. Lists of things to do and people to call, lists of goals and mission statements, lists of errands, lists of lists. I had been ad-libbing for too long, and was determined to eradicate every piece of procrastination from my life. If it could be organized and prioritized I…

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…

From a press release about a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry:

Although numerous studies have linked alcohol problems and depression, whether the relationship is causal or whether there is a common underlying factor remains unclear, they said.

To explore the issue, they examined data from the Christchurch Health and Development study, which followed 1,055 individuals born in New Zealand for 25 years from birth.

…

In an attempt to determine causality, the researchers tested three statistical models on the data:

• One in which both disorders increased risk of the other in a feedback loop
• One in which major depression caused alcohol problems
• One in which alcohol…

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them–She was the Universe.

-Lord Byron, “Darkness”

The darkness that had descended so seductively on my mind is lifting. Sometimes, I don’t realize how sick I’ve been until I feel better. I’d reached a point of depression where I felt no joy. A few weeks of medication, and I’m back to myself. It’s kind of a miracle.

Sometimes, things are funny. Sometimes, things are sad. It’s all within a manageable range.…

All I want to do anymore is sleep. I want to sleep, and I want to wake up briefly to eat cereal, and then I want to sleep, sleep, sleep.

My house is a mess. My marriage is a mess. I don’t feel equipped to deal with any of it. Apparently, my strategy is to sleep the next two weeks or so until I can count on my anti-depressants taking the edge off my splintered emotions.

I got out of bed to go to a meeting, which is important, but that’s really all I could muster for today. I am glad that…

My husband came with me to meet my guru for a session yesterday. He’s never practiced meditation before, so it was an initiation for him.

It was kind of exciting for me, too. Meditation has become a special, sweet part of my life, and I’m glad that he’s interesting in pursuing a practice of his own. I also believe that it will only have positive effects for his recovery, and I’m grateful.

The last week or so, we have both begun to treat one another with respect again. I am not sure how it happened, exactly. I do know that I was…

A few nights ago, I was surfing around the ol’ internetz, looking for some guided meditations. I’ve been struggling with both depression and boredom lately, and I thought I might find some visualization and relaxation exercises that I could use to help get me to a better place.

I did find some meditation podcasts that were pretty good, but the most intriguing thing I found was this video of a young, pointy-haired, British man tapping himself in the face. I have to admit that my love for Brit accents sucked me in more than anything, and then there was the what-the-heck…

From jointogether.org:

New animal research from Florida State University suggests that smoking during adolescence may increase the risk of depression during adulthood, Medical News Today reported Jan. 29.

Researcher Carlos Bolaños-Guzmán and colleagues injected adolescent rats with either nicotine or saline solution for 15 days, then tested the rats’ responses to stressful and rewarding situations both during and after exposure.

The study showed that even a single day’s worth of nicotine exposure during adolescence led to rats experiencing lower sensitivity to natural rewards and enhanced sensitivity to stressful situations.

Administering either nicotine or antidepressants during adulthood caused the depression symptoms to disappear, the researchers…

I saw this yesterday and feared that alcoholism research was going the same route as research on psychiatric prevalence–finding implausibly high rates of disorders.

A 20% lifetime rate of dependence for men would either be false or demonstrate the uselessness of dependence criteria. Reading the press release left me confused about whether that 20% figure was dependence or the sum of dependence AND abuse.

This Join Together research summary suggests that it is the latter. (Whew! Especially since Marc Schuckit is the lead author. I’d be very disappointed if his research began to look unreliable.)

Some data points of interest about early use and…

“Let go and let God” is saying I’ve heard frequently from people in recovery. It’s one of those slogans, like “one day at a time” or “easy does it”, that are a kind of shorthand for a more complex idea. They have a ring of truth about them, these slogans; they seem like common sense advice, solutions that many addicts agree can be applied to any number of the problems that commonly crop up in recovery.

But I’ve always struggled with “let go and let God.” It’s a difficult idea for an agnostic like me to wrap my head around, and…

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…

One of the reasons I quit taking my antidepressant medication six months ago was that I honestly felt like it wasn’t doing anything for me any longer. I’ve been on-and-off antidepressants for many years, and as many of you may know, they have a way of crapping out after a while. Taking a break from a certain medication will sometimes render it effective if you need it again in the future, and since I wasn’t having any depression symptoms at the time it made sense to stop taking the medication.

My antidepressant of choice is Wellbutrin. Over the years, I’ve tried…

A funny thing about depression is that a pretty clear sign, for me at least, that I’m depressed is my mind’s insistence that I am NOT depressed. It’s kind of like addiction that way, with a built-in denial process. I mean, if I try to look at it objectively, all of the signs and symptoms are there. So I try to decide that I should go back on antidepressant medication, and instead of just accepting this as the rational and effective way of dealing with this disease, I start rationalizing.

Maybe it’s lingering effects of my thyroid. Or it’s just because…

My depression has been off the charts lately. I went through a brief period of hypomania, complete with excess spending, lack of need for sleep, and pressured speech, which was fun. But last week, I fell faster than a dead bird from the sky and crashed so hard it physically hurt. This prompted my psychiatrist to wonder about the possibility of bipolar disorder! WHAT???? Whatever the diagnosis, however, the pain is unchanged.

I’m so tired of talking about the pain. I’m so tired of battling the pain. I’ve been locked up in my incredibly disorganized and messy home, unable to sleep,…

If you’ve been wondering…I’ve been missing. Depression and I have been doing battle for the last couple weeks. I’ve NOT been winning. I’ve been so far from winning as to be barely recognizable at times. I’ve been so far from winning as to be barely functional at times. I’ve been so far from winning, I’ve not been capable of rational thought–never mind rational writing! But, I’m back. If you are interested in any of the gory details, I was able to finish a couple of posts here.

One of the toughest symptoms I had over the past few weeks was increasingly-distressing…

How do you know when you’re doing the best that you can?

I don’t know why, but I’m finding lately that I doubt myself on this quite a bit. I mean, on the one hand, I think that I’m doing the best that I can given my situation right now. But there’s always this voice, which sounds suspicously like my mother, in the back of my mind telling me that there’s really nothing wrong with me and I’m just lazy.

Probably I should just ignore that voice, but it’s difficult to do at times. I had the kind of mom and dad…

Depression disabled me. I was unable to work, even unable to care for myself at times. Then, after deciding alcohol was good medication for what ailed me, I became an alcoholic! I got sober and my depression symptoms have been slowly improving, finally, over the last several months. I haven’t been in the hospital for over one year, the longest freedom tenure since this odyssey began eight years ago. Yes, eight years now. Eight years ago this month, November 2000, my new, uninvited life with depression began. It’s been a long road.

But now, I am looking at going back to…

My friend hooked me up with some friends of hers who do this thing they call The Abundance. Every Friday, they get the culled items from one of the local organic-produce delivery companies, and they set all these awesome veggies out in boxes on the side of their house, send out a text message and it’s free for the taking.

I went for the first time a few weeks ago. There were boxes of little potatoes, big green leeks, leafy Swiss chard, peppers, onions, grapes and my favorite apples - Jona Golds. It was like an awesome, free farmers market, and…