The other day a very dear friend of mine sent me an email to tell me how reading my book was affecting her. She’s been reading it slowly, highlighting passages that resonate, underlining comments that she wants to refer back to and remember. She said it’s been helping her. Like me, she was in a [...]

Those of us adept at keeping life going in unusually awkward or even terrible conditions are used to triage: making difficult reprioritization decisions in the moment.  As we move from crises to greater stability, we find that many of the characteristics and habits we developed in survival mode no longer serve us.  But I believe [...]

Intimacy is important to our well-being.  I’m not just talking about sexual intimacy…although that can be an important type of intimacy.  I’m talking about the freedom to share what is in your heart and mind with another person.  Intimacy includes the vulnerability of honest conversation; the physical accessibility of two people able and willing to [...]

I’m lucky to have a truly wonderful man in my life right now, but my happiness can be hard to take for a friend of mine who is not in quite the same place.  When she admitted her slight feelings of jealousy and frustration to another friend, he suggested that when she was ready for [...]

My mother was a genius at getting me to do things around the house.  She’d simply say “but you’re so good at cleaning the kitchen; really, no one can clean it like you can!” and sure enough, she would be right.  I was also told that I never finished projects, and that I was so [...]

A man I was dating a while back was constantly telling me I no longer needed my support program.  After we broke up, I realized that there had been many signs that he was probably an (undiagnosed?) alcoholic.  When the rough years of my marriage began, my ex-husband tried to dissuade me from taking classes [...]

Have you ever caught yourself saying or doing something that has made you both ashamed and wonder how you could possibly be acting that way?  Don’t worry, we all have.  Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a controversial experience at Stanford in 1971 called “The Lucifer Effect” during which men were recruited to create a prison [...]

I learned about the healing power of compassion during a period in my life when I was hopelessly unhappy in my job.  For various reasons, changing jobs was not an option so I stayed put, but I decided to add another element to my life that could give me satisfaction.  Around that time I happened [...]

The road to recover is actually very similar for alcoholics and alcoholic supporters alike.   Both journeys are tough, and they each begin by admitting we have a problem, and that we are incapable of solving it on our own.  The next logical step is to determine who or what can help us.  If we could [...]

Loving detachment is a great skill for the supporter of an alcoholic.   We tend to gravitate toward situations where we are needed, including in our relationships.  And for good reason: we get things done, we can multi-task like no one else, and we just intuitively seem to know what to do to make the world [...]