Within the concept of loving detachment, there are two types of detachment to practice: physical and emotional. This blog deals with physical detachment and the next one will deal with emotional detachment. Both are critical to your health and sanity. As I mentioned in my last bog, loving detachment doesn’t require that you physically leave [...]

A few weeks ago, I was sure I was going to die. It would happen – I figured – at some point during a business trip to Montreal. The plan would go down, or my cab would get into an accident. Regardless, my life would be over and my kids would be on their own. [...]

My father had Alzheimer’s, so whenever I hear about anything to do with degenerative brain function, I tend to listen. This morning I spent an enjoyable half hour listening to an archived radio broadcast a friend had sent me the link to. The show was an edition of the CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, and featured [...]

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 [...]

My support group has an expression: “Go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated.” As I get further into my own recovery, I recall with some shame the degree to which I held on, in the past, to relationships where I clearly was not celebrated and in fact, felt barely tolerated. This included my relationship [...]

Living with an alcoholic, I learned that things could change in an instant.  One moment life can be normal and in the next, I could discover that my husband was in jail, thousands of miles away.  Or I could be having a perfectly normal day gardening only to suddenly learn that he’d had a car [...]

Recently my boyfriend and I had an opportunity to stay with friends at their spectacular fishing resort on a somewhat secluded section of Vancouver Island.  On our first night there, he caught a 12 -pound Chinook salmon in the cove in front of the property.  The next morning, we awoke to a stunning vista of [...]

My fourteen year old son sometimes reminds me more of a five year old.  Despite being at an age where normally, teenage children are stretching boundaries in order to gain independence, he’s becoming even more dependent on me.  In the short term, this isn’t a bad thing, and it’s quite understandable in the circumstances.  He [...]

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 [...]

Today marks the launch of my new book “Looking Up: Surviving Life with an Alcoholic”.  The book chronicles about four years of my life before, during and immediately after my ex-husband’s succumbing to alcoholism.  While there is no doubt in my mind that these years marked some of the toughest of my life to date, with [...]