My daughter Dani had her senior gallery show yesterday.  Instead of creating multiple pieces for this one, the project was one big installation: a 20 ft pair of gently flapping wings.  The piece was to benefit the non-profit organization Not For Sale, an group working to end the enslavement of people worldwide, including here in the USA.

I have a new boyfriend and it’s a little on the complicated side, because for some reason easy does not seem to be in the cards for me. Maybe that’s so that I will truly appreciate love when it arrives?  I’m not sure, but I do know that I am hopeful and very interested in seeing where this is going to go.
He is an old friend whom I caught up with again on Facebook. Facebook? Really?
I know it sounds silly, but reconnecting with old friends is my favorite thing about sites like Facebook or MySpace. We have spent more hours …read more

Buddy T. offers to help you at About.com.
Al-Anon Quiz – Are You Troubled By Someone’s Drinking?
“Millions of people are affected by the excessive drinking of someone close. Many times people who are close to alcoholics do not even realize how much they have been affected by someone else’s drinking.”
Buddy offers you this quiz to help you decide whether the Al-Anon Family groups might work for you.
One specific question that rings a bell with me – “Do you feel that if the drinker cared about you, he or she would stop drinking to please you?”
Buddy also offers you a resource for …read more

Please don’t allow yourself to be misled by that person’s actions, non-actions, attitudes, demands, lies, manipulations, rationalizations, etc. There is help no matter what the perception of the current situation is. The help is there for you if the person with the alcohol problem is finding ways to avoid getting help.
For example, Take Paul’s comment today;
“the only way to get the help you need is to stop drinking, go into fits risking his own life or wait until a weekday. I have taken him to the doctors he has been told to go home and drink beer and slowly reduce …read more

Last year we made an attempt to determine what is the message that we carry in Alcoholics Anonymous and received a couple of excellent responses;
Joe said: “The message that I carry is AA’s message. 12 steps which guarantee a spiritual awakening to be the result. My obligation is to try to share my experience with those twelve steps with other Alcoholics and to practice the 12 disciplines in all my affairs. Most important to me is that I be cognisant that this is AA’s program and AA’s steps! Not mine! My program is what brought me to AA! One path …read more

While doing some research for the other Blog I write on here at b5 I came across this “letter to the editor.”
Quoting the writer;
“As a child I suffered from having an alcoholic mother. My only outlet was keeping a diary where I vented. Mother read it and retaliated. At the age of 15, I ran away from home, never to return. Fortunately, my older sister let me stay with them. Who knows what my life would have been like otherwise?”
And I felt that person’s anguish, instantly. Had I done the same thing and my father discovered it, I would also …read more

Notice that it doesn’t say “In Good Religious Health.”
“When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and spiritually.”
First things first – “Intelligence is not incompatible with humility, provided I place humility first… To be fashionable and to seem better than I really am is a spiritual illness.”
In my drinking life I could not put these two together. Why? Simply because the concept of humility was totally lost on me. To be humble was not within my understanding. I was either less than, far worse, or far better because, if not, I was worthless. Absolutely convoluted…
“To recognize and to …read more

Theses entries have been, and remain, at the top of the statistics for most viewed every month here at A Dozen Steps…
Nonsense Gods of Recovery
“Covers the origins of what I call the “nonsense gods of recovery” that have crept into our fellowship…Alcoholics may be sick but they are not stupid… Demonstrating the absurdity of the weird names counselors, therapists, and treatment people–as well as AA’s – have assigned to “their” deity… These include tree, light bulb, radiator, Gertrude, Ralph, Coke bottle, Pumpkin, and on and on.”

With a hat tip to Syd who has this link in his Blogroll which he had titled “Codependency and Alcoholism”
Alcoholism and Its Effect on the Family
Something I can immediately identify with… something that, for all practical means and purposes, defines me and then defines my children too.
Here’s what I can pick out of the article which applies directly to my personal life (rather lengthy);