“I want winning!” the three-year old seethed as he plucked the dreaded peppermint candy card from the pile.  He was so close to the castle, the finish line, the grand ending where he could declare himself the winner, but instead he boomeranged back to the beginning only to watch others race to the finish. Candy

  Does anyone remember the Scorsese film “After Hours”? At the start of the film Griffin Dunne watches his last $20 bill float out a cab window and it is a catalyst for a night of chaos in downtown 1980s New York City. Every scene builds with chaos and insanity and a colorful cast of

Prologue: The following piece was written after meeting a homeless man, in the depths of insanity, one afternoon in Dublin, last year. He appeared to be a hopeless case. However, over the course of the last 2.5 years, I have learned (from listening intently) that there are no hopeless cases. I spend a lot of time

The statistics speak for themselves; according to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health 88,000 people die from alcohol related causes annually, making Alcohol the fourth leading cause of death in the United States alone. As a culture, we seem to underplay the pervasiveness of people who suffer or die from alcohol related

  I often get asked by clients, friends and acquaintances how to get to where they want to be in life. All of us have aspirations for our future. Self-help books and gurus tell us to dream big – if you can dream it you can be/do it. And we all know about the Law

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. The Alcoholics Anonymous authored book, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, famously calls step six “the step that separates the men from the boys.” What the AA folks mean by this is that compiling a list of one’s character defects and then becoming

  Clean and sober: now what? 90 meetings in 90 days, read the book, get a sponsor, write out your steps longhand, read the Morning Reflections, change everything and did I mention;” Go to meetings”?  I thought that getting sober was going to be a long slog from one recovery oriented duty to another. Sure,

  The International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression is a United Nations observation which occurs each June 4th. Created in August of 1982, the commemoration originally concentrated on child victims of the 1982 Lebanon War; however, its objective has been enlarged to recognize the trauma borne by children who are the victims of physical, mental and

The following post is based on a series of conversations that keep popping up lately. I use a masculine pronoun but this story is not gender specific. Perhaps this blog will hit home for some people new to recovery. To be clear, the situation I’m describing involves having a partner who’s a casual consumer of

  After rehab, I entered ‘the rooms’ as a protocol for what I, and others, believed would be helpful. I was desperate to overcome the feelings that I had tried to outrun my entire life. As life would have it, my life improved for some time. I went religiously to meetings three times a week,