Back when my 14-year-old son called me from school and said he knows he should be happy and he is a lucky boy, but he feels like he wants to die, I truly panicked. It was as if I wasn’t hearing the right words coming out of his mouth. I knew I wasn’t equipped

As we slam into the end of the year it seems we can’t avoid the bombardment of messages telling us to buy buy buy. Yet, by next year it’s likely whatever was bought this year will either be broken, out of fashion, not the Apple 8, or lost and forgotten.  But there is something you

I remember when my first spiritual teacher told me that love was the most important thing there was and it could transcend and heal all things. I thought he was crazy, it didn’t apply to the love I was familiar with. The love that I knew was learned from those perfect families on TV and

In October I was invited to visit Alpine Horizons, a new rehabilitation facility in Switzerland that deals with addiction treatment and preventative programs for those at risk. I was given access to some of the program activities and taken through the program structures, all of which are impressive. Their team of international experts is headed

  Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what.  If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff. — Catherine M. Wallace —   Listening

I spoke to Dawn Clancy recently, creator of Growing Up Chaotic, a community for friends and families of addicts and survivors of abuse. Dawn and I met originally when we both wrote for AfterPartyMagazine. She shares some of her story with us and gives us some great advice on how to live a functional life, despite

    Blue, Baby, Blue One of my clients recently lamented, “I always feel blue around the holidays.” How often have you, or someone else, said the very same thing? Anxiousness & Isolation are the primary complaints. How ironic we feel isolation when it turns out there’s plenty of company with those same feelings. Is this

    Thanksgiving is my favorite time of the year. I love that the weather is starting to get cooler. It gets dark a little earlier which gives me warm loving feelings of family and a deep sense Gratitude. It’s a time for me to reflect on how far I’ve come in my life and

      Where were you when I was sitting alone in the parking lot of the motel we called home? Where were you when I picked up that needle and stuck myself with it? Where were you? You knew he had HIV/AIDS. I used to cry and feel so lonely without you there. So

The next two chapters of Rosemary O’Connor’s book, “A Sober Mom’s Guide to Recovery — Taking Care of Yourself to Take Care of Your Kids”, deal with very important topics for anyone in sobriety, but maybe more so for Moms than anyone else. Without good communication skills, our relationships with our kids can be severely