addiction

NY Times Bestselling Author and Sober Addict Anna David

September 8, 2017 by Genius Recovery

Making Amends Was Everything I Least Expected

September 7, 2017 by Genius Recovery

I thought I knew exactly how my Ninth Step in AA would unfold. Instead, over a decade later, I’m still trying to make sense of people’s unpredictable reactions.

I heard about how sober people made amends long before I got sober. Somehow, the idea that alcoholics and addicts went around apologizing for their past misdeeds lodged itself in my psyche at a time when I had yet to say the Serenity Prayer.

That doesn’t mean I understood the concept. For instance, if you’d asked me then if apologizing and making amends were the same thing, I’d have sworn that they were. I had no experience, yet, of making things right with someone I’d wronged—let alone making things right in a way that might stop me repeating whatever it was I’d done in the first place.

By the time I got to my Ninth Step, I’d picked up a few things. Probably the most important one was that I didn’t have to play the victim anymore. My Fourth and Fifth steps had showed me that I had played a major part in all my resentments—a realization that I found liberating. Steps Six, Seven and Eight had gotten me ready to make my amends. And while I was certainly nervous about getting started on what I then thought of as my apology tour, I was also excited.

I was promised miracles and they came—but never how or when I expected them.

I figured I’d knock out the “easy” ones first: one to Lauren and another to Peter, both former party pals. In each case I’d done something gossipy and mean-spirited but not atrocious, so I figured these amends would be simple. These people weren’t, after all, family members who were likely to make the experience traumatizing, or exes whom I dreaded to contact at all. They were just people I’d once spent a lot of time around but didn’t really have anything in common with anymore. Easy, right?

I called Lauren first (this was in the days before Caller ID or the demise of landlines):

“Lauren? Hey, it’s Anna.”

Long pause.

“Hey, Anna.”

“So listen. I’m calling because—“

“Oh, God, don’t tell me this is one of those ‘amends’ type of calls. I just—”

“Please let me—”

“Look, I heard you’re sober and that’s great. But this just isn’t something I’m up for.”

Click.

I sat there listening to the dial tone. In all the amends scenarios I’d mentally concocted, having someone—let alone the first person I reached out to—not be willing to hear what I had to say had never occurred to me. I’d read in the Big Book that we had to be willing to go to people we feared might throw us out of their offices, but I’d never read anything about how to handle the people who wouldn’t even take the call to set up the meeting. Still, what could I do—call her back, tell her it was about something else and sneak an amends in? My sponsor told me to move on, so I did.

To Peter. Who, well, never called me back. I didn’t realize he wasn’t ever planning to call me back until a week or so after I’d left a voicemail, when our mutual friend told me. “He doesn’t like to revisit the past,” the friend explained. “He said you don’t need to apologize for anything.”

This wasn’t how I’d imagined it going. I’d heard other people share about how they’d suddenly find themselves running into the very person they’d been planning to make amends to that day. Why was the opposite happening to me?

But I moved on. I had to. And I continued to find the process nothing like I expected it to be.

In general, it seemed like the people I thought weren’t going to be amenable to even meeting up welcomed me warmly. Those I thought would forgive me right away, meanwhile, were dismissive or indifferent. But one thing remained predictable: The amends that I was so terrified to make that I shook with terror or sobs at the thought were always the most rewarding of all.

Take, for instance, the ex I’d never gotten over. I called him up one evening when I was about five years sober and told him how sorry I was for destroying our relationship, for every cruel thing I’d uttered and each horrible mistake I’d made when we were together. But rather than lay into me as I expected, he said he was glad to hear from me, that it helped him make sense of his past, that he was happy I was sober and doing well. But, he added, I was blaming myself too much; he’d played just as big a part in what had gone wrong between us as I had. The conversation was more honest, painful and beautiful than any we’d had the entire time we lived together. I hung up feeling about 20 pounds lighter. I was finally free of an idea I hadn’t even realized I’d been clinging to—that I’d been a monster, and he my innocent victim.

Then there was the time I met up with a friend I’d known since I was 12 but had fallen out with in my twenties. We went on a hike and I told her how sorry I was for the way I’d behaved the last time we’d spoken, five or so years earlier. It turned out she was in a 12-step program too—so she actually made amends to me right after I made them to her. By the time we got to the bottom of the canyon, we’d re-launched our friendship—on new, healthier terms. Over a decade later, we talk nearly every day.

I was promised miracles and they came—but never how or when I expected them.

Take my financial amends. The first debt that I owed was to my college roommate, for the time I’d borrowed her car in sophomore year and then acted surprised when I saw the dent. I explained to her that I’d actually crashed into something when drunk and lied to her, and that I wanted to reimburse her for the damages. But she wouldn’t hear of it.

For my next financial amends, I decided to just go ahead and send a check. It was to a girl I’d lived with when I first moved to New York after college, a girl who’d moved out of our crappy, railroad-style place without notice one Thanksgiving weekend when I was out of town. It was a shitty thing to do, of course. But it didn’t make it right for me to charge up the phone bill in her name as high as I could, and then not respond when she asked me to reimburse her. So I tracked down her address and mailed a check and a card, apologizing for the phone bill as well as for being—well, the kind of roommate who would inspire someone to move out over Thanksgiving weekend without notice.

She sent the check back, along with a note that said, essentially, that she was doing very well, that she had a husband, five kids and a thriving career as a chiropractor, and that if I felt so bad about my behavior, then I should donate the money to a good cause since she didn’t need my charity.

Glenn was a guy who’d lock my cats away when I was out and call the landlord when I had friends from AA over, saying that he was “scared for his life” because there were “homeless alcoholics” around.

Like I said, not what I expected. But even that one allowed me to live with a little more freedom.

Some amends haven’t involved contacting people at all. Glenn, a gay guy I’d lived with the second time I’d moved to New York, when I was about seven years sober, had started off cool as could be but slowly revealed himself to be crazy—a guy who’d lock my cats away when I was out and call the landlord when I had friends from AA over, saying that he was “scared for his life” because there were “homeless alcoholics” around. (To say I’ve had bad luck with New York roommates would be an understatement.)

Though I ended up moving out and getting away from him entirely, I found myself still resenting him months later. I had done plenty wrong in our relationship, but trying to make amends to him was something I couldn’t imagine—not when he’d done things to me that I couldn’t imagine getting over. I decided to make a “living amends” by trying to be kind and gracious in my life—the opposite of how I’d been toward him at the end. But that didn’t stop me from resenting him. So, at my sponsor’s suggestion, I committed to praying for him for 90 days—specifically for him to get everything he wanted and for me to have empathy for the fact that he’d been doing the best he could. I did it for those three months, never feeling any differently about him but staying committed to the process because my sponsor kept asking me about it. I thought it was silly: I never felt any differently about Glenn.

Until the day, months after I’d stopped praying for him, that I met a guy who asked me if I knew anyone great to set him up with and I found myself answering, without thinking, “Yes! I know this amazing guy named Glenn.”

Glenn! As in: the guy I hated. Had hated, apparently.

Those days and weeks and months of asking an entity I didn’t even understand to give Glenn what he wanted had apparently granted me the empathy to see that he only hurt like that because of the pain he was in himself. And this had relieved me of my resentment, without me even realizing. It was surreal. (And no, I didn’t set the two guys up—I had no interest in ever talking to Glenn again—but the space he’d been taking up my head was cleared.)

I still do things I need to make amends for. Sometimes I make them right away and sometimes not for a long time. But I’ve found that time works in surprising ways when it comes to these things. Consider, for instance, what happened with Peter—the guy who wouldn’t call me back when I first started making my amends. Years had passed—so many years that he’d forgotten I’d ever said or done anything hurtful to him—when I ran into him one evening outside the gym. He told me that he’d just gotten an offer to sell a book of poetry, then asked if I’d be willing to look over the contract the publisher was asking him to sign.

I said I’d be happy to, and we met up a few days later, when I looked over his contract and gave him the best advice I could. Then I told him how sorry I was about the hurtful thing I’d done so many years before. I still remember how shocked his bright blue eyes looked when they jumped from the contract pages to meet mine. Then they filled with tears. Turns out, this thing I’d done that was “just” gossipy and mean-spirited had actually been something I needed to make right. And the guy who didn’t like to “revisit the past,” who’d told a friend I didn’t have to apologize for anything, ended up accepting my apology lovingly, giving me one more opportunity to chip away at the guilt and shame I didn’t want to walk around with anymore. He just hadn’t been able to do it on my time schedule.

Lauren has never surfaced. But that’s not to say that she won’t.

Just How Addictive and Dangerous is Sugar?

August 7, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

Sugar Addiction?

Many surprising food products can contain high amounts of sugar. Cheese, salad dressings, soy milk, tomato sauce and canned soups are just a few examples. Most Americans have now heard the standard advice from nutritionists that excess sugar consumption can lead to obesity. But, what might not be clear is how to avoid sugar addiction. Sugar is a dangerously addictive substance and it is in almost everything we eat and drink.

The chemical makeup of sugar contains fructose. It’s a substance that actively interferes with our brain function and enables our addiction to sweet flavors. Sugar ingestion can activate the human brain’s “pleasure centers”. After the body digests a sugary food, these pleasure centers release large amounts of a chemical called “dopamine,” which is the same chemical responsible for sexual pleasure. However, the brain’s pleasure centers become desensitized with each use, so every time we consume sugar, the dopamine high decreases. This means that we have to consume more sugar in order achieve the same level of dopamine release and the feeling of happiness it triggers, which some refer to as a “sugar high.” This is the same neurological process that makes it difficult to quite using drugs like cocaine and heroine.

While it is true that addicts can become addicted to any number of different substances or behaviors, sugar is found throughout so many of our daily foods that it probably affects even those with borderline addictive personalities, people who have never used illegal substances but who have similar symptoms of withdrawal from a food such as ice cream that addicts have when they stop using opioids. However, sugar addiction may be even more difficult to cure because foods that contain it are cheap and readily available.

Sugar Addiction Problems

If you’ve ever craved a sugary treat because you knew it would significantly alter your mood, or if you’ve ever eaten more of a dessert than you had planned, it’s possible that you could be addicted to sugar.

Sugar addiction can cause a number of problems in the lives of its consumers. It can cause wild mood swings, for one. It can also be one of many factors that worsens chances of developing diabetes. As any dentist will also tell you, it is also particularly damaging to teeth. The idea that occasional sugary treats can be an innocent part of our diets is changing now that we understand more about how sugar consumption mimics the substance abuse of opiates.

Sugar goes by many different names. If you see the words “sucrose,” “lactose,” “glucose,” “dextrose,” “cane juice,” or various kinds of “syrups” (such as malt or brown rice), then you know that the food product contains a form of sugar. Even artificial sweeteners are not necessarily safe. Many studies now show that the use of such sugar substitutes actually increase one’s sugar addiction. There are many plans available to help people cut down on sugar consumption. The existence of so many different approaches to reducing sugar intake is a testament to its toxic and addictive nature. It’s an addiction that’s hidden in plain sight.

What are the Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism?

August 4, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism

Given the increasing opioid epidemic that’s currently plaguing the millennial generation, it’s important to remember the negative consequences of alcoholism. While opioid use often manifests with visible physical symptoms even in its early stages, alcoholism is called the “silent killer” because its effects are less obvious right away. However, the health problems associated with excess alcohol consumption are nonetheless just as deadly as any other addiction.

One of the most widespread consequences of even moderate alcohol consumption is related to the body’s cardiovascular system. Even people who limit drinking to periods of celebration with friend and family suffer from something doctors call “holiday heart,” where increased alcohol intake triggers heart palpitations and tightness of breath, mimicking the signs of a heart attack. These episodes of holiday heart are not without risk: some types of abnormal heart rhythms can lead to stroke or heart failure, if not treated. In alcoholics who drink to excess regularly, the stress on the body’s cardiovascular system is even more damaging and can lead to early heart disease and other health problems related to a weakened cardiovascular system.

Health Consequences

Of course, the health consequence most closely associated with alcoholism is cirrhosis of the liver. It is responsible with processing toxins in the blood stream. Any amount of alcohol consumed makes the liver work harder than normal. It creates conditions that often leave fatty deposits, cause liver inflammation, and create a build-up of scar tissue. So, liver becomes less capable of filtering out toxins in the blood, this failure can create stress on other organs.

The body breaks alcohol down into various components during the process of digestion. Some of those components, such as acetaldehyde, have been known to increase risks of cancer. Excessive drinking also leads an addict to use more tobacco products. The risks of cancer double to include those types of cancers inked to smoking, such as mouth and lung cancers.

The process of digesting alcohol can also cause issues in the stomach and intestinal tract. Alcoholics often avoid eating so that the high from drinking is more intense. But, drinking on an empty stomach can result in malnutrition and its many related health problems. Since alcohol dehydrates, drinkers often suffer from ulcers/hemorrhoids, which can be the source of internal bleeding, if left untreated.

Health Risks

One of the overlooked categories of health risks related to alcohol consumption are automobile accidents. Just one drink can dull a driver’s response time so that he or she is incapable of responding to changing traffic patterns in a timely fashion. Additional drinks can cause drivers to drive significantly over or under the speed limit and to swerve in his or her lane, increasing the chances for fatal accidents should they cross over into oncoming traffic. This is just one of the ways that drinking affects the brain negatively by interfering with motor coordination. Other ways is that it can cause sudden shifts in mood and behavior that damage interpersonal relationship, whether personally/professionally. Alcohol is a depressant and can exacerbate existing mental health issues.

Drinking temporarily affects motor coordination, but it can damage the alcoholic’s brain permanently. Heavy alcohol consumption causes memory loss and bring on other signs of dementia because it makes certain part brain atrophy.

While it’s true that the effects of alcohol on the body can vary due to a person’s weight, genetic makeup, gender, and level of fitness, the results of scientific findings are overwhelming in their consensus about the negative effects of alcohol on the body.

Is Alcoholism a Disability and Protected by Law?

August 4, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

The Disability Discrimination Act states that alcoholism is not included under its list of protected disabilities, however, courts in the U.S. and Canada have ruled on a case-by-case basis that alcoholism is a disability that is protected by law. This means that alcoholics maintain certain rights and privileges. For example, it would be legally questionable to fire an alcoholic employee for behavior related to their alcoholism. The government provides assistance to people suffering from alcoholism in the form of food stamps and subsidized housing. Certainly, there are generous interpretations to the law and even loopholes. For instance, even if a judge were to rule against protecting alcoholism as a disability, the conditions that result from this disease, such as depression or cirrhosis, may qualify for protection. But the bottom line is that major organizations, such as the ACLU and American Medical Association, view alcoholism as a disability.

There are two competing sets of recommendations at odds in laws regarding the workplace. At the same time that the Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers are responsible for making sure that a professional environment is devoid of illegal substances and their use, this same law states that workers who are recovering from addiction are entitled to protection. However, the process of recovery is almost never a straight line, and is often fraught with relapse. At what point is someone “recovering” versus a “user”?

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

Employers who might be considering firing an employee because of his or her excessive drinking need to take a few things into consideration, given that courts have returned rulings that view it as a protected disability. First, equal treatment for all employees. If a number of employees have drinking problems, then one or two cannot be selected for termination. This is difficult grey area because employers should document the difference between moderate to heavy drinking and an actual addiction. It’s extremely challenging in certain employment sectors, such as the restaurant industry, where alcohol consumption tends to be quite widespread. Second, the excessive drinking has to interfere with the performance of employee’s job and lessen the quality of their work. This can also prove to be challenging to distinguish and document.

Drug use is a bit more problematic of a category than alcoholism because of the illegal nature of those substances. It is clearly stated in the law that illegal drug use is not considered a disability, however, it is legal in the U.S. for anyone over the age of 21 to consume alcohol, so alcoholism, in not involving with illegal substances, is more readily treated as a disability in the workplace than any other addiction. Testing for illegal drug use is not a violation of protection for disabilities.

Recovering alcoholics who are not currently drinking are the clearest category protected under the disability act. Employers must provide reasonable accommodation of alcoholism as a disability. This means to offer the employee a special schedule in order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The official disability awards is based functional limitation caused by alcoholism.

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

How Does Addiction Affect Families?

August 1, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

You don’t necessarily have to be an addict in order for your drug and alcohol use to annoy members of your family or have a negative impact on your family’s dynamics. However, an addiction often forms around dysfunctional family behavior that can be aggravated by the addictive behavior.

Families in which parents are addicts have their own particular dysfunction. Instances are they will not able to their own children. Because of what they’ve witnessed as models for adult behavior, these children are at an increased chance of becoming addicts. Sometimes, as they mature, children of addicts may attempt to distance themselves from their parents’ compulsion. Only to find later on that they have abuse a different substance. This might happen, for instance, when a parent is an alcoholic. Even though the adult children of this parent don’t drink, they might develop an addiction to sex. Or might run up high debt because they are shopaholics.

Families in which children are addicts often have problems distinguishing the difference between helping versus enabling the addict. Addicted family members should be handled with tough love. Don’t give in to the temptation to try to make the situation better for the addict. Only he or she can make the decision to get clean. Families in this situation must first make the addict aware that their behavior is unacceptable and then they must seek to heal from the trauma that addiction has caused in their daily lives. Sometimes the financial devastation of addiction (if family members are stealing money from other family members or opening fraudulent credit in their name) can takes years to set straight. In cases of theft or violence, family members often have to make the tough decision whether to involve law enforcement.

Dealing with Addiction

Usually, these extreme steps might be the final push that an addict needs in order to seek help. Addiction causes damaged on the normal family bonding. An addicted family members cannot be trusted. They usually cannot hold onto a job and may often go missing over night or for multiple days. They inevitably betray people who love them and more prone to violence. Above all, they are not able to attend to small children.

In addition to the emotional impact, the cost of an addict’s attempts at recovery might ruin the family financially. While the cost of buying drugs or alcohol can be a drain on a family’s budget, which may dwindle due to job loss, recovery programs can often be very costly, too. Many families dealing with addiction have to consider whether they might be better off filing bankruptcy, which can lead to the loss of future opportunities, such as the purchase of a home or the ability of your children to attend college. An addiction doesn’t just affect the person suffering from it; it affects everyone around him or her.

It is normal for the dysfunction of addiction to trigger feelings of anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, and many others from those who love a person abusing drugs or alcohol. The bottom line is that families should be very careful when dealing with addiction. It can damage relationships for years.

How Does Addiction Start?

August 1, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

Many people think that addiction begins by use of a gateway drug. This is the notion that addictions are formed by first trying a seemingly innocuous recreational drug, like marijuana, which leads to seeking greater physical highs with harder substances. While that can often be true, what is perhaps a greater reality is that addictive personalities begin to form during the early phases of childhood development, within the emotional dynamic of a family.

Parents should let their children express their emotions properly and allow them to decide on their own. Otherwise, various issues may arise such as addictions to mood-altering substances. Whether children have home deprived of healthy emotions or one deprived of financial well-being, the outcome is often the same. The child will seek a placed to escape from the harsh realities of their existence. They often grow into impulsive adults who are comfortable taking risks. Who have high-pressure jobs whose stress seems to excuse their abuse of substances because they feel that they “deserve” it.

Moreover, an addiction doesn’t start only through early experimentation with drugs or because of family dysfunction. The genes often make a person becomes an addict. Science doesn’t quite yet understand this biological start to addiction. Not every child born to an addict becomes one. Yet, children raised by alcoholic parents have a much greater tendency toward substance abuse. Researchers have not yet quite worked out whether this is due to the example of behavior learned by the child in that environment or the biochemical makeup of a child born to an addict. Certainly, genetics is one factor that can trigger the start to an addiction.

Contributing Factors of Addiction

Beyond these elements of “nature and nurture,” addictions have a tendency to start with peer pressure as teens experiment with drugs and alcohol. Most of the statistics on when addictive behavior starts will cite ages before 19-years-old. Your addictive personality might already determined before you’ve made out of your teens. Some historical and cultural shifts are responsible for that. Situations like bullying have only increased in recent years, with the increased access that social media gives users to each other’s lives. Bullying is just another word for negative peer pressure. When you’re a teen, this kind of influence from friends can push you to try to demonstrate a kind of maturity or coolness which might require the excessive use of drugs or alcohol.

The effects of one’s younger years live on to haunt us. It is the way we are raised that often impacts the lifestyle we have as adults. This is true of addictions, as well. If you come from a family where someone has an addiction, you are likely to imitate that behavior unconsciously. However, it does not need to be anything so transparent in your upbringing as being raised by an alcoholic. Parents should encourage children to develop positive social skills in order to avoid the risk of developing addictive behaviors. Strong social connections are important to avoid the tendency of developing addiction.

This is not an invitation to blame the parents, siblings, or extended family for the start of an addict’s downward spiral, but the most successful recovery programs explore the larger family dynamic if they wish the patient to successfully recover. We need to understand how psychologically conditioned we are. In that way, we can break out of destructive patterns.

What Are Some Signs That You Might be an Alcoholic?

August 1, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

Many people, at some point or another, question how much alcohol they are consuming. Maybe a friend or loved one has suggested there might be a problem. A drunk person might do something wrong that he will regret eventually. Either way, it’s important to consider the distinction between healthy alcohol consumption and troubling, addictive behavior.

Culturally, you can drink to excess on important occasions to celebrate major life milestones. Most common occasions are graduation, getting married and work promotions. On these occasions, binge drinking is not really considered to be problematic in the same way that consuming that same amount of alcohol might be if done on a random Tuesday at lunch. Therefore, the context for drinking is important to consider when you are asking questions about whether you are becoming alcoholic.

An additional element of context involves what time of day you drink and whether you drink alone or with companions. Most happy hours begin in the late afternoon because drinking later in the day is considered more acceptable. If you’re drinking earlier in the day, especially drinking early in the morning, then you’re probably engaging in addictive behavior. Drinking alone could also indicate a level of dependence on alcohol that is not as easily suggested by drinking to facilitate social interactions with other people.

How to Assess Alcoholism

The idea of being social with others is a key indicator in another way. If your personality changes greatly while drinking, for example, if you become more belligerent or antagonistic when you drink, this could definitely be a sign that you have a problem involving alcohol. In this scenario, your alcohol use is not helping you to have a good time with others

The issue of quantity is also a determining factor in assessments of alcoholism. Alcoholics often cannot stop drinking once they have started and will continue their consumption well beyond that of the other people who are joining them. “Blacking out” is a potential sign of serious addiction. It happens when you’re drinking too much to the point where you have trouble remembering what you said or did.

The alcohol’s effects on your body are also a good way to gauge whether you might have a drinking problem. Waking up with muscle tremors could indicate that your body is going through withdrawal. This means that you’ve been drinking so much and so regularly that your body has developed a dependency on alcohol. Whether you can “handle your liquor” can also point to a problem with drinking because an alcoholic whose body is developing a dependency will need to drink more alcohol in order to achieve a drunken state.

Think about all of the various activities that fill your time. If you build your schedule around activities that involve alcohol consumption, then seek help from a therapist dedicated to recovery.

Overcoming Addiction: Can Alcoholism Ever be Cured?

July 28, 2017 by Paul Fuhr

If someone is to recover from an addiction, the first step is admitting that there is a problem. A mental health professional, such as a therapist, should be consulted. They can offer a tailored treatment plan for an addict. They will address the underlying issues that led to the addictive behavior in the first place. There are treatment centers for almost every kind of addiction: alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, work, gambling, Internet, and many others. You cannot really cure addiction and alcoholism. Addicts just learn to live with the understanding that they have an addiction. And that they learn various coping mechanisms to free themselves from its negative effects on their lives.

One of the first steps of recovering from addiction is to detox from the substance. Some people have had success by stopping “cold turkey” on their own. However, most addicts who need larger support from friends or an established medical facility found the method ineffective. Support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, seem to be the most effective long-term solution for recovery. Many of the successful treatments involve some form of therapy. In behavior therapy, addicts learn why they abuse substances and then learn more productive behaviors to cope with the feeling or events in life that trigger their addiction.

Treatment Options

There are many medicines in the market that claimed to cure addiction. One such product, Vivitrol, is a version of naltrexone, an opioid blocker, that takes away the “high” an addict feels by blocking the brain’s release of endorphins. Some alcoholics, including a group of Hollywood actors, claim that this method of curing alcoholism is extremely effective and are campaigning for its wider use in the United States. Few European countries have used it currently. Other similar medications are disulfiram and acamprosate.

Addiction or alcoholism has no real cure because a relapse into the addictive behavior can happen at any time. Even among the success stories of people who go through recovery programs for addiction, you often find stories about how the addiction just shifted to something less harmful, like an addiction to exercise or an obsession over “eating clean”. The 12-step programs can help someone stop their addiction to drugs or alcohol, but it can’t cure an addictive personality. It’s clear from the way these programs work that addiction doesn’t ever go away forever. Recovering alcoholics, for instance, can never have another drink of alcohol again. The same goes for those recovering from drug use. They have to be careful even to avoid overuse of prescription medications, which could impact their healthcare.

Even though there is no cure for drug addiction or alcoholism, it is worth seeking help if you think you might have a problem. It is helpful inorder to prevent the negative consequences you might be facing due to your dangerous behavior. Famous faces in recovery serve as reminders of how one can turn one’s life around through any of the various treatment options available. Even without a cure, it doesn’t mean addicts are ever without hope.

Bio

After nearly two decades of drinking and destroying just about every relationship in my life, I decided to get help. I didn’t know what to expect (and in some ways, I still don’t), but getting sober has been the most rewarding, fulfilling decision I’ve ever made. In the years since I entered treatment, secured an AA sponsor, and forged friendships in sobriety that rival all the others in my life, I feel like a completely different person. It’s as if I woke up in another person’s life. I’m a married father of three young children who lives in Columbus, Ohio, along with a bossy cat named Dr. No.

Most of my recovery has been spent writing about my experiences, and I’ve been fortunate to have my work picked up by The Fix, AfterParty Magazine, The Literary Review, and The Live Oak Review, among others. I want to help others find meaningful, lasting sobriety in any way that I can, which is part of the reason I’m so committed to Genius Recovery. More than that, though, I sincerely believe in the vision, aims and purpose of Genius Recovery. I’m as passionate about recovery as I am about discovering levels to my life that I didn’t know existed. After all, addiction recovery is about hope as much as it is about possibility. Through my writing, I hope to guide others to discover what’s possible for them, too.

– Paul

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