When someone obtains peace and serenity, this shines a bright spotlight on others’ own unhappiness making their discomfort even more apparent.

Claim all that is good and powerful in life and make it your own!

Rest, Recreated, Refreshed and Refuel!

To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of...

In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to:break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing… with no will of their...

The winds of tribulation blow out some men’s candles of commitment.(Maxwell) Our job in recovery is to protect our candle from those winds.

Always know there are friends somewhere rooting for you. There are people you don’t know, always praying for you and lifting you before God. – Jenee, from “To the Survivors”.

We, as a society, have arbitrarily differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable drug addictions.

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name...

I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in...

Just because you may live your life in recovery, surely doesn’t mean the PARTY IS OVER, Nope!, it just means you can remember what you DID LAST NIGHT!”.LOL

forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring...

Swirling in a squirrel cage of perpetual motion, the head-committee meets, argues, votes out the guidance available from emotions, and successfully keeps serenity at bay and chaos close at hand.

Somewhere in the distance I hear the bucket clatter to the floor. I plunge the knife into his head, again and again. His arms lash out blindly, getting in the way. Blood mixes with water...

Rather than assuming weakness or defectiveness, we should acknowledge that getting through depression requires considerable strength. Rather than assuming permanent debility, we should recognize that some depressions are followed by thriving.

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible...

Anorexia cannot be cured by treating the physical symptoms alone; it is the mind which must be treated.

I can always recognize the fellow wounded.

My brother trolled recovery and support groups, searching for women with dependency issues, the way I frequented bookstores with the hope of finding a well-adjusted, intelligent woman. Between us, his record was more stellar, his...

What hell condemned, let heaven now heal.

We can’t calm waves, but we can steer the ship.

status quo” on the other, they are often in balance. Change is hard. We tend to accept our condition and no matter how painful, we will not change until the balancing scale is tipped –...

fix it” for the other person, the connection of acceptance is snapped and the sender and receiver miss an opportunity for understanding.

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under...

Life cracks us into unrecognizable shards of former incarnations. Slivers of our hurt and our pain and our shame nestles next to fragments of our truth, our divinity, our fierce reclamation of power.It is this...

If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details...

Only love can neutralize shame.

There is no greater gift than realizing the constant presence of the Divine and His Absolute Power to create and restore all things.

No, this barrier of scar tissue is to keep you out.

Recovery itself is a very un-glamorous daily process of being willing to fall down again, to break again, to cry again, to get up and try yet again until ‘success’ manifests as ever-greater sustained healing.

Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word ‘new’ lose it’s luster? Now the past is supposed to hold...

Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn’t end there.

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen...

Why would God create a defective product? Why would a God who gave me free will require any certain belief? Why would a God powerful enough to create the universe need me to justify His...

Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.

Take what is good from the pastand carve a new path.

Sex had nothing to do with feeling good, everything to do with superficialities, and was always accompanied by a masochistic agenda to feel anything but dead inside.

Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we...

Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of...

When the sum of our faith and humility is sufficient, it reaches a type of spiritual critical mass and hope is fostered and grows. A willing heart emerges which generates the ability for us to...

Myth: Feeding the banking sector gobs of welfare cash will bring about a recovery. Fact: Our leaders are only dedicated to preserving power

Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and...

BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people...

Deep down inside, each of us knows what our truths are. It is forgivable to lose them…It is unforgivable not to reclaim them.

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way,...

You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This...

It’s crazy, how similar we are. Here’s both of us, working through our stuff, trying to make something positive out of something really bad.

One reason we’re not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.