When the Twelve Steps were first formulated in the 1930s, its founders didn’t have the understanding of many aspects of alcoholism and the human condition that we have today. Nevertheless, they did have a very accurate and intimately personal understanding of the experience of alcoholism, its destructive progression, and a nascent grasp on a very […]
“When you feel in yourself the addictive attraction of alcohol, remember these words: You stand between the two worlds of your lesser self and your full self. Your lesser self is tempting and powerful because it is not as responsible, not as loving, and not as disciplined, so it calls you. The other part of […]
I recently came to the realization that, for a good portion of the last few years, I’ve been steadfast in the activity of ‘not-dying’ as opposed to truly ‘living’. In the fall of 2022, I made a decision to not end my life and instead reached out for help. At the time, I had been […]
One of my goals here is to sift through traditional Twelve Step recovery concepts and make the language and ideas more palatable for agnostics, free-thinkers, atheists, and non-believers who, like me, are in recovery from addiction. I also work stuff out in my mind as I write, with my first draft often becoming my published […]
Making amends is about owning-up for bad behaviour that hurt someone else. It’s about looking them right between the eyes and acknowledging “I did exactly this, and you bore the cost of my wrongdoing.” In the Secular Twelve Steps, making amends is Step Nine, the final stop along the journey of ‘cleaning-up the wreckage of […]
I haven’t felt the urge to post here in almost a month. I have been writing, nevertheless, focused on working the Secular Twelve Steps with my sponsor. I’ve also been regularly attending peer-support meetings, getting out of my cocoon and rejoining the human race. The purpose of this post is to talk about how I […]
Magical thinking is harmless unless it becomes a liability. Dreaming of meeting that special person gives me hope, but imagining the person I just met at the coffee shop is my soulmate because she likes the same obscure bands as me is problematic. Yes, it means I met someone with whom I share an interest. […]
I am sharing what I have learned about my own relapse, a nine-year meandering in the desert that ended last April when I returned to the 12-step program and its peer-support meetings. Over the past five months, I’ve spent many hours in deep deliberation, trying to understand why I left recovery in 2014. It is […]
Love yourself, they say. But what if we haven’t a clue about healthy love actually is? On top of that, ask any ten people to define love and you’ll get ten different responses back. Love is a lot like ‘spirituality’: when we try to define love, we don’t find its limits but instead our own. […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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