Help for Families | Secondhand Drinking | Codependency
When Your Child Struggles With Addiction | Author Linda Dahl’s New Novel Offers Help and Hope
When your child struggles with addiction, which is now understood to be a chronic, often relapsing brain disease, the world flips and turns in unimaginable ways. Days and nights become excruciating as a parent’s every attempt to help, stop, hold onto, and do anything and everything to save their child seems to slam into another wall,…
Read MoreExcessive Alcohol Use Kills 88,000 Americans Annually | What Can WE Do to Stop This?
Excessive alcohol use, either in the form of binge drinking or heavy drinking, was responsible for an average of 88,000 deaths annually in the United States from 2006 – 2010. (Source: CDC>Excessive Drinking, accessed 8/11/17) This is equal to 241 deaths per day. In view of these statistics, which I find staggering, as is the fact…
Read MoreOvercoming Addiction | Linda Dahl
Overcoming addiction, which is now understood to be a chronic, often relapsing brain disease, can be gut-wrenchingly hard. And that’s so often because of the secrecy, misinformation and shame that surrounds this particular disease as a result of common beliefs that it’s a choice or moral failing or as simple as “just stop.” It’s not.…
Read More15 Minutes Can Change Your Life
Change [including how one deals with a loved one’s addiction or with a loved one deeply affected by secondhand drinking (aka codependency)] begins in the mind. As such, a person can use their mind to change their lives. To help readers better understand this concept, Darlene Lancer, JD, MFT, shares the following post. To read her…
Read MoreUntreated ACEs Can Make Addiction Recovery Difficult
Compare the changes in the Smart Phone of 2007 to the Smart Phone of today, 2017. Radical, revolutionary, life-changing, who could have imagined? The superlatives to describe this comparison are endless. Those same superlatives can be applied to the changes in our understanding of the human brain; changes that explain how ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)…
Read MoreI Could Have Developed Alcoholism | I Developed Bulimia Instead
I still look back with great sadness on the 11 years I spent binging and purging (bulimia) and the year I spent “dieting” (anorexia) — my lost years from ages 16-28. To the person whose never been bulimic, it’s impossible to understand why someone would “choose” to eat huge quantities of food and then throw…
Read MoreFinding Happiness After Addiction – Trevor McDonald
There is a great deal of confusion, stigma, shame and discrimination surrounding addiction and addiction treatment and recovery. Yet those who have the chronic, often relapsing brain disease of addiction and are in recovery live healthy, productive, engaged lives — the same kinds of lives as people who do not have this disease. But all…
Read MoreI Hate You and I Love You – Daughter of an Alcoholic
Helping children and adults understand the secondhand drinking (SHD) impacts a child experiences when growing up with a parent’s alcoholism* is essential to helping a child (or an adult child) heal from the SHD-related ACEs s/he likely experienced. Secondhand Drinking (SHD) refers to the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others. Drinking behaviors include verbal,…
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