Anyone who has worked in a workplace with a “good daddy/mommy” or a “bad daddy/mommy” knows this experience also. I have trouble with rage addicts because I grew up with a father addicted to rage–he was a rageaholic. So I have to keep a close check on my codependency around them as I have a basic desire to kick them in the behind–in a ladylike way, of course. But judgment hurts me as well as the other so I try to remember to pray for tolerance when in the company of someone who wants to control me with his/her anger.

The following sites have good references to the ACOA characteristics. Don’t be surprised if you identify with a few of them.

(1) Codependents Anonymous is the coda site. This site includes a great list of characteristics centering around denial (“perceive myself as being completely unselfish and dedicated to the well being of others”), low self esteem pattern (“I do not ask others to meet my needs or desires”), compliance (“I am extremely loyal, remaining in harmful situations too long) and control (“I have to be “needed” in order to have a relationship with others.

(2) Mental Health Issues includes this:” There are identifiable core issues that ACOA’s experience. Control is one such issue. The fear of loss of control is a dominant theme in their lives. Control dominates the interactions of an ACOA with themselves as well as the people in their lives. Fear of loss of control, whether it be over one’s emotions, thoughts, feelings, will, actions, or relationships is pervasive. ACOA’s rely upon defenses mechanisms such as denial, suppression in order to control their internal world of thoughts and feelings as well as the outward manifestation of those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors”.

(3) The Dr. Janet Woititz site has resources including a video for ACOA. The site refers visitors to AA Family Meetings. The 13 characteristics are listed on Dr. Jan’s site.

A current blog post about why some ACOA’s thrive in the addiction and the characteristics they learned from being in the addiction.  Great article and I recognized why creativity has been my salvation.

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The following excerpts are from the blogs I read in my Google Reader (the world’s best RSS reader).

1.  On My Mind (Christine Stapleton): “Depression, Codependency and My Cape”:

“I am codependent. I do not know where I stop and you begin. Your problems are mine. I will rescue you. I will say “Yes” when I really want to say “No.” I will carry ALL your baggage. I will ping-pong between being a martyr and a field marshall. I will get so caught up in you that I forget about me. I am enmeshed. I have no identity without you and your problems.”

“This is my codependency. It is the fuel for my depression and alcoholism. I believe it will kill me before my depression and/or alcoholism. I resent you for getting yourself into these jams. I resent myself for getting myself worked up about you getting yourself into your jams.”

“If you are an alcoholic, like me, codependency is like a bad, itchy rash on your trigger finger. It gives you a reason to drink for someone, at someone and to someone – even yourself.”

“My codependency is so crippling that I went to treatment for it after my last major depression. It helped and I am better. At least now I recognize when I am in the throes of a codependent crisis – which actually kind of makes it more frustrating because I still don’t know what to do.”

2.  I’m Just F.I.N.E.-Recovery in Al-Anon: “Distorted thinking”:

“I think that co-dependency is something that starts at a very young age.  It probably starts with repression of feelings in which a child has to “walk on egg shells” around a dysfunctional family member.  For me, that was my dad.  My mother covered up and denied there was anything wrong. So there was really not much honesty in feelings or trust within the family.  Everything seemed to be “swept under the rug.”

“Consequently, the stress mounts and the child learns to be anxious.  And along with the stress and anxiety, some unhealthy ways of survival are learned.  One of those ways to survive is to deny one’s own feelings.  So instead of basing self-worth on my own feelings and actions, I began to base my self-worth on the opinions, needs, and moods of the person I wanted to please.  In my case, it was my father.”

3. A Room of Mama’s Own: “What is Codependence?”

“But codependence (or codependency) is harder to define and to recognize. After all, codependents can seem, to themselves and others, like hapless victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or they can be perceived (especially by the codependent) as doing good work rather than harm, because the harm they are doing is largely to themselves. But if addiction is an unhealthy attempt to escape trauma, codependence is an unhealthy attempt at damage control.’

“At its heart, codependence is a distorted way of seeing oneself and one’s relationship to the world, which results in unhealthy (sometimes self-destructive) behaviors in relation to other people. Codependence is viewing the world in a fun house mirror and reacting as if you had a huge head and the people around you had huge asses, or vice versa. Codependents want to put the world right, but can’t because they are reacting to a distortion.”

“Generally, codependent beliefs and responses are the result of growing up in a dysfunctional family where at least one member had a (usually unacknowledged, active and untreated) addiction or mental illness. Neglect, abandonment or verbal, emotional, physical or sexual abuse may have been present as well. This background skews the codependent’s sense of “normal.”

“Codependence can span a wide variety of behaviors: from highly controlling and demanding of others to overly compliant and lacking in assertiveness, from extremely self-reliant to extremely needy, from distrustful and fearful of intimacy to naive and overly trusting, and sometimes a mixture of all of the above. Someone who is codependent may seem like “the nicest, most easygoing person ever” or “the biggest control freak ever.” (Personally, I’m a little bit of both.)”

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By flatworldsedge

“The most important words in midlife are—Let Go.  Let it happen to you.  Let it happen to your partner. Let the feelings.  Let the changes…You are moving out of roles and into the self…It would be surprising if we didn’t experience some pain as we leave the familiarity of one adult stage for the uncertain!ty of the next.  But the willingness to move through each passage is equivalent to the willingness to live abundantly.  If we don’t change; we don’t grow.  If we don’t grow, we are not really living.”               Gail Sheehy

1.  I’m Just F.I.N.E.–Recovery in Al-Anon: “Distorted thinking”:

“I seem to be posting a lot of heavy stuff this week.  I do plan to lighten up for the weekend. Yesterday’s post brought about some good comments.  I want to address one by Mary LA who wrote: “But what about the distorted thinking and voice of the codependent who is obsessed with that alcoholism? That makes me equally chilled. Those who don’t want the alcoholic/addict to get better.”

“I think that co-dependency is something that starts at a very young age.  It probably starts with repression of feelings in which a child has to “walk on egg shells” around a dysfunctional family member.  For me, that was my dad.  My mother covered up and denied there was anything wrong. So there was really not much honesty in feelings or trust within the family.  Everything seemed to be “swept under the rug.”

“Consequently, the stress mounts and the child learns to be anxious.  And along with the stress and anxiety, some unhealthy ways of survival are learned.  One of those ways to survive is to deny one’s own feelings.  So instead of basing self-worth on my own feelings and actions, I began to base my self-worth on the opinions, needs, and moods of the person I wanted to please.  In my case, it was my father.”

“As Mary noted in her comment, the co-dependent person may actually feel more depressed and unhappy once the alcoholic is sober.  I think here of Lois who was so angry that Bill W. was attending AA meetings. She finally threw her shoe at him in a fit of rage and yelled, “Damn your old meetings.”

“This type of crazy thinking, fueled by anger, was what got me into Al-Anon.  I knew that I was angry, empty, worn out, and emotionally bankrupt.  I was using very unhealthy thinking to relate to other people.”

2.  Through an Al-Anon Filter: “Two Tiny Steps Forward, One Giant Step Back”

“My sober-for-years-but-not-in-recovery-for-long alcoholic, it seems like the minute I give them any encouragement or support, they take it like a “get out of jail free” card, and start to treat me like crap again. How do I give any positive feedback, when they just use it against me?”

“Oh, have I been in this writer’s place – and it was a mystifying landscape through which to travel. One of my alcoholics is just this way, and I have had to learn that any support or encouragement I give has to be non-personal. If I put anything of myself into it, this person will then see me as vulnerable, and go on the attack. When I’m around this alcoholic, I feel as I might were a tiger in the room with me, waiting for the slightest sign of weakness, always ready to spring. That tiger never sleeps.”

“If this person says, “I have been trying harder,” and I reply, “Yes, I’ve noticed that and I’m very grateful, and you are a good person…” I’ve just bought myself some mistreatment at their hands, because they see that the way a tiger might see me strapping some steaks to myself, and then walking back and forth an inch from its muzzle.”

“Sober is not recovery. Sober is sober, and while I can be grateful for the sobriety, if I see it and recovery as all of a piece/the same thing, I’m going to suffer for that misconception.”

“With this alcoholic, when they say “I have been trying harder,” I have to reply with something along the lines of: “That’s great; working your program will benefit you and those around you,” and leave it at that. I have to keep myself and what I think, completely off the table. They will often try to put me back onto the table with questions like, “You’ve noticed, right, you’ve noticed I’ve been trying harder?”

3. Suicidal no more: “The Weight of the World  (Codependency) and Being Lost”:

“A lot has been going on with my family lately. There is a lot of stress involved. I have this problem: I take on the world’s problems and worry about them incessantly. I have done this my entire life. I was the first child and the first grandchild in my family. They say I always told the younger kids what to do. Once when I was four years old, someone hollered down the basement of a relative’s home and said, “Is anyone down there watching the kids?”. I said, “I am!! Don’t worry!”. And so it began.”

“People don’t want my help all the time, or my advice. But some people do tell me a lot about their problems, and I feel that I need to try to help somehow. It is, in certain occasions, totally useless to do this. In other situations, I do help people in a tangible way. But it’s the thought process that is a problem. It is the amount of time I spend focusing on other people’s problems that is dysfunctional. I’ve been getting sick to my stomach for months worrying about a particular person; my anxiety has been through the roof. I can’t stop worrying, and the worrying eats away at me, makes me miserable, distracts me from the things I need to do to live my own life, and doesn’t change the other person’s situation very much in the long run anyway.”

“One of the things I like about Al-Anon is the idea that you detach with love. That you can’t cure someone’s drinking problem (or other problems), and you didn’t cause the problem, and that’s just how it is. There are a lot of books out there about codependency, and I have looked through some of them, and found that I am described there quite well. I’m not totally codependent, but I have the signs of it. I feel that my family’s well-being is my responsibility, deep-down, and the thing is, my family is never doing well. My family is always caught up in financial problems, mental health problems, drinking problems, life management problems, anger problems, etc. It seems sometimes, that they are never just, plain happy. And neither am I. I’m content sometimes, but I don’t feel much happiness – or, at least not for very long. If this stress was removed from my life, if I didn’t constantly take on the woes of the world, then perhaps there would be space in my life for true happiness.”

Codependency means being part or dependent on someone else for our emotional completion. Being reared in a home with frequent emotional strife means being reared with emotional healing issues.

At some level we have each experienced feelings of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, having boundaries, trouble standing up for ourselves or feeling shameful because of others’ actions. We may have learned these emotional choices in our family of origin.

Feelings are our choice. We can choose positive emotional choices.

Onion House has written the following about ACOA characteristics:
“The problem is that we come to feel isolated, uneasy with other people, and especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process. All the same, we would mistake any personal criticism as a threat.”

“We either become alcoholics ourselves or married them or both. Failing that, we found another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment”.

“We lived life from the standpoint of victim. Having an over-developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We somehow got guilt feelings when we stood up for ourselves rather than giving in to others. Thus, we became reactors, rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.”

This is also the classic definition for codependency–the common thread in addiction. Children in troubled homes learn that they aren’t as important as continuing the pretend picture of the family. Actually the family is in an ever-increasing cover-up which continues to eat up most of the family energy.

I recently met a classmate from high school–we graduated in 1958–and I was sharing some of my growing up experiences. She said that it was hard for her to believe what I remembered about my core family as she viewed us as the perfect All-American family. I guess we were better at the cover-up than I thought. I remember feeling so guilty as I cried on the way to school that I couldn’t save my mother from the arguments my parents had. It never entered my mind to wonder why she couldn’t save herself.

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I don’t do book reviews. Instead, I give the book title, the author, the ISBN number and a link to Amazon to buy it. I also include excerpts from the book chosen so that a reader can decide if this book is a good match for him/her.

All of the books in the Changemaker Library are at Books to Help You Become Stress Free.

Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life

Gregg Levoy

ISBN 0-609-80370-0

Amazon link

From the introduction:

“In many traditions, calls—in the form of sounds—precede prayer, rites of initation, spiritual healings, and major life events. The purpose of calls is to summon adherents away from their daily grinds to a new level of awareness, into a sacred frame of mind, into communication with that which is bigger than themselves. The calls may come from bull-roarers, trumpets, rattles, wooden clackers, songs, and bells.”

(Calls may also be “still messages and/or thoughts, songs, etc.)

“Primarily this force announces the need for change, and the response for which calls is an awakening of some kind. A call is only a monologue. A return call, a response, creates a dialogue. Our own unfolding requires that we be in constant dialogue with whatever is calling us. The call and one’s reponse to it are also a central metaphor for the spiritual life.”

“They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school, leave or start a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in anentirely new way; calls toward whatever we’ve dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.”

“Saying yes to the calls tend to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows that your life won’t make sense without.”

“We find that we must act on this imperative despite temptations—to back down and run for cover—that will divide even the most grimly resolve against themselves. We must persist with the sort of hope about which playwright and former Czechoslavakian president Vaclav Havel spoke when he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

The main body of the book is divided into 5 sections:

1) Part 1 The call to attention

2) Part 2 Receiving calls

3) Part 3 Invoking calls

4) Part 4 Saying no to calls

5) Part 5 Saying yes to calls

An excerpt from Saying Yes to Calls:

“Much of the pain associated with callings comes from avoiding them, from not surrendering to them. However much sacrifice may be involved, much of the pain we feel in surrendering to callings actually comes from our anticipation of the pain and not from the actual capitulation. Once we do surrender, we often feel a sense of great relief, and just as often we are bewildered about why we didn’t do it years ago.”

“We mistakenly equate surrender with defeat and sacrifice with annihilation. We bring to our renunciations the same oanic and anxiety—“Oh God, I can’t give that up”—that we often bring to our deliberations about intimacy, the fears of beng devoured and overpowered, of giving our lives away. Granted, parts of us are broken into smithereens in the process of following our calls and experience real compromise and real suffering, but this is not defeat any more than a flower suffers defeat by going to seed. Futhermore, say theologian Frederich Buechner, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarely fill a cup.”

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My online tracker is FatSecret.

Email me at changemaker.kathy@gmail.com. if you have any tips. I need all the help I can get–only free tips. please.

How many calories do you eat each day to maintain your current weight? (Use this link to determine the calories) http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=12678

How out-of-shape are you? Use these links to measure your body fat– BMI measures your body mass index:

http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.html

How many calories do you need to omit in order to lose weight? Calculate the daily calorie deficit required to reach goal weight:

http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_loss.html

What is the satiety index?

http://www.acu-cell.com/gi.html http://www.vegetariantimes.com/document/563

http://www.nutritiondata.com/topics/glycemic-index#satiety

http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm

All about cravings:

Chart that tells you what your body needs when you have specific cravings and gives you healthy food choices for each craving:

http://www.naturopathyworks.com/pages/cravings.php

Emergency appetite control foods:

http://www.newstarget.com/003550.html

0Hunger management for “boomers”:

http://www.aarpmagazine.org/food/Articles/19_ways_to_fight_food_cravings_and_win_the_war_on.html

How to conquer cravings:

http://www.fitfaq.com/conquer-cravings.html

How to reduce food cravings:

http://www.annecollins.com/weight-loss/food- cravings.htm

Beat late-night food cravings:

http://www.fitfaq.com/beat-food-cravings.html

Why we crave:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20030819-000001.html

Five tips to stop food cravings for easy weight loss:

http://www.phtimes.org/Food-and-Drink/five-tips-to-stop-food-cravings-for-easy-weight-loss.html

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Desert Leader by Hamed Saber

“A veritable gold mine of possibilities is hidden within each of us-aptitudes, attitudes, characteristics, and traits that once may have been conscious, but for some reason slipped away or were pushed away into our unconscious. In addition, there is great potential within each of us that has never had the opportunity to see the light of day. William A. Miller

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; bold­ness has genius, power, and magic in it.”   Johann Goethe

From the Changemaker Library, we recommend:

Keep Your Paycheck, Live Your Passion

Erika Welz Prafder and Carole Sovocool

ISBN 1-59337-264-7

Buy this book

According to the authors: “First of all, if you don’t believe in yourself, your talent, your dreams, then forget about it. The person who believes has no questions. The person who doesn’t believe has no answers. The alternative to not keeping your creativity alive is to have your soul slowly disintegrate with time. It may take a fair amount of soul searching to identify the obstacles that prevent you from realizing your dreams. Some people coast through life with one finger on the snooze button. It takes less work to suppress your innermost creative aspirations and dreams than it does to respond to a wake-up call from your heart.”

Read more of the review here.

I keep several books in my “textbooks for my life” group. I keep these separate and available and use them as textbooks. One of them is Callings: Finding and Following and Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy. Listening to callings for a life direction takes much patience and faith.

In Callings, Levoy relates: “Just as in monastic life, where there are periods of being a candidate and a novitiate before taking vows, so in life our calls are also tested. We are tempted away and distracted; we hear the siren song of old habits and addictions; we feel pure laziness and amnesia; we discover the cold necessities of life.”

“Joseph Campbell called this part of the heroic journey “the road of trials” which is between The Epiphany and The Grind, between the heart flushed with heroic song and the heart with its human frailties. On this road, we answer the elemental question of whether our commitments are real or imagined.

The ordeals on this endless road, the dragons that have to be slain over and over again, serve to test us, like the Sphinx who confronted Oedipus before he could continue his journey. They teach us humility and a sense of proper perspective, and they help reveal our hidden powers.”

One of my issues after years of practice in listening to the God of my understanding has been accepting larger gifts than I “deserve”. Who decides what I “deserve”? What if I may receive the desires of my heart?

According to Brian Mahan in his book, Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition, “vocation speaks of a gracious discovery of a kind of interior consonance between our deepest desires and hopes and our unique gifts, as they summoned forth by the needs of others and realized in response to that summons.”

“That’s what’s so enticing about the idea of vocation: in embracing one’s vocation, the draining internal opposition between compassion and personal ambition is, at least in principle, overcome.

As Frederick Buechner says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

In continuing about callings, I am using another book from my “textbooks for my life” group of books, StandLikeMountain, Flow Like Water, by Brain Luke Seaward. He writes: “At some point in life, each individual is beckoned by the call of his or her soul to fully awaken spiritually. It may be curiosity, an intuitive inclination or a full-blown crisis. My friend Jane is one of many people who, as Kubler-Ross would say, has entered into her spiritual quarter—someone who has begun to question the meaning of life and her relationship to the universe.”

“Some people walk gracefully into this stage, some stumble, still others immerse themselves. Since the territory is unfamiliar, however, the majority of people refuse to budge, thus denying any pursuit of the spiritual aspect of their lives.”

Having been born in 1940, when I had my Moment of Truth, I couldn’t keep quiet about what had happened to me. Even in twelve-step programs, talking about radical conversions was very suspect. The skepticism was many things. One of these fears was to be expected—in that every struggling addict would like to be “saved” and the ordeal of recovery could be done.

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, I always loved the passage about some of us looking for the easier, softer way. Before recovery, every change I came to, I sought the easier, softer way. But none of those choices ever ended up to be the best choices. The best choices were the ones I came to after I had exhausted all other routes. They could easily be labeled, “Letting go and letting God.”

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“Try to forget yourself in the service of others. For when we think too much of ourselves and our own interests we easily become despondent. But when we work for others, our efforts return to bless us.”     Sidney Powell

Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life

Gregg Levoy

ISBN 0-609-80370-0

Amazon link

Service may come as a result of the callings that we may listen to and may make as the central theme of our life. Gregg Levoy has written about callings and includes this:

“Primarily this force announces the need for change, and the response for which calls is an awakening of some kind. A call is only a monologue. A return call, a response, creates a dialogue. Our own unfolding requires that we be in constant dialogue with whatever is calling us. The call and one’s response to it are also a central metaphor for the spiritual life.”

“They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school leave or start a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls toward whatever we’ve dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.”

“Saying yes to the calls tend to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows that your life won’t make sense without.”

More links to continue readings about callings:

Five Blind Spots That Keep you From Seeing Your True Calling

Your Career is Not Luck

Can You Differentiate a Craving from a Calling?

The Masks of God

What if God Asked You to Take a Pay Cut?

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ACOA: Guess what normal is; Just Be Real; Understanding My Son

Addiction Recovery Help: Nicole Wick; The Spiritual River; Barefoot Bob’s Collection of Writings

Al Anon:Chic Mama; From New Ultecht to Figurea Avenue; I’m Just F.I.N.E–Recovery in Al-Anon; Through an Al-Anon Filter

Alcohol Self-Help News

Artists in recovery: Attitude of Gratitude

Autism: A Room of Mamas Own, Stony River

B

Bipolar recovery:Sophie in the Moonlight

Books: http://lynnes.wordpress.com/

C

Child abuse: Child Abuse Survivor; Writing

Christian journey: Blessed…is she who believed; Covered in Dust; Glass House Ministries; Highway 41: Life in the Fast Lane

Christian living sober: sobernuggets; This Sober Life

Codependency: Sophie in the Moonlight

Committed fathers: The Rabbit Room

Cooking: Find Your Balance; Irish Gumbo; Mama Hollioni’s Kitchen

Creativity: 1 door away from heaven

D

Depression: Beyond Blue; Rusin Roundup; This Sober Life

Domestic abuse: This Sober Life

Dual Addicted: Enchanted Oak

E

Emotions: Emotions Anonymous

F

Faith: A Churchless Faith

Food addiction recovery: Actively Arielle: A Voice With a Commitment; Sassle! My Journey to a Healthier Life!

G

H

I

Intervention-The Partnership at Drugfree.Org

J

K

L

Healthy living: Find Your Balance

Living in the positive: AHA Moments; Beyond Blue

Living with disability: So about what I said…

LMTs in recovery: Jill Java and the Garden of Eden

Longer term sobriety: Being Sober; The Rapacious Creditor

M

Mind mapping: I Q Matrix; Idea Mapping; Mind Mapping & Creative Thinking; Mind Map Inspiration; Mind Mapping Blog; The Mindmapping Software Blog

Mobile devices: JK On the Run

Mothers in sobriety: A Passion for Jaywalking; Complications of a Perfect Life; My Recovery; Queens World; Stay-at-home-mayhem

Mysticism: The Website of Unknowing

N

O

P

Parents of addicts: An Addict in Our Son’s Bedroom; Mother of a Drug Addict; Intervene

Poetry: Yesterday, Today and Forever

Q

R

On the recovery journey: Elegant Blessings; Finding My Wings in Life; He Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying; In Spite of My Crazy Self; Three Routes

Recovery chef; Adventures of One Sober Woman

Recovering in California: Another Sober Alcoholic; Just a Closer Way With Thee; My Own Road; Prayer Girl

Recovering in Canada: A Song Not Scored for Breathing; Stay-at-home-mayhem

Recovering in Illinois: Wait. What?

Recovering in Texas: higher powered

Recovery support communities: The Junkies’ Wives Club; The Second Road; The Sober Village

Reparenting: Guess what normal is; The Junkies’ Wives Club; Way Station One

S

Sexual abuse: Come Into My Closet; Victory Over Sexual Abuse; Writing

Sexual addiction recovery: A Room of Mamas Own; Love in the Time of Addiction; Making My Peace; Woman. Anonymous7

Sober blogs directory: Sober Blogs

Students in recovery: Another Real Alcoholic

T

12 step help: Recovery Archive; Step12.com; Step12.com

U

V

W

Working in recovery: Stop. Drop. Recover.; The Spiritual River

Writers in sobriety: Letting Go; Stay-at-home-mayhem

Writing: Dooce; Letting Go; Stony River

Writing help: Pictures, Poetry and Prose; The One-Minute Writer; Click Here to Visit Top 100 Sober N Clean Blogs

X

Y

Z

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