Our Guest Bloger today is Kelly Miller. Kelly's specialty as a counselor is helping parents who are having to deal with teenage alcohol and drug abuse.

RELAPSE AMONG TEENAGERS

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Men Leave Treatment Because of Their Codependency!

     I am writing to propose some level of cooperation between professionals writing about and treating codependency and the professionals staffs of treatment centers in order to improve retention and ultimately long-term recovery for clients by providing some missing pieces for families whose lives are being ravaged by the co morbid diseases of addiction and codependency. Here is a quote taken directly from the back cover of our book written by Dr. Joseph Moons, C.P., Retreat Director, Holy Name Retreat Center , Houston, Texas;

“There is a need for this book for codependent men. In my association with the many men and women who attend 12-step retreats at Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center, the codependent men have the greatest fear and the least knowledge or understanding of their relationship with the addicted person in their life.  As the man in the family, they are supposed to have the answers and they don’t. This book begins to give some answers.”

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Stop Helping Them To Death!

     Nothing changes until something changes. If one member of the family changes, that changes the whole family dynamic. As a practicing codependent you can make the changes necessary to allow the other (s) in your family suffering from addiction. The way you do this is; allow them to suffer!

     Stop the little things first. Stop picking up after them. Stop preparing lunches in advance if you are doing that and they could be doing that for themselves. Stop “taking up the slack” every time the addict does not fulfill his or her obligations to the family. Yes, you will catch some flack, and yes you will have to experience the discomfort of not having those chores completed. Everybody will. But do not allow the flack to pull you back into the helping role.

     Next, openly ask the addict for help with larger issues, such as managing the family finances, doing the “running around” to places like the laundry, the grocery store, the post office, and the bank. In my case, I picked up eight bounced checks one weekend after working out of town all week that my now X-wife had written. I then told her that I was never going to do that again, AND I DIDN’T!  Yes, it was a hard week after I opened a new checking account the following Monday morning in only my name, but she learned that I had set a boundary, and no matter how much screaming, silent treatment, dirty looks, or jawing she gave me, I would never spend another Saturday picking up her bounced checks!

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Just A Little Willingness

Despair is the basic "affect" of the newcomer to recovery. Affect is what psychologists and psychiatrists call the basic emotion projected by a person. By the time we finally "hit our bottom" as a result of the ravages of addiction we have truly surrendered. We have given up on other people, on ourselves, and even on a God of any kind!

Recovery, from day one, becomes a matter of possibility. Possibility is just a glimmer of light flickering through the ink-like darkness of our soul. During our first meeting we experience other people demonstrating that they too walked through that door at some point in the past, that they stayed and began their own recovery process, and that IT WORKED!

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5 Ways to Help You Deal with Alcoholism during the Holidays

It’s that time of the year again when everyone is supposed to “drink and be merry.”  For some, a couple of drinks are fine, but for others dealing with alcoholism, it can be a burden and an agonizing temptation.  It all comes back to the famous phrase: Old habits die hard.

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 For alcoholic women there is usually one primary enabler.  This is typically a high functioning husband, a wealthy father, or a boss who spreads the work the alcoholic doesn't do among many other workers. In time these dysfunctional enablers are sucked into the alcoholism vortex because alcoholism is a disease that is progressive. It creeps into systems slowly over

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As part of my continuing education as a pharmaceutical salesman covering the hospitals in a major medical center, my company had arranged for a kind of preceptor ship at a teaching hospital in downtown Chicago. I was to "shadow" a third year internal medicine resident for two solid weeks. We had three reps assigned to each resident, and that little group of four worked

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For various reasons, the members of addicted families suffer constant upheaval from frequent relocations. Moving may be related to other obvious symptoms of family instability: bankruptcy, divorce, frequent hospitalization, incarceration, deaths in the family, etc.

   But there may be other reasons. The hero-child dad is more likely than most dads to sacrifice family stability

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