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75b4355 But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius. alcoholism confession Truman Capote
56dd826 Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane. alcoholism drinking heartbreak insane mental-illness money Craig Ferguson
591e303 Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed--as are the grape and the grain--to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it. advice alcoholism alochol drinking drowning-one-s-sorrows drugs drunk-driving eating food hangovers martin-amis men responsibility rules scotch single-malt whiskey women Christopher Hitchens
2e4fb13 One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn't a clue. A day is a fuckin' eternity alcoholism recovery Roddy Doyle
d7e31fd You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever. addiction addiction-cure addiction-disease addiction-treatment-center alcohol-addiction alcohol-addiction-treatment alcohol-disease alcohol-rehab alcoholic alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism alcoholism-addiction-recovery chris-prentiss dependency depression disease drug-addiction healing-addiction inspiration inspire passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss rehab rehab-centers self-help Chris Prentiss
4a629ad I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other. alcoholic alcoholism alcoholism-addiction-recovery mad miserable Anne Brontë
1063099 When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy. addict addiction addicts alcohol-abuse alcohol-addiction alcoholics alcoholism chris-prentiss drug-abuse drug-addiction Chris Prentiss
41980cb Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink--help the alcoholic who can't.' (' '?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it. alcohol alcoholism andrei-gromyko antisemitism astrology astronomy beijing birth birthdays breastfeeding britain censorship china communism communist-party-of-china corfu corfu-channel-incident czechoslovakia damascus diplomacy ernst-von-weizsacker flushing-meadows flushing-queens gods history hitler horoscopes hosni-zayim international-court-of-justice israel jews mao mars nato nazis newspapers nuremberg passover-seder prohibition the-hague united-nations united-states ussr vatican war Christopher Hitchens
342a841 Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. alcoholism anxiety depression Joan Didion
311c114 If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can't stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse. addiction-and-recovery alcohol-addiction alcoholism chris-prentiss drug-addiction non-12-step passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss relapse withdrawal Chris Prentiss
6bea34d Every person in the AA program who's successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol- the power to stop. addiction alcohol-addiction alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism chris-prentiss drug-abuse drug-addiction empowerment Chris Prentiss
c0ce2aa "I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD." alcoholism alters dissociative-identity-disorder mental-health mental-illness mpd multiple-personalities multiple-personality psychiatrist psychology split-personality survivor therapy Robert B. Oxnam
6ef6822 "Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve." addiction addiction-and-recovery alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism buddhism na narcotics-anonymous oppression recovery secularism sobriety substance-abuse trauma xa Noah Levine
62081ec "AA purports to be open to anyone, as it is stated in Tradition Tree, "The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking," but it isn't open to everyone. It's open only to those who are willing to publicly declare themselves to be alcoholics or addicts and who are willing to give up their inherent right of independence by declaring themselves powerless over addictive drugs and alcohol, as stated in Step One, "We admitted we are powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable." 12-step-programs aa addiction-cure alcohol alcohol-abuse alcoholic alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism alcoholism-addiction-recovery drug-abuse drug-addiction empowerment non-12-step non-12-step-programs passages-malibu passages-rehab passages-ventura Chris Prentiss
5f98f8f Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life! alcoholism drink moon Malcolm Lowry
bf3f574 Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society. 12-steps alcohol-abuse alcohol-addiction alcoholism change chris-prentiss drug-abuse drug-addiction non-12-step-program passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss philosophy recovery society substance-addiction treatment Chris Prentiss
1b8b584 The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. An all-encompassing, fully enveloping, completely overwhelming obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth. addict addiction alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism James Frey
2982823 Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes. addiction addiction-treatment addictions-treatment-centers alcohol-disease alcoholism change-the-world chris-prentiss confidence cure-addiction disease healing healing-abuse healing-trauma overcome-addiction passages-malibu passages-rehab passages-ventura pax-prentiss rehab-centers self-image Chris Prentiss
b9dc24b "People who are dependent are merely using alcohol as a crutch to get through the day. Yet doctors and scientists are still treating "alcoholism" as if it is the problem, when it has nothing to do with the problem. They might as well be studying "scratchism" for people who have a chronic itch." alcoholism alcoholism-addiction-recovery chris-prentiss health holistic-treatment passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss science Chris Prentiss
78d229c In addition to the smells of mince and pumpkin pies, the Sage and onions of turkey stuffing, another aroma floated in the air, the very essence of Santa Claus. Years later, when I was grown up, I still remembered that marvelous fragrance and recognized it as Scotch whisky. 2001 alcoholism bad-santa christmas santa-claus scotch unintended-consequences Lloyd Alexander
db14a86 To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful and demoralizing. addiction-treatment alcohol-abuse alcoholic alcoholism change chris-prentiss healing healing-abuse holistic-treatment life-improvement non-12-step passages-malibu passages-rehab passages-treatment passages-ventura pax-prentiss philosophy recovering-addict recovery rehab self-help therapy Chris Prentiss
e1456ef "...there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that "Relapse is part of recovery." It's another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery." addiction-cure addiction-treatment addiction-treatment-center alcohol-abuse alcoholics-anonymous alcoholism books chris-prentiss drug-abuse passages-malibu reading recovery relapse Chris Prentiss
bf1403e If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent of alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependency. addiction-and-recovery alcohol-addiction alcohol-treatment-center alcoholism chris-prentiss dependency drug-abuse ecstasy heroin passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss prescription-abuse prescription-drugs self-help substance-abuse Chris Prentiss
5d9006e The advertise their products in such a fashion as to make it seem wonderful to drink their ethanol products. It does not matter if they give their products fancy name like Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, or if they put bubbles in an ethanol product and call it champagne or beer- everyone is selling ethanol. addiction-and-recovery alcohol-addiction alcohol-treatment-center alcoholism beer chris-prentiss dependency drug-abuse ecstasy heroin passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss prescription-abuse prescription-drugs self-help substance-abuse wine Chris Prentiss
de9385c "Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it. That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave. Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason." alcoholism intuition sensitivity Jack Williamson
3e7ed5c Only discovering and healing the root causes of each individual's dependency puts an end to dependency. One-on-one sessions are key because the individual issues at the core of dependency are just that- completely individual. addiction-help addiction-philosophy addiction-treatment alcoholism change change-the-world-change-life chris-prenitss healing-addiction holistic-therapy non-12-step non12step one-on-one-therapy passages-malibu passages-ventura philosophy Chris Prentiss
4e05711 It is ethanol that everyone is after when they drink alcoholic beverages. That is what gives us the euphoric feeling, and that is what all vendors of alcoholic drinks are selling. addiction-and-recovery addiction-treatment-center alcohol alcoholism holistic-treatment passages-malibu passages-ventura Chris Prentiss
2741626 Drunkenness is better for the body than physic! Drink always, and you shall never die! alcoholism drunkenness immortality E.R. Eddison
acc2ce3 When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help others discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free. alcoholism chris-prentiss holistic-health passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss Chris Prentiss
8421a84 Can you see that meetings and centers that don't address the real causes of dependency are almost certain to be little or no help? They actually can be very damaging. alcoholism chris-prentiss dependency twelve-step-meetings Chris Prentiss
08d5137 If I were to create a word that more accurately describes alcoholism and addiction, I would say it was dependencyism. Sounds silly, doesn't it? Yet it's no sillier than the word alcoholism. The reason alcoholism no longer sounds silly to you is because you're used to hearing it, reading it, and thinking about it. addiction-and-recovery alcohol-abuse alcohol-treatment-center alcoholism chris-prentiss inspiration passages-malibu passages-ventura pax-prentiss substance-abuse wisdom Chris Prentiss
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