Trust yourself to catch youself. You know how it works when people parachute? They’re harnessed to a device that facilitates their chute — their gentle drift down, down, down? (Chute is French for “fall.”) A quick linguistics course: the prefix Para- is attached to words we’ve taken from Greek (mostly, but there are some French ones [...]
I've been meaning to share this link to a news article that ran earlier this month on AOL news online, which claims there is a link between a child's sugar cravings and his or her potential for alcoholism. It's not terribly conclusive, and I'm sure there will be theories to debunk the ones cited here, but [...]
If your parent had a drinking problem, if alcoholism runs in your family–should you drink? For some, the answer is an obvious no. No, of course you shouldn't drink. It's too big of a risk to take, feels like playing with a box of matches and hoping none of them will catch fire. It [...]
Most children of alcoholics spend a lifetime waiting to become an alcoholic. That is, worrying that day will come despite our best efforts. Each of us knows that alcoholism is a family disease, and many of us believe that we can inherit it with or without doing much drinking at all. At times alcoholism is such a well-hidden disease that some folks handle it without a single side-effect (if appearances were the whole story) such that it would look like he or she was not an alcoholic at all. While it may be easy to hide addiction on the outside, anyone on the inside of an alcoholic family knows that it’s anything but free of side-effects. If you’re like me, you are to some degree always listening for the click of that key.
We live in a culture of addiction in the United States. Stephanie Brown suggests that a hallmark of American culture is addiction, that Americans believe there are no limits and that each of us is in control of whatever we’re addicted to, whether it’s email, cell phone, Blackberry, alcohol, sugar, or (insert name of stimulant here).
Children of alcoholics tend to be drawn to rules, self-imposed or otherwise. Rigidity. Extremes. Is this true for every child of an alcoholic? My guess would be that it’s true for most. Do you like rules? Do you often start new diets? Do you often isolate foods that are “bad” and avoid them completely? Do [...]
