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A LifeRing Keeper: 400 Sober Days
From a member of a LifeRing email group: I joined LifeRing on December 9th of 2011, it was day 3 for me . I was miserable! Guilt, shame , self-loathing, remorse and despair had become my constant companions. I felt like I was in a state of perpetual grief; I couldn’t think of one good…
Spreading the Word About Alternatives to AA
Increasing the awareness of AA alternatives is a slow and frustrating task. Headway is made one small step at a time. A recent article on the Huffington Post website marks one of those steps, this one authored by Tom Horvath, President of SMART Recovery. He writes: “Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other 12-step groups are the…
A Solstice Essay
A message from LifeRing member Mahala Kephart: A few days late, but as I thought about how important having a secular choice in recovery has been to me, I thought maybe I’d riff on light and dark today. Whether you’re in Sweden or South Africa, the Yukon or Tierra del Fuego, or somewhere in between,…
LifeRing’s Winter Newsletter Just Published
The latest edition of the LifeRing Newsletter is hot off the press! Edited by LifeRing board member Carola Z., this edition features articles on topics ranging from the value of volunteering to proposed changes in the LifeRing bylaws. There are also articles on surviving the holiday season and LifeRing’s presence at a recent gathering of…
Book Review — “The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power”
LifeRing member Charles D. has written the following review of The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad. It’s an older book — 1993 — but still very relevant and available as both a paperback and an e-book. Here’s Charles’s review: In the book Empowering Your Sober Self, Martin Nicholas,…
LifeRing Keeper: The Recovery Process
A recent message in a LifeRing email group included this comment: “40 years of smoking pot and 10 years of drinking heavy have probably scrambled my marbles…..eeeesh…..unhealthy coping skills and unhealthy ways of reacting to sadness have not helped.” That comment drew this response: That’s exactly the sort of thing that the whole recovery process…
Martin Nicolaus, LifeRing’s Founding Leader, Publishes Article in a Journal for Treatment Providers
Martin Nicolaus, author of Empowering Your Sober Self and Recovery by Choice, has an article in the recent edition of the “Journal of Groups in Addiction and Recovery.” Nicolaus, the founding leader of LifeRing who retired in 2010, still makes regular speaking engagements drawing on his knowledge and experience in the recovery field. The article,…
LifeRing’s Fall, 2012, Newsletter Now Available
Carola Ziermann, LifeRing board member and chair of the Newsletter Committee, has issued the first new LifeRing newsletter in many years. The newsletter, which can be viewed HERE, contains articles on subjects including on-line resources, peer-to-peer support and Marty Nicolaus’s 20 year Soberversity. Don’t miss it.
If Alcohol Were Discovered Today, Would it be Legal?
An article from the website Alternet.com discusses a new book just published: Drugs Without the Hot Air, by British author David Nutt (2012 UIT Cambridge). In the book, the author asks the reasonable question of how our society would handle alcohol if it were to appear suddenly as a street drug. An excerpt from the…