Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir

Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir

By Tara BoyceEducationSelf-Improvement
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Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir episodes

  • Functional Alcoholism
    Over the next year, I kept both a job and a boyfriend, and was thus performing normalcy to a dazzling degree that surprised even me. Since the incident and my outpatient therapy, every time I drank and nothing terrible happened I gave myself permission to drink more often and still, nothing catastrophic occurred. I’d broken the system. I’d graduated into what I believed was functional alcoholism, and was perfectly content to stay there indefinitely.People speak of addiction as progressive, so...
    35 min
  • Happy Holidays!
    A few thoughts on the holidays, and the challenges they have presented, as well as the legitimate joy they can bring.The holidays can be difficult for people in recovery So many holiday traditions involve alcohol, the office party, the Christmas cheer, and let’s not even get started on New Years Eve. There is this idea that the holidays should FEEL different than other days. Your relationships should feel closer. There should be a warm and cozy fireside feeling in our hearts. We should f...
    19 min
  • I Think I May Have Just Murdered Myself
    After a disturbing alcohol related injury, it was off to my very first outpatient program for addiction. The outpatient group, at the time, was five days a week, and it was good in that it gave me something to do every day and bad in that it gave me something to do every day, in that it seemed to excuse my otherwise minimal participation in my own life, a crutch I would come to rely on to give my life structure and meaning.I did want to get better. I was suffering. But I also couldn’t imagine...
    34 min
  • She's AWFUL.
    Why would I quit drinking when I still liked me better when I was drinking, and the confounding thing was that other people did too.Well, that's what I believed at least.I didn’t have much to offer in a relationship, but that was never so much my concern. What was important was what I could get out of it. What I needed was a sense of legitimacy, of identity, a role to play in the world, and since I wasn’t participating in my own life too much, a role in someone else’s life would do. In the mo...
    37 min
  • My Friend's Cool Dad
    That awkward moment when you walk into your first AA meeting and there's your friend's cool dad who used to give you booze as a teenager. And your first impulse is to go and tell your mom and friends about it.Oh wait... I think that's against the rules. Before I return to troubleshooting some issues surrounding 12-step, I can remember how I first came into the program, and I was hardly a paragon of virtue, honesty and good intentions, so I can be a bit more generous in my judgment of others. ...
    35 min
  • Are You Buying The Stairway To Heaven?
    So, time to get controversial and talk about 12 step recovery! People have very strong feelings about 12-step, what it is, what it isn’t, if it’s bad, if it’s good, if it’s a helpful community, if it’s a cult, whether you need to find God, whether it’s 2 well-to-do men from the 1930s and why should we listen to them, of whether there are wrong or right ways to do it, and the types of people it can help or not help, so many opinions.A lot of this noise gets in the way of what I believe is a ve...
    41 min
  • Drug of Choice... I Didn't Know There Was a CHOICE!!!
    I'd heard somewhere no one understands an addict like another addict, so as my alcoholism, progressed I gravitated towards a booze-fueled affair with a deliciously tortured soul who was legit damaged: He'd actually been to rehab. How exciting! He drank a lot, but it was OK, because alcohol wasn't his drug of choice... Holy Moly, I didn't know there was a CHOICE!!!This episode also begins to tackle alcohol as a means of addressing a deeper inability to connect with people and our environments,...
    38 min
  • The Melting Pot of the Hopelessly Average
    At 20 years old I'm already washed up, so might as well just give up on doing anything meaningful and go into a school program I have no intention of taking seriously. While I'm at it, might as well give up on love as well and lose my virginity to a stranger. Winning at life!This episode also talks about addiction as a fundamental refusal to accept reality. Being rather pissed off that the world was not bending to my every whim, and not seeing that my participation, or lack thereof, might hav...
    35 min
  • I Am An Abusive Person.
    I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I am an abuser. There is someone in my life that for years I’ve been abusing mentally, emotionally, and physically. I also neglected her, endangered her and left her vulnerable to the abuse of other people. Beyond that, I was so convinced for much of this time that she deserved it, or even that it was for her own good, that I was teaching her a lesson, that I didn’t recognize I was doing anything wrong. The only reason I'm not in jail is because th...
    37 min
  • The First Time
    The first time I drank I may not have catapulted into full-blown alcoholism, but it was clear, even from the get go, that alcohol only amplified my personality deficits.But what about other first times in recovery, in life? What about the positive milestones? The first time you resisted buying drugs or alcohol. The first time you reached out for help. The first time you helped someone else. The first time that proved to yourself 'I can do this!' These moments are just as important, or more, t...
    33 min

About Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir

From the publisher's feed

Warning: This might be hard to hear. It was hard to LIVE. Having an honest dialogue about what active addiction was like isn’t pretty, but I’m hoping that even if you come for the train wreck…