Have you ever joked around a lot and been the life of the party?  Has it ever felt like a mask? "Although I might be laughing loud and hearty, deep inside I'm blue."  I had a friend see through my clown one time, and helped me see how I used it as a mask.

Do you ever find it tough to make a decision?  I learned in business school that not to decide is to decide.  I discovered that when I was growing up, if I didn't make a decision, I didn't take a risk, and was less exposed to bad things happening.

Have you ever felt like there was some solution that was just going to magically appear and make your world better?  As a teenager, I would sit in my room reading Swiss Family Robinson, about a loving family, and think something would happen to make our family that way.

One of my favorite lines from that movie is "I think God gets ticked off if we don't see the color purple." I sometimes get so wrapped up in the big events of my world that I forget to stop to appreciate the small but very significant things that surround me.

Have you ever felt like you're still a kid in many ways?  That's the essence of the inner child, and although it sounds hokey and '80s to talk in those terms, I think there is a real truth to it.  I never learned how to grow up in many ways.

Have you ever wondered what serenity was, and what it really felt like?  When I first started dealing with the effects of growing up in an alcoholic family, it was just an abstract concept to me.

Recovery is hard work.  It is - it just is!  Growing up as the child with an alcoholic and violent father was not a path I chose.  Yet as an adult, I was left with the effects of it, and there was just no way around that.  Doing the work to move beyond those issues was just a lot of tough work!

Have you ever felt like you should be apologizing for being born?  I took on a sense of shame, of being a mistake, from an early age. The shame was so woven into the fabric of my being that I didn't even know it was there.

Frozen ego? What is that?  A therapist once told me that as a result of a traumatic incident, your ego might freeze at the age you were when the traumatic event happened. It really helped me understand my world - because I was operating as a terrified 14 year old boy much of the time.

Has someone ever said something, and you figure out the absolute wonderful response - 3 days later? At the time a situation happens, I feel frozen and can't think of what to say, particularly if there is a negative edge to what is being said to me.