How to Enjoy the Holidays Booze-free for Moms

While Eleven Pipers are Piping and Ten Lords a Leaping may be all having a great time; as moms, during the holiday season, we may feel more like Seven Swans a Swimming upstream in rough waters.  Due to all the high-stress and expectations of others, and ourselves we may feel more like the Grinch than Jolly Old St. Nick. While it would be nice to have the Eight Maids a Milking arrive at your door to help with the long to-do-list, it is possible to enjoy the holidays without them.

Here is a self-care plan to help you not just survive the holidays, but to actually enjoy them ... Booze Free!  

1.  Lower your expectations of yourself.

For years I tried to keep up with the Jones (whoever the heck they are) and I pictured everyone having a Hallmark holiday and living happily ever after.  I worked tirelessly to have the perfect house, the perfect kids in the matching outfits, buy the perfect gifts, and send the perfect...

The Gifts of Sobriety

What I Didn't Know About Recovery Before I Got Sober

While I was still drinking  I had no idea what it would be like to be sober.  In the brief moments I contemplated not drinking, I thought all the fun would stop and I'd be sentenced to a life of misery without alcohol.  My delusional thinking told me everything was just fine when in reality, I had a lot of shame about my behaviors while under the influence of alcohol.  No one told me how incredible life in recovery would be.

Here are just a few of the many gifts of sobriety I didn't know which were waiting for me in recovery.

• I’d have so much fun AND remember it!
• Everything can be healed.
• Relationships with my kids would be tender and real.
• I’d be given a peace I’d never known.
• I’d learned to ask for help.
• I would never have to be alone.
• I’d have a solution to all my fears.
• I’d find a God of my understanding.
• I’d meet the most amazing...

Guilt: The gift that keeps on giving.
Erma Bombeck

Guilt is the constant companion of the alcoholic or addict, maybe even more so for a mom. Every mother feels guilt about her parenting from time to time. That’s doubly true for women who have created drama and caused distress for their children by drinking or using—possibly inflicting psychological damage. Here’s one story from my past that still makes me cringe.

Due to my drinking, I was separated from my husband but was still living in my beautiful Northern California home with my three children, ages two, five, and eight. I was the top salesperson in my company and still getting promoted. I had the perfect job for a drunk, taking clients to lunch and dinner, with lots of drinks on the company dime. Things looked good on the outside but they were rotten within.

I promised myself I was only going out for two drinks. I told the eleven-year-old babysitter I’d be home in a couple of hours—no later...

Recently I attended an intervention training with the internationally acclaimed interventionist, Ken Seeley.  The training was outstanding and I learned some new tools, which have helped me tremendously with the interventions I’ve done for mothers.  Here is a great article he wrote.

Helpful Guide When Planning an Intervention for a Loved One

By Ken Seeley, Founder of Ken Seeley Communities

Addiction can be absolutely brutal to witness in a loved one. Each day you see the cumulative effects of drugs or alcohol stealing away the person you know and love. As they spiral deeper into the vortex of addiction, family and friends are left feeling utterly helpless to change the course of the disease.

Amazingly, the one person who should be aware of the self-destruction being waged via addiction is the one person who seems to be completely clueless…the addict him or herself. As is common in addictive behavior, denial is like a steel barricade that has been...

Recovering from an addiction is tough enough, but when you throw in the tremendous responsibilities of motherhood, resisting cravings and remaining abstinent—much less enjoying the rewards of the holidays—can seem like an impossible challenge.

The holidays can bring up many uncomfortable feelings of stress, loneliness, financial fear and overwhelm which can often trigger a relapse. For the alcoholic or addicted mom trying to get sober or stay sober, it’s vital we know what our triggers are and step-up our recovery plan to avoid a relapse. I heard someone once say, “we are either working on our recovery or working on a relapse.”

Once we know what our danger signs are, we can watch out for them. So when we identify the triggers, we can see them as highway signs that say Danger Ahead with flashing red lights.

For many, one of the most challenging places during the holidays can be at home. I once saw a bumper sticker which read, “Good news: The...

Intuition 

 Finding Your Answers Within

Never apologize for trusting your intuition. Your brain can play tricks,
your heart can blind, but your gut is always right.
Rachel Wolchin

Some call intuition an inner guide, gut feeling, internal authority. Wikipedia defines the word intuition as ‘a phenomenon of the mind, describes the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason.’

For me, intuition is like coming home and listening to that small voice within.

As children, most of us had a strong sense of intuition, yet we seem to lose it as we get older. Most children have a strong feeling of people who feel safe and situations which don’t feel right.   We stop listening to our inner voice because we begin to reason with it, argue with it, and our rational linear minds want concrete proof.

In recovery, it seemed as though my intuition started to wake back up after the fog began to clear in my mind. There was a small faint voice...

 Fear is the great enemy of intimacy.  Fear makes us run away from each other or
cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.
Henri Nouwen 

Intimacy is one of the greatest human needs — those longing for someone to truly deeply know and accept us for who we truly are. We all have a primal human desire to connect with another person on a deep spiritual and emotional level, a yearning to be known and understood. We want to know we matter, that our presence on this planet has a purpose.

Before I got sober, I had the false expectation that this yearning for intimacy was fulfilled through having sex. As my friend Diane said, “We go to bed with a man, and the next morning he’s planning golf while we’re shopping for the wedding dress.”

Another fallacy I believed was that if I had a man in my life, it would mean I did matter; I would never feel afraid, lost, or unsettled. I knew nothing about healthy emotional closeness. I was afraid...

LOVE ADDICTION – A MOTHER REVEALS HER SHOCKING STORY

My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror of intimacy.  

Ethlie Ann Vare

When I got sober in 1999 – I put down the alcohol and picked up another addiction – Men!

I was a serial dater. I don’t know how many men I dated nor do I remember many of their names. I would spot a man, beeline to him, flirt up a storm, and if he gave me even the slightest bit of attention I was hooked. The shelf lives of these relationships were one to three months. One day I’d be saying, “I love you,” and the next day, out of the blue, I was saying goodbye. I was going from man to man with an empty, bottomless cup, begging for love and attention. It was never enough because I didn’t feel enough.

What makes me cringe the most is how my serial dating affected my children. They witnessed the revolving door. I’d spend hours on the phone with the man of the moment. My five-year-old...

5 Tips to Overcome Loneliness

An excerpt from my book “A Sober Mom’s Guide to Recovery” (Hazelden Publishing, 2015)

"When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death—ourselves."— EDA LESHAN

Loneliness is one of the most difficult human emotions. It can feel like a hole in the bottom of your gut, or a deep, aching longing in the heart, or both. The addict runs from loneliness in many ways: through drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, bingeing, purging, overeating, gambling, busyness, and overworking. These quick fixes do the trick at first, but as with all addictive behaviors, the high or distraction quickly wears off, and we’re back to feeling lonely and isolated. We pick it up “just one more time”—the drug, the alcohol, the lover, the credit card, the carton of ice cream— and then we’re left with that deeper hole of self-loathing and demoralization.

...