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Today I went on a personal retreat, just for the day. To a retreat center an hour from where I live. 135 acres, with woods, a retreat center, a lake, a chapel-like structure, a labrinyth. When I left home it was 18 degrees, but the day warmed up and I was able to spend most of it outside. I...

Happy Thanksgiving to each of you Warriors. Today is perhaps the most fitting day of all to think about Gratitude and how this simple idea can help us heal and recover from the pain and despair we often feel and talk about here. Taking five minutes every morning to sit down, get quiet, and...

I've posted some threads by Richard Rohr before...with some hesitation because he is a Franciscan priest and so espouses the Christian point of view, but there are some "larger than life" lessons in what he offers. Here is one of those (edited): "...Most of what we call "thinking" is...

Good Morning dear friends and Warrior people, Just a note to say that I'm celebrating this week. It's been two years since Difficult Child last got out of jail and started on what has turned out to be a path of consistent progress. Today, he begins a new job making $23 an hour as an electrician's...

Just reading along on some of the threads and thinking about people and the roles they play in our lives. I have a good friend right now who has recently gone through a divorce and now she is dating and all the different men who are coming in and out of her life, and how hard it is. Then...

Good Morning dear friends...I just read this, this morning, and find it so incredibly relevant to each of our lives on this forum. Please know I am not promoting here Christianity or any particular pattern of belief, and please disregard here the items included that do not work for you. There...

This morning I was reading a devotion by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who gets very specific about faith and life and struggle. He has helped me a lot on my journey of recovering from enabling. Here is what he said that struck me today: We don't think ourselves into a new way of...

Okay, this may sound kind of strange, but I received two adult coloring books for Christmas and...I love them! They are billed as "calming, stress-relieving and meditative" for adults, and you know, I believe that is true. I was so excited to receive both of them! I truly felt like a kid...

Two posts today said this so very well: I'm giving my son the best gift I can give him and it's the gift of detachment. Wow. What a thought. I am creating this new post with this idea because I think it is so very worthy of all our consideration. There is a great post already on this thread...

Difficult Child was scheduled to have surgery yesterday for hemorrhoids, which have plagued him for years. He was to come back to my house to stay for a few days to recuperate. I was a bit nervous about that but of course I wanted him to be here. Right before he was to go into surgery, the surgeon came in...

Good Morning Friends...Today's email from Richard Rohr (one of my alltime heroes) gets exactly at one of the issues we struggle with: our emotions and reacting to our Difficult Child based on our emotions. This is a lesson it took me a very long time to learn as I am very much a "feelings" person. I...

This morning, it seems that honesty is a key topic on this forum. I used to take the idea of honesty for granted, but no more. Watching my Difficult Child lie to my face over and over and over again...and feeling myself being off balance all the time because of wanting so much to believe him...but finally...

This phrase was one of the most confounding to me, and now one of the most important to me, in my work on myself. I always thought feelings WERE facts. After all, I felt it, so it must be real and true. I have learned, over the years in Al-Anon and from other study and readings, that while...

True Confessions Time: I had posted before about my angst in interacting with my son and his fiancee' over the past six to nine months as they planned their wedding. Suffice it to say: It was a very, very challenging time for me, and I finally was "told off" by my son. It wasn't pretty and I...

I ran across this statement today. It struck me because I have come to understand that doing even just one thing differently is what led to another change and another change...in me. For years and years, I thought. And felt. And then acted. I thought I could think my way into a solution for...

Wednesday night Difficult Child and I went to the movie to see Mission Impossible. Turned out to not be such a good idea...but I'm working to see the value in it...for me. He had started working at a new job site the day before, and was very anxious about it, thus didn't sleep much at all the night before...

I was walking yesterday and decided to listen to a podcast instead of music and wanted to share it with you all as an at-home free resource...Another tool for our toolboxes. Here's the link: http://therecoveryshow.com The host talks about alanon principles and has many podcasts "in the can"...

As most of you know, Difficult Child has been doing much better for more than a year now. Progress, certainly not perfection, and I still must work hard on having no expectations, which is a slippery slope and one I slide around on. Over the weekend, girlfriend (the one who stabbed him last summer) "went...

One of Echo's posts made me think of this question in this way. What is it that we really and truly need in order to be happy? What is our highest and best hope and dream for ourselves? What puts us at peace inside, that single moment when we feel flush with goodness and happiness, and the...

I think this is one of the hardest things to "get" about our dcs. When they were babies, children, young teens...it was OUR JOB to lay groundwork for them. We facilitated. We orchestrated. We managed. We set up opportunities. We talked to teachers, coaches, doctors, other parents...that...