Pleasure.

...when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt — this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

-Elizabeth Gilbert

Today, I realized that I have very little pleasure in my life, and I haven't for a long time. I am in a financial mess because I'm waiting for my husband, the madman, to fix himself and get back to work. I've waited too long. It's time to start fixing my financial mess myself.

I have a lovely, artsy, freelance and fun job, but it's a job that just barely pays my bills. I get my paycheck, I pay my bills, and then the money is gone until the next paycheck. If he would work, then there'd be enough money for some joy in my life: some yoga classes, some nice meals out, a movie now and then, an expensive coffee, a new pair of shoes. Right now, there is nothing extra. He's not going to work. I'm going to have to find a new job.

I'd thought of having to get a new job before, but it felt like something I wasn't ready for yet. Today, it came to me with that pre-packaged, fully formed, fully processed feeling that means it's not my decision anymore. What praying I've been doing to try to figure out how I'm going to get out of my financial bind has worked: I'm going to start looking for another job. I'm going to find a job that will give me some paid time off, some health insurance, and all those other wonderful accoutrements of adulthood.

Even if I get a lame-ass job, a suit job with shitty hours and a shitty boss and all kind of shittiness, it will be a job that will pay my bills, and I'll stop dawdling in this desperate financial quagmire. I'll get myself back in control of my life, and I'll fix my house up a bit so that I can sell it in a few years, and then, I'll go back to school.

Something inside me feels pleased to have this plan. A plan is good, and it's my plan that has nothing to do with him. He's welcome to come along for the ride, I guess. Tonight, he's welcome to come along for the ride. I'm tired of spinning my wheels here, and I hope that making some moves will mean that there will be good things coming.

In doing my fourth step inventory, I've realized that one of my biggest character defects is impetuosity. I'm hoping that having a plan with a bit of scope...I'll get a lame grown-up job and keep it for a few years until I get my finances squared away and am able to sell my house, and then I'll go back to school...will keep me from suddenly deciding to become an astronaut or a ballerina or a lawyer or a flight attendant or any of the myriads of things I often scheme up when I'm feeling desperate and in need of an escape. I don't want to escape anymore. I want to change, but I want to change in a way that's lasting, permanent, and right. I want to grow, not just run away.

Lit Chick Meme!

My super-bud BFF MPJ tagged me, and it's been a bit since I've played the meme-game. This one is about books! Yay!

Total Number Of Books?

I'm not sure...there's probably around 750...there's 7 bookshelves, but some of the shelves are holding art supplies, and there are books in places that aren't where they're supposed to be. The best books are all around the floor by my bed most of the time. I like books! I move them with me, all up and down the East Coast, back and forth across the ocean, much to the chagrin of whatever addict I have harnessed into my service at the time. It's miserable...boxes and boxes of books. I just can't let them go. I'm not satisfied by library books. I need to be able to tear them all up and write in them or cherish them and keep them pristine and with virgin spines. I don't like borrowing folks' books for this reason, too...I need them to be mine.

Last Book Read?

It depends on how you count. I'm usually reading a few at the same time. The last book I finished was Lolita. You might ask, what the fuck was I doing reading that head-fuck? A friend loaned it to me, freaking me out and making me think he knew all kinds of secret things about me. I started reading it and couldn't put it down and couldn't stand it and couldn't stop it. It was awful.

I'm knee deep in a few things right now...there's all kinds of 12 step and self-help shit, as that's where I am in my life right now...I'm also reading Eat Pray Love, like everybody else in America. It's quite good. I also keep re-reading bits and pieces of Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson.

Last Book Bought?

Eat Pray Love. I bought one for myself and one for a very special friend who was having a hard time.

Five Meaningful Books?

This question is a little weird. I bet I'm supposed to offer wisdom or truth or show off what an intellectual I am. What I'm going to reveal, instead, is that I'm a real sucker for beauty. The thing that unifies my favorite books is that they are so intricately constructed, so beautifully worded. It's like every word is carved and plated in gold. Reading words put together like these is more like drinking or bathing or rubbing lotion on sore skin. It's what I hope to be able to do as a writer...make something so beautiful, so true, that it makes the reader speechless.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.

And here's why:

“Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes, each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoiced. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him, finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it- wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room- it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.”

Written On The Bodyby Jeanette Winterson

And here's why:

"I've tried to get you out of my head but I can't seem to get you out of my flesh. I think about your body day and night. When I try to read it's you I'm reading. When I sit down to eat it's you I'm eating. When he touches me I think about you. I'm a middle-aged happily married woman and all I can see is your face. What have you done to me?"

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

I read this one while I was watching my first marriage fall apart. It's about a marriage falling apart. It was kind of hard to read, but it's so breathtakingly beautiful. I wish I could read Japanese. The translation is lovely, though, and there's so much imagery and surreal dreamscapes and spiritual excavations. It's amazing.

The Complete Poems Of Anne Sexton

Nothing gets me all revved up to be a tragic poetess like a good dose of Anne Sexton.

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

Four Quartetsby T.S. Eliot

It makes me think about god, poetry, love, time, risk, truth, beauty...and those rhythms are unmatched in English.

And I won't copy MPJ by listing the hundreds of other favorites I'm leaving off, including Shakespeare's collected works, which I've just got to say because I can't not mention it. If I had to be trapped on an island with only 5 books, I'd be hard pressed not to include it...but damn. The five above are so gorgeous...I might trade Murakami for Shakespeare, just because it's a translation. Is it normal that considering which 5 books I'd take with me to my deserted island is making me very anxious? Oh, and what about Jack Kerouac, and that Desolation Angels that taught me to think of myself as a poet and to fall in love with tragedy...goddamn it. I'm stopping this now...

Now, that was fun! I will not tag this time, but I hope more of you do this. It's a fun game. Actually...wait...I'm tagging the Cuntfaces. Every one of you.

For What It's Worth.

"Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors...In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted."

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

So I'm reading the book, and these few sentences give me pause. Perhaps it's the "trust" word.

From my earliest memory, there was chaos and suspicion in my life. One day, someone could be stalwart, benevolent, and solid as a rock. The next, that same person might violate me unspeakably. A tender, loving presence might burst into hysteria and anger.

And also, from my earliest memories, I was hungry for beauty...for an image, for a story, for a particular intensity in feeling that lifts me from myself, makes me someone else, somewhere else.

Gilbert's ruminations on Italian sensuality, though, had nothing to do with me really...it took some reflecting to figure out why I had to read it, and read it again, and read it even more. It's that idea, I guess, of how beauty and art can become so very important when everything else is so shaky...and also how we might come to accept the unacceptable when it's all we've known...and not only accept it, but expect it.

Because he's beautiful to me and because he shares my passion for art and creativity and beauty--because his aesthetics and mine line up so well--I tolerate lying, stealing, manipulation, and insecurity from my husband. Because the world is insecure, unstable, shifting and disconcerting, I look to beauty as the only thing that's true, as the most important thing. And because so many people have proven to be unreliable and unstable, I accept that kind of behavior from anyone.

So what does that mean, though? Is this an insight into something I need to fix? Is this an insight into something that's true, and it just is true, and that's enough? I keep having all these little epiphanies, but I'm never sure of what I'm supposed to do with them.

Closer

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

-From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Littleneck clams out of season.

This is a picture of Assia Wevill. She stole Sylvia Plath's husband. I'm neck-deep in Lover of Unreason,the book about her life and all the attendant mythology of the tragic poetesses. I've never been much of a Plath woman, preferring to identify with the brunette and green-eyed Sexton. I like the ferociousness of Sexton's poems, and I find Plath to be a bit chilly at times. I do, however, like the suicide-bound Plath, and I am LOVING this crazy-ass Assia woman, her beauty, her incessant marrying and remarrying, her feigned elegance.

She's perfect. I also really like the authors' stance on her, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes critical, but always honest and clear...neither defending her nor reviling her as people often do who are in the Plath thrall.

I've spent so much time in my life identifying with The Other Woman, the watercolor woman, the exotic. And now look at me, a wife. Solid, loving, unyielding, and steeped in the home.

It's one thing I always knew, though. No matter what happens between us, we always have that turbulent beginning. Our love will remain a gift that we give to one another, something salvaged from the wreckage of our young adult lives and pieced back together into this wonderful, complex, and entirely real life. Every moment we spend together, no matter how messy, is a gift.

Ophelia.

From Hamletmachine :

(enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock.)

Ophelia:

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I'm alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.

When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you'll know the truth.

The Nightingale And The Rose.

Oh read Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale And The Rose. Poor bird, pouring its heart out for nothing. I find something in the story compelling to me right now...

Maybe it's not nothing that the bird died for. The bird sacrificed itself for an ideal? Isn't that what artists do? Isn't that like what Jesus did or whatever? Maybe the bird is a Christ figure?

That doesn't seem very Wilde. He was probably talking about beauty and art and all those things. Or maybe he was critiquing the pedantic, boring cry of heteronormativity, and the little queer bird is sacrificing itself on tradition's altar, grasping at a romantic ideal that's no longer valid in the modern age.

Or maybe it's a codependent bird, maiming itself for the love of a couple that has absolute nothing to do with it, and that isn't even real love, anyway. The bird's description of the lover and his perfection rings marvelously true.

All I know is that I want a bird-blood rose.


http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/22974347/

Wuthering Heights

Today we watched the 1992 Wuthering Heights film. It was great...for years, he's been my Heathcliff. Here's that priceless quote from the book:

'I think that's the worst motive you've given yet for being the wife of young Linton.'

'It is not,' retorted she; 'it is the best! The others were the satisfaction of my whims: and for Edgar's sake, too, to satisfy him. This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable; and—'

And then this one:

'This is nothing,' cried she: 'I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'

From Zadie Smith

I found this quote in Zadie Smith's book On Beauty. It's beatiful, and it reminded me of my man...his beauty, his charm, his charisma:

"And all the time, while he spoke, and she tried, bewilderedly, to listen, his face was doing its silent voodoo on her, just as it seemed to work on everybody passing by him in this archway. Zora could clearly see people stealing a look, and lingering, not wanting to release the imprint of Carl from their retinas, especially if it was only to be replaced by something as mundane as a tree or the library or two kids playing cards in the yard. What a thing he was to look at!"

Heroin Book For Kids...

Junk by Melvin Burgess is apparently a children's book (or at least a young adult book)about heroin addiction. It's at the top of my summer reading list. I'll let you know what I think once I read it.

Dead Addict Of The Day

Alright, so I know he didn't die of heroin, but he did die of alcoholism, and after the letter J brought us Janis Joplin, one of my youth's heroes, I couldn't resist having the letter K be for Jack Kerouac, beat poet and novelist. I like to specialize in finding dead junkies, as it gives me something to point out to my husband over dinner (Did you know Chris Farley died from doing a speedball? You probably should ever do that, or you might die. You don't want to go out like Chris Farley, do you?)

But Jack Kerouac holds a special place in my heart. If I could pick any boyfriend, dead or alive, he's the only one who would compete with my husband. The book Desolation Angels changed my life...actually quite literally. I quit eating meat because of a particularly disgusting section of it about the way meat digests in the stomach. I think Kerouac himself was a vegatarian, if I remember correctly.

I was a huge sucker for all that drunken poet drinking port wine business. I guess I've been preparing myself for a life as a junky's wife for years.

Phrases from Desolation Angels moved me so much when I was about 16, like:

I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

or this bit from Big Sur:

Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'

It's just plain beautiful writing, beautiful sentiment. I imagined I was a Buddhist. I wrote poems in long scrawls with a typewriter, emulating his style as best as I could. I should read his stuff again...I'd gorged myself a bit on his work for a while, but it's been years now. I felt the same way about Janis Joplin or Grateful Dead for a long time, but I love to hear these songs now. They put me in a strange place...oh, and also listening to The Doors, especially in autumn, or when it first starts to get cold outside and the leaves are all changing...it makes me feel crazy in that way you can only feel when you're 16 years old, angry, lonely, and literary.

Ahhh my wasted youth!

In Cold Blood

I'm reading In Cold Blood, and it's great. We watched Capote not too long ago, and I've been interested in reading the book ever since. I want to write a true crime novel! I want to investigate a story, interview the perpetrators, get obsessed and become an expert!

Maybe that's what I'm doing with this blog...investigating my husband's substance abuse from all angles. I always mean to write a memoir, and maybe this is my starting place. As I'm becoming less and less frantic and there's less and less to say about addiction, heroin, and my relationship with my husband, maybe I will start to use this as a forum to record this weird, weird relationship I've got myself in...maybe I can use this space as a building ground or a sketch pad for my life history.

I'm not sure about some things in my life--like whether or not they are worthy of being written about--but the story of the love affair between my husband and me is definitely worth some literary attention. It's really complicated and spans years and involves countless characters with all kinds of grotesque personality quirks...it's really an amazing story. There's a pharmacy robbery (or two, or twenty...no one knows for sure what the final count is except my husband, and he tells lies), insane relatives on both sides, drugs, drinking, whoring, law school, pit bulls, guns, love, nakedness, a leather couch, inflamed ovaries, and endless fun!

Writing out some of our history might help me stop being so angry, and so obsessed. I sometimes wonder if I should stop writing about heroin and his using and reading and reading and reading and reading about heroin all the time. It helps me in a lot of ways, but it also makes me fixate. Just as much as his using is reductive of his personality, my focusing on it is reductive of our relationship.

One thing that's a little scary about In Cold Blood is the way that the killer that fascinated Capote most, Perry, reminds me of my husband in a lot of ways. He's one of those introspective, charismatic, sensitive sociopaths...apparently writers love these guys?

I'm loving reading things that aren't substance-abuse related lately. I need to go book shopping again...book recommendations are welcome!

Heroin Miscellany

Here's a daughter's account of her realization that her father was an addict. It's gut-wrenching.

Here's a review of a film about Roky Erickson called You're Gonna Miss Me, which will feature some apparently epic heroin binges.

And I found this quote from a review of the life of Alexander Trocchi, author of Young Adam, from one of his university professors. It SO describes my man:

"He was extraordinarily magnetic, some would say manipulative - able to get what he wanted out of people. He was very charming, but with a hint of danger. Sometimes there were these dark looks from under his eyebrows, a sense of something different altogether. There was a depth to him that was impressive, strange and not quite sinister, but there was the sense that something unexpected could happen."

How we used to be.

The first time I read this excerpt, all I could think of was him. I want that feeling back, so much.

From Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin:

Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him; finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it--wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room--it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.

Good Prayers

Someone's post on the Soberrecovery forum today reminded me of Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. I love the speaker in the book, and her spirituality is one that I can relate to, which really surprised me when I started reading the book. One of my favorite parts is when she says that the two best prayers she knows are:

Help me! Help me! Help me!

and also:

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

These are prayers I can relate to. A few nights ago, when I was sleeping upstairs because I was too angry to sleep with my husband, I was sobbing in the bed, and those phrases came to me again. Often in the midst of big depressive sobs, some phrase will get stuck in my mind--I think it happens to a lot of people. But often, the phrase is "Help me...help me...help me..." For so much of my life, I haven't been sure who I was asking for help. I'm still not sure, but I think I'm getting closer to understanding.

Nothing To Do With Addiction, Everything To Do With ME

I finally got the shipment of books I'd ordered from Amazon yesterday, and one of the books is Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love.
I LOVE the whole Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes drama, so this book is a super fun amazing book for me.

I must admit, however, that I feel a little guilty for being interested in Assia Wevill. It isn't quite fair to dear Sylvia that I'm reading this book about her rival. However, she's an interesting woman in herself, and I kind of think I look a little like her. I'm really more on team Sexton than team Plath, anyway.

It's also kind of a strange book to read because Wevill really wasn't anyone except Plath's rival--at least not anyone that I would normally read about. She isn't a writer, isn't an artist--I mean, in the book there are pictures of some little paintings she did, so I guess she dabbled in the arts, and her letters to Ted seem rather literate for a woman who was just some ho...but her suicide is interesting, and I guess it fits into the tragic poetess milieu, which is obviously the bestest thing to read about ever.


I'm only into the first few chapters, so I haven't really gotten to the juicy bits yet. It's giving a full biography of Wevill, from her childhood moves all over Europe (her father was a non-religious Jew, so they had to leave Germany, and moved from Italy to Israel, where Assia spent much of her childhood).

The authors are a little critical of her at times, saying that she fantasized/imagined her childhood in exile from Germany as being much more dramatic and tragic than it actually was, but mostly they seem fascinated by her...kind of turning her life every which way and poking her with sticks.

The best parts of the book, which I've been scanning through in the pages ahead, I think are going to be the pictures, which are always fun, especially when you are fantasizing that the subject looks a bit like you, and the passionate letters to Ted.

I should read more about Ted Hughes. He seems like such a Panzer Man! (Hey wait, I guess he was THE Panzer Man, wasn't he?)

I want somebody else to read it and talk about it with me.

From The World's Best Junky

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question ''Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?'' should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
--William S. Burroughs, author of Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk (50th Anniversary Edition)

Addiction Store

I put together some stuff in this store. Check it out to find answers or for treats for yourself. I've been trying to remember to reward myself lately (and I've got about 10 new pounds on my ass to show for it). From reading about my new favorite subject, Addiction,to lying in a bath with lots of candles, remembering to take care of ME first is the best thing I can do. Buy yourself something nice!

Detachment Rocks

Yes, I'm one of the Nar-Anon freaks who reads the detachment handout again and again. I have read that purple piece of paper until my eyes almost bleed when I see it. It helps me SO MUCH.

I found this link to the Al-Anon books How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics, and I thought it was a clear explanation of the practice. It's useful in every aspect of your life--when something is getting under your skin, to practice detachment is so healthy.

Another instance of this mess making me a better person...

Get Your Loved One Sober

I can't decide about this book, Get Your Loved One Sober: Alternatives to Nagging, Pleading, and Threatening. I think I like it a lot. I first learned about it on the website for HBO's special on addiction, which everyone in my first Nar-Anon meetings was going nuts over. I wish we had more than one channel because I'd really like to see this addiction thing.

But anyway, the website references this book again and again, so I bought it. It is an alternative approach to the 12 steps and to the intervention model of addiction treatment.

One thing about the book is that it's probably much more useful if you're dealing with an addict in active addiction. It offers techniques to help you use something more like a positive rewards system to encourage your addict to stop the addictive behavior instead of nagging or bitching about things that bother you. For instance, say your addict comes home a little late and is clearly high, the book would recommend that you should tell your addicted spouse that you love him very much, but that you don't like being around him when he's high, and that you're going to go out with your girlfriends.

This approach does two things--one I think is very similar to the techniques I've been learning in Nar-Anon, and another is pretty much a polar opposite approach. The similarity is that wonderful part of the 12 steps for families--it teaches you to take care of yourself. In the above instance, instead of sitting home and freaking out and getting all worked up about how your man is fucked up, you go out with girlfriends, vent, and have a good time. Your personal interests are taken care of, and you're protecting your sanity and your serenity.

The thing that the book does that is quite different from the 12 step model, however, is it allows/encourages family members to take active responsibility for changing the addict's behavior. It becomes the job of the spouse to engage the addict's behavior head on by doing things to discourage him from using, which is pretty much a no-no in the 12 step programs, at least in how I understand them.

The book is definitely worth checking out, however, because it does offer a different perspective, and I've found in dealing with all of this that different perspectives help me, no matter what. Even when people's opinions contradict one another, it's really useful to hear what other people have to say, what techniques they've used to help themselves and thier addicts, and how they've kept their sanity. It helps to get outside your own head, you know?

Also, the book encourages you to remember the good things about your addict and to focus on providing a positive, healthy alternative to drug or alcohol use. By reminding my addict that he's a brilliant artist, for instance, I'm reminding him of things that he can do to make himself feel good and reminding myself of why I love him. I think this part of the book encourages healthy trends within relationships that are generally pretty messed up, and that's always good.