ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS: THE TWELVE STEPS

2010-12-19T08:29:59+0000">December 19, 2010 – 8:29 am

The Twelve Steps function as the therapeutic framework of AA. They were not devised by a group of social scientists; nor are they derived from a theoretical view of alcoholism. The Twelve Steps of AA grew out of the practical experience of the earliest members, based on what they had done to gain sobriety. They do, indeed, represent a doing: AA is not a passive process.
The initial undrugged view of the devastation can, and often does, drive the dry alcoholic back to the bottle. However, the Twelve Steps of AA, as experienced by the sober members, offer the possibility of another solution: hope for another road out of the maze.
Step 1, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable,” acknowledges the true culprit, alcohol, and the scope of the problem, the whole life. Step 2, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” recognizes the craziness of the drinking behavior, and allows for the gradual reliance on some agent outside (God, the AA group, the therapist, or a combination) to aid an about-face. Step 3, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him,” enables the alcoholic to let go of the previous life preserver, the bottle, and accept an outside influence to provide direction. It has now become clear that as a life preserver, the bottle was a dud, but free floating cannot go on forever either. The search outside the self for direction has now begun.
Step 4, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” allows a close look at the basic errors of thinking and acting that were part of the drinking debacle. It also gives space for the positive attributes that can be enhanced in the sober state. An inventory is, after all, a balance sheet. Step 5, “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” provides a method of cleaning the slate, admitting just how awful it all was, and getting the guilt-provoking behavior out in the open instead of destructively “bottled up.”
Steps 6 and 7, “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character,” and “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings,” continue the mopping-up process. Step 6 makes the alcoholic aware of the tendency to cling to old behaviors, even unhealthy ones. Step 7 takes care of the fear of repeated errors, again instilling hope that personality change is possible. (Remember, at this stage in the process, the alcoholic is likely to be very short on self-esteem.)
Steps 8 and 9 are a clear guide to sorting out actual injury done to others and deciding how best to deal with such situations. Step 8 is “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.” Step 9 is “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” They serve other purposes, too. First, they get the alcoholic out of the “bag” of blaming others for life’s difficulties. They also provide a mechanism for dealing with presently strained relationships and for alleviating some of the overwhelming guilt the now-sober alcoholic feels.
Steps 10 to 12 are considered the continuing-maintenance steps. Step 10, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it,” ensures that the alcoholic need not slip back from the hard-won gains. Diligence in focusing on one’s own behavior and not excusing it keeps the record straight. Step 11, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out,” fosters continued spiritual development. Finally, Step 12, “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs,” points the way to sharing the process with others. This is one of the vital keys Bill W. discovered to maintain sobriety. It also implies that a continued practice of the new principles is vital to the sober life.
A word can be said here about “Two Steppers.” This phrase is used to describe a few individuals in AA who come in, admit they are alcoholics, dry out, and set out to rescue other alcoholics. However, it is often said in AA that “you can’t give what you don’t have.” This refers to a quality of sobriety that comes after some long and serious effort applying the entire Twelve Steps. It is interesting to note that “carrying the message” is not mentioned until Step 12.
No AA member serious about the program and sober for some time would ever imply that the steps are a one-shot deal. They are an ongoing process that evolves over time (a great deal of it) into ever-widening applications. When approached with serious intent, the steps enable a great change in the individual. That they are effective is testified to not only by great numbers of recovering alcoholics, but also by their adoption as a basis for such organizations as Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Emotions Anonymous. These other organizations simply substitute their own addiction for the word alcohol in Step 1.
A therapist/counselor/friend should be alert to the balance required in this process. The newly dry alcoholic who wants to tackle all Twelve Steps the first week should be counseled “Easy does it.” The longer dry member hopelessly anguished by Step 4, for instance, could be advised that perfection is not the goal and a stab at it the first time through is quite sufficient. The agnostic having difficulty with “the God bit” can be told about using the group or anything else suitable for the time being. After all, the spiritual awakening doesn’t turn up until Step 12 either.
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CAUSES OF OCCUPATIONAL RHINITIS: SMOKING IN OFFICES

2010-12-12T08:29:17+0000">December 12, 2010 – 8:29 am

Because cigarette smoke is such a common cause of office rhinitis, a few comments on the rights of smokers vs. the rights of nonsmokers are in order. This is an issue that has not been settled, but whose face is changing. Here is the current situation:
• There is no national law regarding smoking in general. Smoking is limited to designated areas in federal buildings and is prohibited on certain domestic airline flights.
• It is possible through state and local ordinances to prohibit smoking in public buildings, as well as permit businesses to restrict or prohibit smoking, whichever they deem in the best interest of their employees.
• The smokers’ defense regarding restrictions to their right to smoke in the workplace has been that they had as much right to smoke as nonsmokers had to not smoke, and that they could exercise this right when and where they wished, respecting safety factors and local ordinances.
• However, a recent declaration by the Surgeon General of the United States declared that cigarette smoke was harmful to nonsmokers who inhaled that smoke, the so-called passive smoker. It is my understanding that this declaration offers the potential for further legal limitation of the rights of smokers: although smokers still have the right to smoke, they do not have the right to harm the health of those around them. Since smoke from the tip of their cigarette as well as that which they exhale pollutes the air that others must breathe, and since breathing such second-hand smoke has been declared harmful, it is quite possible that their right to smoke in an environment in which nonsmokers work or play will not be upheld. This has yet to be tested in court, but it is my guess that such a test is only a matter of time.
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SEXUAL ORIENTATION: WHAT CAUSES HOMOSEXUALITY?

2010-09-27T13:43:50+0000">September 27, 2010 – 1:43 pm

Nobody knows what ’causes’ homosexuality or bisexuality, just as nobody has discovered the ’cause’ of heterosexuality, although there seems to be little interest in the latter.

It makes no difference if one or both parents are gay. Research has shown that children raised by gay parents are no more likely to be gay than those raised by heterosexual parents. It also has nothing to do with having a weak father, an overbearing mother or growing up in a single-sex boarding school.

The Kinsey Institute proposed a continuum of sexual orientation rather than an either/or classification. On a scale of zero to six, exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, some people rest firmly at one end or the other, with the remainder somewhere along the line. If your sexual orientation is fixed firmly at the zero (heterosexual) end of the scale for your entire life, that means you have never had an erotic thought about, or experience with, someone of the same sex. Your position on the scale can move from time to time as you go through life and depends on particular situations. The majority of self-described gay people have had heterosexual experiences and many people who see themselves as straight have had or have occasional homosexual experiences.

Your sexual orientation depends on lots of factors — acts, fantasies, your attractions to other people, and the way you see yourself. It’s also important to point out that your choice of partner is not based purely on sexual attraction. On a deeper level you might find that your emotional needs are best satisfied by that particular person.

People can be afraid of same-sex erotic thoughts or feelings. One woman in her late forties said, ‘I saw a program on television that talked about women having fantasies about making love to other women, even if they had never actually done it. Do you know, I have been married for nearly twenty years but I have had erotic dreams about women for as long as I can remember and I thought it was really weird. Seeing that program was such a relief. I have never been able to talk to anyone about it.’

Although it is common for both men and women to have erotic thoughts about people of the same sex, there are barriers that preclude many of them from ever acting on those feelings, like fidelity to current opposite-sex relationships, fear of the potential repercussions, religious or moral beliefs, or lack of opportunity.
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SEXUAL ORIENTATION: WHAT IS IT?

2010-09-27T13:42:29+0000">September 27, 2010 – 1:42 pm

In a lifetime there are many landmarks that force you to confront your attitudes to sex. One of the most powerful catalysts is discovering an attraction to a person of the same sex. It’s a situation that invokes powerful emotions because it makes -you question yourself, and impacts on your relationships to family and to society. The implications of a same-sex attraction can be far-reaching.

Many of you will go through life and never have the slightest physical attraction to your own gender, not even in your dreams or fantasies, but it’s very likely that sooner or later someone close to you will … a brother, a sister, a child, a parent, a cousin, a close friend … and you may well find yourself in a dilemma between your love or friendship for that person and what you thought were your attitudes to homosexuality.

We have become used to hearing about sexism, racism and more recently agism. They are terms that help us to recognize and understand some of the attitudes we have grown up with; attitudes that are more than just benign intolerance. They have caused fear, anguish, despair and even death. They have the power to isolate and destroy. These words describe prejudice. A glance at my Collins dictionary tells me that ‘prejudice’ means ‘An opinion formed beforehand, esp. an unfavourable one based on inadequate facts …’, and it strikes me that this definition could well apply to conventional attitudes to homosexuality and bisexuality. Could it be that society’s traditional ‘unfavorable opinion’ is the result of ‘inadequate facts’? As we learn more about the diversity of other cultures or the thoughts and feelings of the other gender, we gain the understanding we need to overcome the prejudices of racism and sexism. So what about sexual orientation?

It’s twenty years since the American Psychiatric Association struck homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders, yet despite this official declaration many people in the general community continue to see a same-sex orientation as some sort of disease or abnormality.

It reminds me of the way we used to treat lefthandedness when everyone was ‘supposed’ to be righthanded. I know of one man who was so strongly lefthanded that he could barely even hold a pencil in his right. As a child, his parents finally got the teachers to stop punishing him for writing with his left hand when he became such a nervous wreck that he started pulling his hair out by the roots and refusing to go to school at all. At least we have stopped trying to turn lefthanders into righthanders and are willing to accept that there is room in the world for both. Nowadays, some people are even happily ambidextrous.
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MIND AND BODY: EMOTIONS

2010-06-03T13:02:41+0000">June 3, 2010 – 1:02 pm
The relationship of the emotions and the body must have existed as long as there have been well-developed brains. When a wild animal finds itself down wind from a man and gets the dreaded scent, it is the emotion of fear which starts its muscles in a wild rush away. A large part of our modern conception of progress, however, is the making of new names, and psychosomatic has appeared in the last half century (psyche, the mind; and soma, the body). It is generally thought of as the influence of the mind on the body, but it is also the effect of the body on the mind.
The problem of which comes first is at times as baffling as that of the hen and the egg. The theory of William James was that the sense organs of the body are stimulated by an object and the resulting feeling of bodily sensations is the emotion. But Dr. Walter Cannon reports that he and others practically separated the cortex of the brain from the body and the animals still exhibited normal emotions. I do not see that we have to worry as to which is the cart and which the horse.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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REASONS OF DRUG ABUSE

2010-06-03T13:01:42+0000">June 3, 2010 – 1:01 pm
Much research points to the family as the critical factor in determining whether children will use drugs. A strong family counteracts the influence of a child’s drug-using peers. On the other hand, a weak family may actually encourage drug use. Parental leniency about marijuana, for example, may actually prompt young people to try pot (although strong rules against drugs in the home do not necessarily stop marijuana use).
Most important, psychologists say, the family provides the child with emotional support and models for correct behavior. If the child is unable to share his or her feelings, thoughts, and needs with the parents, the child is more likely to try marijuana and other drugs to feel better. Young people who get into deep trouble with drugs are the ones who use drugs to cope with their environment.
Dr. George De Leon, then research director of Phoenix House, has studied the family’s influence on drug use in detail. He compared the families of adolescents who use drugs and those who do not. He has come up with a formula for a good family that may immunize its sons and daughters against experimenting with drugs despite so-called “friends” who pressure them to do so.
“A good family,” says Dr. De Leon, “provides good communication, closeness, and good role models. A good family shows no compulsive behavior: no gambling, drug use, or excessive alcohol intake.”
In his study of drug abusers and drug abstainers, Dr. De Leon has found that, perhaps more than the mother, the father’s behavior powerfully influences his children’s drug-taking habits. A good father, Dr. De Leon says, shows his children that he is true to his ideals and does not lie to himself or others. In this sense, a good father shows his children strong, self-reliant behavior and honesty.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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CHILD’S HEALTH/INFECTIOUS DISEASES: WHOOPING COUGH (PERTUSSIS)

2009-05-21T07:21:27+0000">May 21, 2009 – 7:21 am

Whooping cough is a highly infectious illness which is most common and most serious in young children. It can be quite debilitating and the complication rate is high. We strongly recommend that you have your child immunised against whooping cough.

Cause

Whooping cough is caused by a germ (bacterium) called Bordatella pertussis. It is passed on through close personal contact, as well as through sneezing and coughing.

Clinical features

The incubation period of whooping cough is between 1-2 weeks. A child can remain infectious for up to a month after the onset of the cough. The entire illness can sometimes last for up to 2 months. Initially your child may just have the symptoms of a heavy cold for a week, such as watery eyes, a runny nose, sneezing and mild fever. The cough develops gradually, starting at night, but becoming worse in the daytime. The bouts of coughing worsen over the following 2 weeks, increasing both in their severity and frequency.

These coughing bouts are usually exhausting, as the child ‘barks’ several times on breathing out, then gasps for a deep breath, which is sometimes accompanied by the characteristic ‘whooping’ sound. The child’s face turns red and he often vomits at the end of a coughing bout. In between these episodes the child is usually comfortable. This stage of the illness can last for several weeks before improvement is seen. The cough itself may be present for months.

Pneumonia, or infection of the lungs, is the commonest complication of whooping cough. This requires treatment with antibiotics. Middle ear infection (otitis media) is another common complication also requiring antibiotic treatment. Small nosebleeds, or haemorrhages inside the eye can sometimes occur due to forceful coughing. If there is significant loss of appetite and persistent vomiting with the coughing bouts, there is a risk of weight loss and dehydration.

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LEAVING YOUR CHILDREN SOMETHING TO LOVE BY:WHAT DO CHILDREN WANT TO LEARN ABOUT SEX?

2009-05-19T05:49:51+0000">May 19, 2009 – 5:49 am

“Can you break your penis off when it is hard?”

No, you can’t break it off. The penis does not really get hard like the word “hard” when you think of wood or a rock. It really gets full of blood that makes it firm so it can join with the vagina for intercourse or be touched and held when you make love with someone you want to be with for a long time. The penis gets firm sometimes because you have to pee or when you are excited and sometimes just because it is part of the way your body works, like when you yawn or sneeze. Just because your penis is rigid doesn’t mean that you are feeling like making love, and you can feel very loving without your penis being rigid.

    ”Don’t girls get all wet when they want a penis in them?”

The vagina sort of sweats sometimes, and that is just like the penis getting firm. It happens for lots of reasons, including being afraid, being happy, and just because giris and women are human and that’s how the body works. The vagina getting wet can make joining the penis and vagina easier, but it doesn’t mean they want to make love all the time. These are things our bodies do that are part of being human, and they happen to you even when you were in the uterus, in that birth capsule.

“How do you know if you love somebody or if they love

you?”

There is a special secret about that. You can tell if you love somebody if you want to help them grow and be a better person. You can tell if they love you if they feel the same. If you or the person lies, or just wants to touch and kiss, or sometimes hurts your feelings intentionally, they don’t love you. And remember, love is work. You have to try to love, and touching and holding is the easy part that comes with trying to treat someone very, very nicely and letting them treat you nicely, too. That’s how you can be sure that your parents love you so, because they work to make you happy and your being happy makes them very, very happy. You can love a person very much and not have sex.

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YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/WIVES’ SEXUALITY: MS. MYTH – THE MOISTURE MYTH

2009-05-18T12:31:00+0000">May 18, 2009 – 12:31 pm

It worries me that I get dry. Sometimes I think I am so turned on and my husband tells me I am dry. Sometimes just when I really want to do it, it bums when he tries to go in me. I think I might be having menopause or something. I’m only thirty-two years old and I’m drying out.

WIFE

If men have been pressured by the focus on erection of the penis as a tangible sign of emotional state, then women have been pressured by a form of’ ‘sexual dipsticking,” checking for vaginal’ ‘fluid levels” as a sign of arousal. Both indicators are invalid because erection of penis, clitoris, and lubrication are merely reflexes that do not accurately reflect our emotional or arousal state. Men can he intensely aroused without erection and intensely erect without arousal, and women can be intensely aroused and not lubricated and abundantly lubricated and not aroused.

The sexist orientation of a well-lubricated opening for a rigid male organ neglected the fact of female clitoral erection. This orientation saw women as being made ready by men to receive men, and is unlike the new perspective, which sees couples getting ready together to merge and share. The early perspectives tried to make sexual response totally different from all other human physiological response. Our bodies just do not work that way. We are a system, and the sexual part of that system does not enjoy or suffer from exclusivity. If you are sweating heavily, you would not necessarily report that you are vigorously exercising. Sweating is determined by many factors, including temperature, humidity, general metabolism, diet, feelings, thoughts, and activity level. This concept is true for lubrication (actually transudation or a sweating of the vaginal walls).

We cannot look to our genitals to tell us whether or not we are turned on or aroused, because they are only a part of a complex interactional system that can arouse us as much as signal arousal. The phallocentric, vaginalcentric orientation limits our potential for sexual development by assuming a one-directional, stimulus/ response mechanism that does not exist in human experience. Learning this key point is another important step toward super marital sex.

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THE DESEXUALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE/WAY TO LEAVE YOUR LOVING: GENDER JUNK

2009-05-18T09:59:29+0000">May 18, 2009 – 9:59 am

Super Marital Sex Rule: Super sex depends on sex roles that evolve within the relationship and are comfortable and acceptable to both partners, not predetermined by society or limited by prior experiences, fears, and a reluctance to be and feel the way one wishes. The roles should be mutually developed, never assigned or surrendered to, and will likely change throughout the marital life cycle. Stagnant, pre-assigned sex roles will severely limit fulfillment.

He doesn’t touch. He grabs. That’s men for you.

WIFE

She just cuddles. She doesn’t get it on, really get down to it. She’s like all women, I guess.

HUSBAND

American marriage continues to struggle with the prescribed roles of man and women in our society. “I chase him until he catches me.” “All women want is love, but they put up with sex.” “He’ll trade a little love for a lot of sex.” These and other cliches were reported by the husbands and wives, and such preconceptions of role assignment severely limited the evolution of a balanced sexual interaction in marriage. It resulted in someone getting made love “to” or “for” and someone doing the “making” of love.

The original Kinsey studies of male and female sexuality indicated that marriage was often accompanied by a diminishing of orgasms for women and a turning to prostitution and affairs for men. It was as if the couples were taking part in a predestined gender dance of a sexist courtship, sexual trade-offs matched to expected roles, self-fulfilling prophecies, conceptions, maternal investment and paternal distance, inevitable decline of sexual interest, and extramarital sex primarily for the man as some form of genetic inevitabilty.

Dr. Donald Symons at the University of California at Santa Barbara suggests that women have a stronger evolutionary investment in the conceptive aspects of sexuality and that they provide the larger “mass” of procreation, the egg. Men contribute only little naked pieces of DNA with tails. He implies that men act somewhat like their sperm: quick, attacking, mobile, and low on investment Women act out their “egg” orientation: stable, receptive, committed, and selective.

Does it have to be this way? Will men always have to contribute a little for a lot and women a lot for a little? Are we victims of some mammalian script? As one sociobiologist had suggested, are our genes wearing us? Can we break away to a more egalitarian interaction between husband and wife? If we cannot, American marriage will continue to de-eroticize, because conceptive and genetic imperatives will have been met and marriage will become a state of maintenance in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Certainly, there is little value for intimacy when human-eating animals lurked behind us as we copulated. Get together, get it on, get out, and live to copulate again. The stress of our modern world seems to create symbolic human eaters and we behave from our neurohormonal past patterns, with men as hunters and women who are kept and who raise the children. Intimacy then plays the role of providing a place for child-rearing, not for providing sexual fulfillment for the cave owners. Are we victims of this mammalian past, or do we have a choice?

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