On my night table sits a small figurine of Saint Joseph sleeping. Over time, the figurine has become a symbol of safety for me. Each night before I go to sleep, I glance at it, pray, and let my heart rest. This is not how I used to feel about father figures. My...
This past April, I traveled to Malvern, Pennsylvania, to speak at the Catholic in Recovery Women’s Retreat. I gave my testimony on Friday night, sharing from the depths of my heart—my childhood wounds, my healing through faith and the Twelve Steps, and the...
As beloved children of God, many of us in recovery are learning how to rebuild the sacred relationship we were meant to have with ourselves—one grounded in love, gentleness, and safety. For those of us familiar with Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional...
The phone rang. I was 23 years old and hadn’t heard from my friend Sara in five years. We grew up together. “What have you been up to?” Sara asked. “Well, I’ve had a life-changing experience and I’ve become a born-again Christian!” I exclaimed, waiting for the usual...
Saint John Henry Newman’s distinction between notional and real knowledge offers profound insights for the journey of recovery as an adult child of a dysfunctional home. Recovery, much like Newman’s view of the Christian life, involves moving from a theoretical...
For members of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA), part of our solution for healing is to become our own loving parents. We do this through 12-step work and by taking a blameless inventory of our caregivers to recognize the wounds that we received from them so that we...
When I first started attending secular 12-step meetings for the loved ones of lust addicts, I noticed that the facilitator of each meeting made sure to read information about the Seventh Tradition, which usually sounded something like this: “Our Seventh Tradition...
“Lord, please don’t let me lose my love for my husband,” I would pray. After years of living with a man with active alcoholism, I felt anything but loving. In fact, I was often in despair, full of fear, grief, and resentment, and on my knees with this prayer on my...
It was an argument over a grocery order. My husband and I were in the early days of my discovering his lust-driven secret life. Because he did not choose to disclose to me all of his deception at once—a concept called “trickle truth”—it seemed that every time I turned...
As I entered my first meeting for family and friends of sex addicts, I looked around the room and studied the faces there, wondering if they would understand. After all, I had a secret in addition to how sex addiction was affecting my marriage, but it was such a dark...