Front Porch Thoughts

There comes a point when that big, fat elephant in the room needs to be booted out.  The family systems disease of substance use disorder is riddled with denial.  And that denial often causes the person identified as “the addict”...

Powerlessness.  Definitely a lesson we all have been well schooled in during the last 11 months.  This lack of control created by the pandemic has caused fear and anxiety to get waaaaay too much of a stronghold everywhere. The grip of...

Roller skating blindfolded on a floor full of marbles. That’s how one relative described living in a family system dealing with an ongoing addiction circumstance.  And that sense of being precariously off -balance and about to crash is not the sole realm...

Drama. Drama. Drama. No one wants a life that feels like a reality TV show gone sideways. But the reality is that life can feel like one endless binge-watch of an off- the- rails reality TV show when you are dealing with...

In the midst of the epic struggle against the family systems illness of addiction in our own families, exhaustion can set in deep as a hard freeze in the dead of winter.

It’s a fact that the month January invites us to make resolutions. But keeping them can be a whole different story. Studies have shown well-intentioned commitments start to unravel by the second Friday of January.  Uh oh… As family members...

An ongoing family addiction crisis can feel like you are constantly living on high alert in an emergency zone. Alarm bells are sounding all around you because substance use disorder is a disease that impacts an entire family system. ...

Chapter 23: THE PRODIGAL SON’S MOM AND DAD Excerpted from Unchained: Our Family’s Addiction Mess Is Our Message NANCY On New Year’s Day I ran into Evelyn, my first newspaper editor, at an event. She was bureau chief in an...

Throughout these last few weeks I’ve heard it said that it might be good, if we could just reschedule the holidays for some time around May 1st.   An interesting idea. I guess we’d have to bring in a snowmaking...