All my best,
Hillary Belk
Recovery Coordinator, House Manger
Bluefield, LLC
Monday, September 9, 2013
NEW BLOG!!!!
All fellow followers, we have officially changed the blog site to uncccrc.blogspot.com since it was under my personal account. Please continue to follow our efforts and show support for a flourishing program that was built with a foundation of love, dedication and recovery!!!! Thank you to the wonderful Center for Wellness Promotion on campus. I miss you guys so much!!!!
All my best,
Hillary Belk
Recovery Coordinator, House Manger
Bluefield, LLC
All my best,
Hillary Belk
Recovery Coordinator, House Manger
Bluefield, LLC
Friday, July 19, 2013
A Little bit of history...
http://www.thefix.com/content/Jimmy-Burwell-AA-Higher-Power-God-12-Step8724
http://www.thefix.com/content/Jimmy-Burwell-AA-Higher-Power-God-12-Step8724
The Angry Atheist Who Made AA Great
Jim B., often wrongly overlooked, fought Bill W. to a draw over the original wording of the 12 Steps. "God" got qualified and tolerance got added. Without this nonbeliever, AA would never have thrived.
Jim Burwell photo via
07/13/13
Bill Wilson and Bob Smith are hardly household names, but the identities of the men who first joined them in what came to be Alcoholics Anonymous have been all but forgotten. Who remembers Jim Burwell, the auto polish salesman from Washington, DC, who refused to believe in God?
Burwell, drinking, had lost some 40 jobs since getting out of the army after serving in World War I. A short, redheaded, pipe-smoking man with strong opinions, he had grown desperate and suicidal until one day in 1938, at age 40, he got a call from Jackie Wilson, a friend of Burwell’s boyhood buddy, Fitz Mayo. Jackie—who had one month of sobriety, but would soon start drinking again—persuaded Burwell to move to New Jersey to get sober with the 10 or so men who had together found a new way to stop drinking.
By 1938, these East Coast founding fathers, Wilson, Hank Parkhurst, Paul Rudell and Fitz Mayo, along with one secretary, Ruth Hock, were officially selling automobile polish and parts through an outfit called Honor Dealers with offices in Newark. Bill and Lois Wilson had lost their house on Clinton Street in Brooklyn. They were living, along with a few of the others, at Parkhurst’s house in nearby Montclair. Hardly a promising group, they were all staying sober by meeting together and following the brand-new 12 Steps written by Bill Wilson. Their vocation was Honor Dealers: “We were all set to put DuPont out of business,” Burwell wrote later in "The Vicious Cycle," which now appears in the "Personal Stories" section of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. But their avocation—staying sober and helping others get sober—would have immeasurable benefits for the world, even if no one’s car got shined and no one’s muffler got fixed.
When he got to New Jersey, Burwell was immediately horrified to find most members of the group droning on about faith and religion and God. They even prayed! Among these Christian salesmen trying for redemption, Burwell and Parkhurst refused to go along with the idea that God was responsible for their sobriety. “All they talked of that first weekend was God,” Burwell recalled with disgust in his Big Book story. The son of a doctor in Baltimore, Burwell had turned against organized religion at a Protestant boarding school where he was sent at age 13. Even as a teenager he despised what he saw as the mindlessness of faith in God. “I swore I would never join or go to any church,” he wrote.
The other men spent time and energy trying to convert Burwell, but it was “nothing doing.” During Burwell's first qualification he burst out, “I can’t stand this God stuff! It’s a lot of malarkey for weak folks. The group doesn’t need it and I won’t have it. To hell with it,” according to Bill Wilson in “Tradition Three” of The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. At first, Burwell’s new friends were adamant. The idea of questioning God was likely as threatening to them as the idea of questioning their fragile sobriety. Burwell had stopped drinking but he defiantly refused the idea of a Christian redemption. When after a few months of sobriety he started to drink again while on a sales trip, they refused to help him. Tradition Three tells the story of men so terrified of losing what they had gained, and so menaced by Burwell’s refusal to believe in God, that they actually took small-minded satisfaction in their friend’s failure.
“I can’t stand this God stuff! It’s a lot of malarkey for weak folks. The group doesn’t need it and I won’t have it,” Burwell said.
But Burwell was as persistent as he was insistent. He stopped drinking and refused to go away, and he was finally allowed to rejoin AA even with his “unacceptable” attitude. His atheism was especially unwelcome when it came to the one piece of literature that Bill Wilson had already written (in pencil on a scratch pad in May 1938), “The 12 Steps," his statement of the new program’s principles. “I would not change a word of the original draft, in which…I had consistently used the word ‘God,’” he wrote in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.
Burwell and Parkhurst, however, refused to sign on to the document. Since they constituted 20% of the group, Bill was forced to hear them out.
Finally a compromise was reached, and four key changes in the document were agreed to. In Step Two, “a Power greater than ourselves” replaced “God.” In Steps Three and Eleven, the single word “God” was qualified by the addition of “as we understood Him.” “On our knees” was cut from Step Seven. And the sentence “Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a Program of Recovery” was added to introduce all the Steps; they were being offered as “suggestions” rather than imposed as “rules.”
It was Jimmy Burwell’s uncompromising stance against religion that initially forced Alcoholics Anonymous into the tolerant, open and welcoming group that has helped more than two million believers, agnostics and atheists. It was Burwell and Parkhurst who bridled at Bill’s original “God”-centered Step Three and pestered the group into the all-inclusive revision, “God as we understood Him.” And it was Burwell whose “bad behavior” was the foundation of the Third Tradition in which theonly requirement listed for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.
As the early AA grew, its members also grew more confident. Soon there were 40 men staying sober and then 60. Sitting at a desk in Honor Dealers, Bill Wilson began dictating The Big Book (then titled100 Men, the Way Out; or Dry Frontiers) to Ruth Hock. Each chapter would go the rounds in New York and Akron with dozens of suggestions added to the manuscript. Bill said that he felt more like an umpire than a writer. Out of this dynamic collaboration came the first 164 pages of what came to be titled Alcoholics Anonymous and gave the fledgling group its name.
Although Burwell mellowed with age and sobriety, he remained a maverick. Making a 12-step call in 1939 to a woman named Rosa, he helped her get sober and then married her. The next year, Jimmy and Rosa moved to Philadelphia, where he started a new AA group. Bill Wilson sent him a letter alerting him to the arrival of Jack Alexander of the Saturday Evening Post and asking him to set up appointments for her in Philadelphia. When Alexander’s favorable piece on AA appeared in the national magazine, the young organization was established overnight as a serious and effective option for alcoholic treatment.
When Burwell had eight years of sobriety, he and his wife moved to San Diego. There Burwell became AA’s unofficial archivist, putting together a huge scrapbook on thick brown butcher paper between welded metal covers (available for viewing at the General Service Office in Manhattan).
“Personally I don’t care a rap who did what,” Bill Wilson wrote to Burwell later. “But if this thing keeps growing and making a stir, I suppose some historian will want to know the real facts by and by. If we don't assemble them now, the record never will be anywhere near straight. And lots of interesting detail and incidents will be forever lost. So your effort in this direction is tremendously appreciated, Jim.”
Burwell’s scrapbook is a miniature history of AA with every newspaper clip, photograph and letter that came across his desk.
Like Jackie Wilson, who placed that first call to Burwell, Hank Parkhurst didn’t stay in the group. He began to drink again and lost touch with the men of Honor Dealers, who had moved to dingy offices in Manhattan, where Bill and Lois lived upstairs from the AA clubhouse. Burwell stayed sober and was an active member of AA until his death in 1974 at age 76. Although he remains little known, his contribution to AA was undoubtedly necessary to its survival as well as his own.
In Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, Bill Wilson paid tribute to Burwell, Parkhurst and the changes they forced in AA’s principles: “This was the great contribution of our atheists and agnostics. They had widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief.”
Susan Cheever, a columnist for The Fix, is the author of many books, including the memoirs Home Before Dark and Note Found in a Bottle, and the biography My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Addiction: The disease that lies - by Dr Martin Seppala
interesting article....Susan
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/health/addiction-relapse-cory-monteith/index.html
Addiction: The disease that lies
updated 6:59 PM EDT, Mon July 15, 2013
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Cory Monteith voluntarily entered a treatment facility for substance addiction in April
- Monteith has been frank about his struggles, saying that he began using drugs at 13
- An autopsy on Monteith is being conducted; police have not yet released cause of death
Editor's note: Dr. Marvin Seppala is the chief medical officer of Hazelden, a private not-for-profit alcohol and drug addiction treatment organization. He's the author of "Clinician's Guide to the Twelve Step Principles."
(CNN) -- Anytime I hear about a death that may be linked to addiction, I am reminded that this is a misunderstood and deadly disease. Deaths caused by addiction have risen astronomically in the past decade. Drug overdose is now the No.1 cause of accidental death in the United States; more common than death by car accidents.
"Glee" actor Cory Monteith, who was found dead at a Vancouver hotel on Saturday, had said that he struggled with substance abuse since his teenage years. The cause of his death is not yet known; medical examiners were set to perform an autopsy Monday.
Whenever someone with addiction dies, I grieve the lost potential and wonder about the limitations of our ability to address this cunning, baffling and powerful disease.
I am also humbled by my own experience with addiction and recovery, and grateful for the help I received.
Dr. Marvin D. Seppala.
It seems nearly impossible to believe that people with addiction would continue to use drugs and alcohol to the point of death, but that is what people with addiction do: They deny both the consequences and the risks of using. As we continue to learn about addiction, we're understanding more about why addicted people behave the way they do. But that's little solace for friends and family.
Addiction is a brain disease, and our knowledge of it has expanded significantly, which has informed our treatment programs and altered our perceptions. We know that addiction resides in the limbic system, a subconscious part of our brain that is involved with memory, emotion and reward.
We refer to this area of the brain as the reward center, as it ensures that all rewarding or reinforcing activities, especially those associated with our survival, are prioritized. The reward center makes sure we survive by eating, drinking fluids, having sex (for survival of the species) and maintaining human interactions.
In late stages of addiction we can see how reward-related drives, especially those for survival, are reprioritized when people risk their families, their jobs, even their lives to continue to use drugs and alcohol. The continued use of the drug becomes the most important drive, at a subconscious level and unrecognized by the individual, undermining even life itself.
When a methamphetamine-addicted mother makes the nightly news after neglecting her children for four days while on a meth run, we can't comprehend how anyone could do such a thing and tend to think she does not love her children. She may have been going out for groceries with the intent to return home and feed her children, but ran into a dealer and started using.
Addiction took over, and she was driven by subconscious forces even though she loves her children as much as I love mine. Her love and her natural instincts to care for and nurture her children were overridden by her own brain, the reward system reprogrammed to seek and use drugs at all costs. Unbeknownst to her, drug use has become the most important thing in her life.
When we witness the incomprehensible behaviors associated with addiction we need to remember these people have a disease, one that alters their brains and their behaviors. We tend to believe we all have free will, so it is difficult to understand how the addicts' perception has been so altered as to drive them to destruction.
We also assume they can make their own decisions, especially when it comes to help for their addiction. In so doing we are expecting the person with a diseased brain to accept the unacceptable, that the continued use of drugs is not providing relief from the problem -- it is the problem, and they need to stop that which has become paramount.
They are unable to make such decisions because their brains have been altered to prioritize use of the drugs, even above survival itself.
Relief of psychic pain, the real, unimaginable pain of addiction, is part of the problem. People have many reasons for seeking relief from pain; some pain precedes the addiction, but most pain is the result of the addiction.
The addicted neglect their primary relationships and they may lie, cheat and steal to continue drug use. And they know this at some level, they recognize their uncontrolled behaviors, but they can't change, they can't stop.
Hopelessness becomes a way of life. Self-loathing, shame and guilt become the norm as the consequences of continued drug use accumulate.
They use drugs to ease the pain, but the very remedy exacerbates the problem. The answer to their dilemma goes unrecognized due to the neurobiological changes that have occurred in their brains.
The good news is that treatment is effective and specifically designed to help people recognize the problem within. Most people are coerced into treatment for one reason or another; they may be facing legal issues, job loss or divorce.
With good treatment their likelihood for recovery and abstinence is just as good as the minority who seek treatment of their own accord. Unfortunately, fewer than 10% of those with addiction recognize they have it and seek treatment.
This is the primary reason people don't seek help. Our largest public health problem goes unrecognized by those with the disease.
Every one of these deaths is tragic. They died of a disease that lies to them. Great talent and intelligence do not protect us from any illness.
We can safely watch such a tragedy, gawking as we drive by the destruction, insulated from the suffering and unable to help. But addiction is all around us and we need to respond to the rising death toll.
All of us are responsible for learning the truth about addiction, raising awareness and intervening for those who have this disease, knowing they are unlikely to be able to do so for themselves.
Friday, July 12, 2013
To Big Book Or Not To Big Book?
Came across this editorial, what does everyone think?
To Big Book Or Not To Big Book?
http://www.thefix.com/content/AA-cults-Big-Book-Nazi-tea-party2069
To Big Book Or Not To Big Book?
http://www.thefix.com/content/AA-cults-Big-Book-Nazi-tea-party2069
Invasion of the Big Book Body Snatchers
After 14 years sober I relapsed, then came back to an AA I barely recognized, full of bright young things quoting the Big Book.
"Be born again into a world without fear and hate" Photo via
07/02/13
I was just back from a slip, sober again about six seconds, when someone at my morning meeting suggested that I go to a Big Book study. I took the advice not out of any desire to embark on the program of recovery as described in the Big Book, but because I was beaten-up so badly I would’ve eaten the book if you promised me that I’d stop hurting.
After 14 years of sobriety, I’d somehow talked myself into having a Guinness stout in a Dublin pub. It’s important to know that it wasn’t like I’d flown to Ireland after answering phones at Intergroup. I’d started to drift away from the program for some time. But whatever precipitated the drink, the aftereffect was a six-year, death-defying blaze during which I progressed from an average, everyday blackout drunk to a middle-aged crack addict. Not a pretty sight, I assure you.
Nor was I that cute in meetings. Counting days after you’ve had years isn’t a happy place. When I wasn’t in a rage, or in cloying self-pity, I was the resident cynic. I desperately longed for the magic I felt the first time around, but everything had changed, including AA. I needed a miracle.
The Big Book study and the Atlantic Group were the Tea Party and I was an Upper East Side lefty, the product of an old New Age of AA that was dead and gone.
So armed with couple of sharpened #2 pencils, and holding onto my brand new fourth edition—and a thread of hope—I headed over to Jan Hus, a Presbyterian church and neighborhood center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I was operating on blind faith. Though I’d read the Big Book, or at least most of the Big Book, no one would ever accuse me of being a student of it. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who was a student of it. When I first got sober in 1981, when I was 26, the Big Book was little more than an afterthought, something old-timers told you to read if you had trouble sleeping. (I’m aware that the Big Book is the most important piece of program literature for just about everywhere else. But below 96th Street, during much of the 80s and 90s, the bible of Alcoholics Anonymous ranked in spiritual priority somewhere between past life regression therapy and The Artist’s Way). So, when I crawled back into the rooms, I was shocked to see that the book stood Atlas-like over Manhattan’s AA. You couldn’t swing a Twelve and Twelve without smacking some Big Book swami right in the head with it.
The guy leading the meeting’s name was Rob (it wasn’t really Rob but he looked like a Rob). He had about seven or eight years, just sober long enough to be dangerous. He was prematurely gray, wore a short sleeve, button-down shirt that really deserved a pocket protector, and owned the impenetrable positive attitude of someone who either lives every moment of his life by the letter of the first 164 pages of the book of Alcoholics Anonymous or is on a serious dosage of Effexor.
The room was packed, overflowing with young, eager followers who fawned over Rob. They all owned those AA eyes—the ones filled with hope, helpfulness and puppy dog tails. A few weeks before, the same friend who’d suggested the Big Book study dragged me to the Atlantic Group, a huge Big Book-centric meeting that fills the sanctuary of a church on Park Avenue. There I’d seen hundreds of the same sets of eyes, the same enthusiastic expressions. My first sponsor always told me not to compare insides with outsides but I couldn’t help feeling like they all had something that I didn’t. They talked about the Big Book with such reverence, such precision, but in a kind of creepy lockstep. It felt so different than the easy-does-it, wide-road AA I fell in love with. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
It’s no surprise then that when Rob spent about 45 minutes explaining the meaning of the title page—which contains a total of about 15 words—I started feeling a little antsy. Then, as he had us underline specific phrases like “this volume” in the preface to the first edition, I felt myself starting to squeeze my pencil. But it was when he dictated a prayer for us to write that was about as long as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and essentially directed us to listen only to what he was about to tell us, that I felt my whole head getting hot. I put up my hand.
“Hey Rob, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Where’d this prayer come from?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“From what book or scripture did you get it?”
“Oh, my sponsor and I came up with it.”
“That so?”
“Yes it is.”
“Well unless your sponsor wears sandals and lived two or three thousand years ago I think I'm gonna leave.”
And I stood up and stormed out. On the street, my anger collapsed into a black hole. The Big Book study and the Atlantic Group were the Tea Party and I was an Upper East Side lefty, the product of an old New Age of AA that was dead and gone. With no place for me in this modern sober time, I didn’t know what to do.
Luckily, I didn’t do anything stupid. And a week or so later I ran into a guy at a meeting that I knew from my first time around. Peter so fully embraces the idea of wearing the program like a loose garment that if he were any more serene, he’d be in a coma. He knows the book pretty well, though he rarely quotes it or cites page numbers. When I asked him to be my sponsor he said: “Cool, man.” My kind of guy.
I read the book again and we talked about it over coffee. When it came time to do some work, we used the Big Book as my guide. It’s a remarkable piece of literature. Ornate, archaic and even misogynistic in places, it’s somehow utterly perfect. And in my opinion, the reason for its perfection has nothing to do with the way it was written and everything to do with the way it’s read. That’s when the miracle of the Big Book happens, when a drunk picks it up and identifies with the words on the page: a spiritual connection that is unique and personal, and can’t be dictated, guru-ed or swami-ed.
I’ll celebrate 10 years this August and I’m not nearly as miserable and angry as I was in those early days. I’ve even acquired some tolerance; some of my best friends are Big Book thumpers and Atlantic Groupies. I can hold my own in conversations with them about the book. I have it on my iPhone. I read it all the time, waiting for the bus or on the subway. And the best part of the app is you can’t underline a thing.
Brian Maclaine is a pseudonym for an author in New York.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Happy 4th of July!!
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness....
Enjoy the freedom of a sober & sane 4th of July!!
Recovery Corner with Judy – 4th of July
Creating a safety plan is essential for us to stay sober during the holiday. Just because I can go around alcohol and not drink, does not mean I should. Every one of us has a different story of alcoholism or addiction, so please be careful when testing your “willpower”.
Remember that it is okay to feel uncomfortable around others who are drinking, and openly say so. If you decide to go somewhere where alcohol is being served, make sure to stay in touch with your inner self the entire time. At the first hint of uneasy feelings or thoughts (only you and your higher power will know when that is), politely excuse yourself and leave.
Remember that one was one too many, and 1,000 was never enough. I believe this to be the case for all recovering addicts and alcoholics, so if you have to plan ahead this 4th of July to protect your sobriety, do so. There are BBQ’s and events that will not have alcohol all over Eugene. Be safe, be smart, and do not go into a risky situation alone. We can easily be our own worst enemy when left to do so. Have a fun, safe, and sober 4th of July!!!!
Judy is a strong member of the recovering community and enjoys giving back to others what was so freely given to her.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Monday, March 25, 2013
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