An Educated Addict’s Mom is an Empowered Addict’s Mom.

Are you an addict’s mom who needs help with codependency?

Debbie Sherrick, a codependency coach who is offering a free class to our TAM members.

About Debbie Sherrick:

Debbie Sherrick is a Holistic Codependency Coach. Motivated by my own personal journey to healing myself from the Inside Out, I love sharing my story of coming out of the shame, low self-esteem and the pain of codependency. I am a certified Holistic Health Counselor and Codependency Life Coach teaching people how to unite mind, body and spirit for a successful healthy life style to achieve more self-love and empowerment in their relationships and personal life. My passion is to educate and encourage others to become healthy emotionally, physically and to develop a deep spiritual connection in taking control of their own lives in these areas.

Information on Empower Hour Codependency Class:

On Tuesday, May 20th, 8pm EST Debbie Sherrick will be offering a free class “Why Detaching Never Fails” on the Empower Hour Show on Google+.

Debbie say’s “When it comes to codependency, some people are confused. We will be discussing some of the behavioral signs of codependency and the myths and confusion of what it "is not". We will see that it’s not so much what we do as WHY we’re doing it and why we struggle with our relationship with self and others.”

"The event is FREE but you must register to attend at www.empowerhourshow.com/live

Much love to all addict’s moms and their families....Barbara Theodosiou founder of The Addict’s Mom.

Visit The Addict's Mom at: http://addictsmom.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

Daily Quote

"There is absolutely nothing in ordinary human experience to compare with the joy of the presence of the Love of God. No sacrifice is too great nor effort too much in order to realize that Presence. " - David R. Hawkins

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MAY 18 v 24 TWELVE STEPPING WITH POWER IN THE PROVERB

There are “friends” who destroy each other,
but a real friend sticks closer than a brother.

STEP 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

What kind of a friend are you ? Misery loves company is what they say and it is one of the truest statements we will hear today . We can tell a lot about a person just by the people they associate with . People will come into your life for a reason ,season or a lifetime . You will know whose who soon enough but in the meantime be your own person .Do not shape your lives to please others or become what they are. Come out be separate and independent you have a destiny and you must live life to the fullest and I guarantee being an addict is not what God has planned for your life. According to the Bible you are a special treasure so believe it and live it.

Colosians 3 10 _ put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

By Joseph Dickerson

We are excited to announce TAM Healthy Moms a new closed group focusing on the health and wellness of Addict's Moms; We are proud to announce TAM NY State Coordinator Debbie Gross-Longo will be working in this group focusing on a healthier you to join visit https://www.facebook.com/groups/607486956006596/

Visit The Addict's Mom at: http://addictsmom.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

How Rock 'N Roll Can Save A Kid's Life
In New York, one program is bringing teens back from trouble with the power of black skinny jeans and electric guitars.



THE FIX

By Neville Elder

05/14/14


About 45 minutes from Grand Central Terminal the Graham school sprawls across 48 acres in the town of Hastings, New York. Elegant Victorian buildings peer down the Hudson river towards New York City. It could be a small university or an exclusive private school. It’s not. The Graham school was the first foster care institution in the US. It started the concept of foster care. Now it houses over 300 ‘at-risk’ day and resident students from New York City.

Downstairs in the canteen a dozen teenagers fill two hexagonal canteen tables with fixed seats. Other tables are stacked in the corner, the room is empty of furniture but full of life. A dozen girls and boys between 14 and 16 sit around and sulk, and chat and gossip. They doodle on notebooks and journals. They talk with staff, occasionally having to be gently reprimanded. They talk constantly, some never looking up from phones. One has a Fender Bullet electric guitar. I sit with him and try to tune it with an app on my phone, but the phone struggles to find the pitch without amplification. As stragglers shuffle in they have to knock on a heavy locked door to get access.


The whole idea is to say fuck you to society and fuck you to the fact you think these kids are garbage and you want to lock them away.

I’ve come to watch the beginning of the Road Recovery’s (RR) workshop. It’s an organization that connects musicians and the arts with vulnerable and troubled kids in care. RR partners with the institutions in a unique way to help change the course of their lives for the better.

Adam Roth is pure rock‘n’roll. With his grey hair slicked back over shaved sides, his guitar-pickin veteran hands are covered with old-school tattoos. He’s tall and skinny with a boyish face and wears desert boots with black skinny jeans. He’s been sober for ten years. He opens a guitar case and takes out a beautiful vintage Hofner hollow-body guitar and plugs it into an amplifier with an electronic ‘squawk.’ He sits down amongst notebooks and backpacks and strums a few chords. The amp stirs the empty room with a natural reverb. Some of the kids look up.

“Who’s got some words? Who wants to go first?” says Adam, a gold tooth gleaming in his beaming grin.

This is their last chance. The children who come here to Graham from the care of NYC social services are in serious trouble. Many have problems with drugs and alcohol. They’re not yet adults but if they don’t get their shit together soon they’ll be flushed into the New York State penal system.

Cheyenne, 15, sits down on the seat next to Adam and without too much encouragement starts singing a lilting bluesy ballad a capella. She reads from a crumpled piece of paper torn from a legal pad.

“We try so hard to be different - but it’s never gonna be alright,

This is the present - my life is a constant fight...”

Her voice is sweet and surprisingly well rounded. Something like Macy Gray meets Billie Holiday. A natural vibrato lifts above her shyness and above the hum of conversation.

“Like a decaying flower - everything just dies,

I will some-day have the pow-er I’m tired of these lies..”

Adam strums his guitar gently with his thumb and fingers, his head tilted towards her song picking out the root notes for her sad melody. He finds the chords easily and they grow stronger as Cheyenne’s voice repeats the phrases to her song. They go around again. She closes her eyes and repeats the phrases, gently swaying to the guitar player's swinging 6/8 rhythm, it’s got an almost Cuban feel and on the last lines - No more judging.. no more fighting - Adam lets the strings ring out and instinctively Cheyenne takes the cue to deliver the last line.

“I will survive.”

Applause breaks out. It’s a song, virtually fully formed in three takes. Everyone is impressed. Cheyenne giggles, reveling in her moment.

By the end of the hour Adam has helped two more kids write songs. These will form the basis for a live concert in 14 weeks' time. It will include dance, art and just about anything else the kids enrolled in the RR program can get excited about.

Gene Bowen, one of the founders of RR, believes that building a relationship with these children through music and art will get them off the fast track to prison.

“A lot of these kids have never had a solid continuous committed relationship in their life. We say, we're going to be here every Thursday night at 6pm for 14 weeks. Even that basic thing.. seems like a foreign idea [to them].”

Adam, like other sober musicians, brings a unique cachet to the project. Rock ‘n’ rollers are anti-establishment by their very nature. They bring their experiences into the Graham school and say:

I identify with you.This is what I did to get myself out of these situations and I’m in recovery from drugs and alcohol. This is where it took me. No one else gave a shit so I had to take responsibility. Whether you can see it or not this is an opportunity. I know, because I’ve been down this road.

Bowen, a former tour manager with the Allman Brothers Band and Alice In Chains, was brought to his knees by his addictions. From touring the world with the biggest rock bands he ended up turning a wrench at a venue in New Jersey, building the stages for the stars he once hung out with. When he got sober in 1993 his life turned around and he got a gig working for Columbia Artists Management putting together tours for orchestras and ballet companies. It kept him busy and kept him off the road. A couple of years later, Jack Bookbinder - who was managing Jeff Buckley for Sony - asked him go out on the road. Jack wanted Gene because he was sober. He refused. If he wanted to stay sober the madness of a rock ‘n’ roll tour was precisely the last place he could go.

“Sony’s hierarchy at the time was full of sober people who knew they needed a babysitter for their ‘pet rock.’ They’d made a huge investment [in Buckley], they knew they needed someone sober to protect their investment.”

Jack persisted. Exasperated, Gene made them an offer he knew they’d refuse. But they didn’t. Gene demanded that if he felt squirrely or freaked out at any time on the tour he could bail. Suddenly, he was back on the road, but this time with a network of sober people embedded in the entertainment industry.

What I saw in the canteen with Adam and the kids was the beginning of the RR program. Gene told me what comes next.

“We build a relationship, we build trust organically over a period of time - which is how we effect change, right? You’re 15, everyone’s told you’re a fucking a loser, a waste of time. We’re saying you have value. I’m 50 you’re 15 guess what? I can save your ass and you can save mine, we can do this together.”

As for the musicians, Adam says:

“We’re working as equals. I’m a rock ‘n’ roll guy - what could be better than writing a bunch of songs and then putting on a show. Fucking great, you know?”

Gene looks for a ‘seamless partnership’ with the methodology of the institution. The Graham staff must interact with the activities.

“It’s the only way this works - no bystanders! You want to be in the room? Beat a drum! And support us with eyes and ears. [Obviously] RR staff don’t have the skills to spot behavior that may result in further problems. We had one kid handing a RR staff member poetry. That gesture, which seemed to be building confidence, was actually acting out. They [Graham school staff] spotted it. They said: ‘this is what you need to do - if this kid is going to be affectionate don’t be affectionate back.”

When the Graham staff engage in the workshops, when they themselves are vulnerable, it breaks down barriers and opens up lines of communication. The kids then tend to seek out those staff members outside of their RR time. Perhaps they’ve been working on dance moves for the workshop, so they’ll take their ideas to that staff member who has been with them in the workshop stumbling around with two left feet.

“We do a newsletter,” Gene told me. “All our staff have to shoot me an email with a synopsis of their workshops. I send it through the hierarchy and let everyone at Graham know what’s going on so when a Graham staff member sees a kid around the school, he says ‘hey you’re working on that song? That’s cool, how did you write it?' It brings everyone together. Pretty soon it becomes part of the culture of the institution.”

But it’s not all ‘High School Musical’. Some of the children at Graham have severe behavioral problems. What I saw with Adam was only the second workshop of that series. It was beautiful and the mood was upbeat and supportive. But tempers can flare from time to time and the Graham school staff then step in to break things up.

“We’ve had riots,” Says Gene, his eyes twinkling, “But you know, if it doesn’t go in a ditch at least once, it isn’t going to work.”

The successes are hard won. But they’re worth it.

“So there’s this kid. . . every time I see this kid he says ‘Fuck you..! I want to kill you.' That's my whole conversation with him! I don’t know what to do with him! All he wants to do is play basketball - I don’t like sports but I ask him: ‘You any good? Can you dribble?' He says: ‘Fuck you, of course I can dribble.’ ‘Can you dribble two balls?.. How bout you dribble two basketballs and create a drum beat?’ Suddenly he’s involved, and he’s on stage at the final concert as the backbone for a dance."

"The whole idea is to say fuck you to society and fuck you to the fact you think these kids are garbage and you want to lock them away. But there is hope, they can become productive members of society.”

Gene waited ten years to lean on his connections in the music industry. He didn’t want RR to turn into a circus and perhaps endanger the kids. New York City is a pilot for a bolder, more remarkable project.

Recovery on the road. The idea Gene was kicking around started on the first Buckley tour in 1996. It was to use sober musicians and road crew when they’re on tour, passing through the cities where they put on the shows, to reach out to the local community and help kids in trouble, kids trying to get clean, to introduce the ideas I saw in Adam Roth’s workshop in the Graham School.

When he was out on the road it was the downtime that bothered Gene - all that sitting around waiting for something to happen. When he came back from the Jeff Buckley tour, Gene was still part of the team but as Jeff was writing a new album Gene was sitting on his hands, trying to figure out what to do next. He didn’t want to be a tour manager for the rest of his life but he’d committed to another four years on the road with Jeff. He talked with Jack Bookbinder and Jeff Buckley about the Road Recovery idea, about maybe taking it out on the next tour. They loved it. But then tragically, Jeff Buckley died. Everything fell apart. In the chaos that followed Gene found an unlikely ally in Buckley’s mother Mary. She saw Road Recovery as a beautiful memorial for Jeff.

“‘I’m going to help you get this going,' she said. She [gave me] a good kick in the ass! She was [the] cheerleader! And she’s still on the board of RR. In those darkest hours she kept pushing me with the words: ‘random acts of kindness.’ She wanted [Road Recovery] to be Jeff’s legacy.”

The plan to set up programs within local communities by piggybacking on the rock shows on tour should work on two simple principles. The workshops must be a ‘seamless partnership’ with the institutions that host them, and once up and running they must sustain themselves when the Road Recovery staff withdraw.

“The crew going in is the tip of the iceberg. Local people, local sober musicians take over and [the local community] become[s] self-sufficient.”

“Getting the seed money to start things was hard work, everyone was saying when you’ve got something we can see working we can talk again, well now [Jack Bookbinder and myself] have proved it.”

It’s been fifteen years since Road Recovery began and now there are self-sustaining programs in such far-flung places as Texas, New York, Alaska and Oklahoma. How does that Jonathan Richman song go? Oh yes!

"1,2,3,4,5,6 Roadrunner roadrunner..."

Neville Elder is a regular contributor to The Fix. He recently wrote about online dating in sobriety and the incompetence behind lethal injections.

One Simple Way to Save Taxpayers $7B Annually
Giving drug offenders treatment instead of prison time benefits us all.



THE FIX

By Paul Gaita

05/15/14


The “war on drugs” carried out during 1980s has resulted in a critical situation in America’s prisons. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world with 2.2 million individuals behind bars in this country, and more than half of those at federal level are serving time for drug charges. At the state level, nearly half of all prisoners have been locked up for nonviolent offenses. The cost of this quixotic pursuit: states had paid $44 billion on prison expenses by 2007 - a 127 percent increase from 1987. During the same period, expenditure for higher learning rose only 21 percent.

Despite these staggering numbers, the zero tolerance policies of the period continue to wreak havoc in our social system, as evidenced by a report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which revealed that more than 3,000 federal prisoners currently serve life sentences for non-violent crimes, with 79 percent of those individuals incarcerated for non-violent drug charges. More than 18 percent of them are serving life without parole for their first offense.

Though both the federal and state governments have been slow to repeal many of these draconian laws, growing opposition from representatives of and adherents to both parties have spurred the rise of numerous programs and proposals that give alternatives to incarceration for drug offenses. An estimated 67 percent of Americans believe that the government should offer treatment for offenders facing jail time for illegal drugs, including 51 percent of all Republicans who responded to the Pew Center’s research.



Such programs are believed to reduce the nation’s massive prison population, as well as the financial toll taken each year to house prisoners, which as of 2013 stood at nearly $7 billion, or a quarter of the Justice Department’s yearly budget. Research conducted in part by Temple University and published in the online journal “Crime & Delinquency” found that only ten percent of state prisoners who abuse drugs or are drug-dependent receive medically based treatment while incarcerated. If that ten percent had received treatment in community-based programs instead of serving jail time, the prison system would save $4.8 billion - nearly the amount paid out to the Bureau of Prisons. Those savings would nearly triple if just 40 percent of eligible offenders received the same sort of treatment.

Diversion programs such as drug courts have offered a first line of defense by keeping low-level drug offenders out of the state prison system. Eligible participants receive a year of treatment under close supervision while pursuing full-time status as either an employee or student. The results have been extremely positive - 75 percent of all drug court graduates remain arrest-free for at least two years after leaving the program, and have saved taxpayers between $3,000 and $13,000 per client - but research from the Urban Institute suggests that for such programs to be truly effective, offenders facing serious charges at the federal level would need to be enrolled. Currently, less than one percent of federal drug cases are referred to drug courts.

Attorney General Eric Holder has thrown the weight of the Justice Department behind diversion programs at the federal level while also calling for an extensive overhaul of sentencing guidelines. The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2014, sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators including Democrats Patrick Leahy and Sheldon Whitehouse and Libertarian Rand Paul, also aims to reduce mandatory minimums at the federal level. But as the drug court program has shown, the greatest force for change regarding drug laws has come at the state level. Twenty-seven states reduced their drug laws between 2009 and 2013, including lowered penalties for possession and use of illegal drugs and the abolishment of automatic sentence enhancements.

New York’s notorious Rockefeller Drug Laws, which set mandatory long prison sentences for drug offenders at all levels, received a substantial overhaul in 2009, including the implementation of Article 216 of the Criminal Procedure Law, which allowed judges to offer drug court alternatives to non-violent offenders. Texas, which spent over $2 billion on prison expenses between 1983 and 1997, found itself out of space in its jails by 2007 and in need of $900 million to continue operating their current prisons. Leaders from both parties joined forces to offer a range of diversion programs that not only reduced the state’s crime rate but also allowed them to close three prisons.

Similar efforts in Maryland, Arkansas and 13 other states produced a dramatic drop in imprisonment rates between 2007 and 2012, with California leading the way with a 26 percent reduction. The Golden State has frequently led the way in offering diversion programs as an alternative to their prison situation, which numbered more than 130,000 individuals in 2009. Proposition 36, or The Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000, saved California taxpayers between $10 and $13 million by releasing from custody over 1,000 nonviolent inmates. The recidivism rate was less than two percent - below state and national averages.

However, statistics such as these have not convinced all state lawmakers to pursue similar revisions to their drug laws. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam recently signed into law a bill that would prosecute pregnant women for using drugs. The media is also calling on Florida legislators to repeal a law that hands down a mandatory three-year sentence for the possession of seven hydrocodone tablets without a valid prescription.

But as greater numbers of the population embrace the idea that treatment and diversion programs will produce more positive and financially responsible results than jail time, the hope is that stories like these are the exception to the rule, rather than the norm.

Paul Gaita is a Los Angeles-based writer. He has contributed to The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Amazon and The Los Angeles Beat, among other publications and sites.