#i have been fighting myself every single day for six years not to relapse and it only continues to get harder as i gain more weight

[birdmanofficial]

proana/other ed accounts are really out here like “if you report me youre a heartless monster because im mentally ill uwu if you dont like my content just block me” as if the rest of us who are trying to recover from the same mental illness cant be triggered back into old patterns of thought and behavior simply by being exposed to a single one of their posts. the very fact that they put their content out on the internet for people like me to stumble across by mistake--especially when it is not tagged or is intentionally tagged incorrectly for exposure--is actively super shitty and no amount of mental illness will make me sympathize with them. 

[x-lulu]

hi, so i’m back again with another rant about mental health

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tw - self harm, mental illness, my experience, just me ranting for a bit, not washing your hair for a week? mention of being suicidal, mention of therapy, if there are others let me know x

also i just want to say that i was just ranting for a bit and getting thoughts out of my head so this might be filled with incorrect sentences and errors, also maybe i didn’t use the right words in that case i’m sorry if i hurt someone’s feelings and you can always educate me

and yes some of this was hard for me to say, but i’m not gonna hide, i’m not gonna pretend that mental illness is like they show in tv shows, movies, commercials, books. yes some might experience their illness as in one of these above, but there are so many things nobody talks about, so i told myself: i’m not gonna be one of those people, while i am a small blog, i’m pretty sure there are a few people following me who are struggling with these kind of things and if i can help in any way, i will

//

on different social media platforms we can see positivity and people talking about mental health and things that can helps or experiences, while I’m all about sending positivity, i also think we should be realistic. now you might think oh she is gonna talk some negative shit, no i am not, while ofcourse i have my negative moments i try to be positive and definitely when i talk to others. the only thing i want to reach with talking about my situation is helping people, make them feel like they’re not alone, that their feelings are valid, all those things, so that’s why i decided to post something about myself when i’m not feeling that great. i’ve posted things about having energy for the first time to put on make up or being clean for a month. well the situation atm is not that good, so i thought why not talk about it, i am not the only person feeling like this and i want people to see mental health and illness for what it is, not what for example tv shows or movies make us think it is.

my mental health issues started when i was around nine years old, of course it didn’t come out of nowhere and i’ve had traumatic situations before it, but that’s the age when i started really noticing how bad my mental state was. i’ve been suicidal ever since, i’ve been to 10 different therapists, psychologist, psychiatrist and basically a lot of different treatments. about six of those I’ve been to in the last year. you see I got help when I was younger but after that I pretended to be fine for years till I got my breaking point in November 2019. I think it’s been about five months since i finally got the treatment that fitted with my situation and helped a bit, two months since I got the medication I needed, my doctor didn’t want to give me any because I was a minor, but eventually she agreed because all my psychologists and psychiatrists said it was necessary, i’ve had up and downs ever since i started this treatment five months ago. that’s the deal with mental illness, you don’t recover in one line, sometimes you have relapses and those aren’t a sign of failure!!!!

there are so many things about mental illness that people don’t talk about. for example taking a shower or washing your hair can be so diffecult. i take a quick bath every day but it takes me a week to build up the energy and the courage to take a shower and wash my hair and yes this is something i can feel embarrassed about but it shouldn’t be, it’s normal! i don’t have the energy to put on make up, i don’t have the energy to keep a smile on my face every second of the day, i don’t have the energy to go to shops even though i really need clothes or food, i don’t have the energy to shave or do my eyebrows. this might gross some of you, i do take care of my hygiene, im pretty big on that, (also some people don’t have the energy for that either and that is also totally fine) but these things are real issues and we should normalise it. things can be hard while other people don’t understand it and that’s okay, we should treat each other with respect. all these things are normal and valid, you don’t have to feel bad about it or hate yourself for it. i can’t be a hypocrite here because yes i despise myself and punish myself for these things, but i know that that is wrong and it’s okay to feel this way and not have the energy. this is also just an example and just something that i’m thinking about at the moment but there are so many other situations, so believe me when i say this. it’s not weird, you don’t have to feel bad about it or embarrassed, you’re not alone, you’re strong, this is normal and you will get through it. not right now, not in a week, but eventually you will get the life you deserve filled with love and joy.

another thing... like i said recovery isn’t something that happens in one line, there are gonna be relapses. selfharm is something i have really mixed feelings about, for me it started out as to feel something different than the pain i was feeling, it started as numbing the voice in my head, it became an addiction, sometimes i can’t leave a matter alone before i cut myself, it can feel like closure to me, it also can feel like i need the punishment, there are so many reasons and feelings when or why i do it, it can be hard to explain. so i’ve been trying to stop for three months i think? at first i went three days without, then i cut myself again, so i tried again, i went two weeks without, tried again, a month, tried again, a month and a half, tried again, two weeks, tried again, four days and now i’ve been clean for three days and i’m still trying. like i said there are relapses. my scars were recovering and now i’ve cut all over them. this isn’t something i’m proud of and yes i felt like i was weak and too scared to tell anyone and disappoint them because everyone thinks it’s going better. but the things is, it isn’t something to feel weak about, it’s a coping system and while it isn’t the best coping system it’s my/our way to get through the pain, it’s a sign of strength, for still being there even though you’ve been through so much. so i will be trying again and again and again, i will be trying as long as i have to, not only for the people who care about me, but also for myself, because yes life can suck, it can suck big time, but life can also be beautiful and i and every single one of you, deserves to feel loved, happy and peaceful. there are so many great things in the world and they will come to you too. we just have to fight and while you may not believe it, you are strong enough and you are not alone. i’m here and i will fight with you.

[holidaywishes]

Welcome to the first episode of “I’m too poor to go to therapy so I guess I’ll tell the internet!”

Let’s be real... I’ve done this quite a few times on here in different ways but I’m making into an actual thing. I figure, a) my life is/can be a lot and sometimes I need to talk about it but, as the title suggests, I’m too poor to talk to a therapist, and b) my family has no idea this site exists so I can air my grievances without worrying they’ll find it.

First things first: this post is being written on my phone because my mom is in the next room and typing on my laptop is too loud. So, excuse me if things don’t come across as eloquently or whatever.

Second thing: these little posts/episodes/chapters, whatever you want to call them will be the most insight you’ll ever get into my life. I try to stay away from personal stuff on here in case I run into someone I know but I haven’t had any instances of that happening so I thought to myself “I’m not so unique that if I tell people these things about me, they’ll know exactly who I am.” So this is what you get, personal details but no first or last name and no selfie until I’ve probably started a podcast (which will likely only happen when I’ve moved out of this place.)

Third and I think last: I’m not looking for sympathy. If you wanna come at me and tell me that people have it worse and that I shouldn’t be complaining, go for it. I can’t stop you. You’re probably right and I recognize that I’m lucky to have a home and a family that, most of the time, is pretty caring and loving where a lot of people have crappy home lives. All I’m doing here, or hoping to do I guess, is keep my sanity slightly in tact. I’m exhausted trying to hold it together for everyone in case my breaking down or expressing something honestly makes things worse. Walking on eggshells in your own home is exhausting. So, again, I’m not looking for you to say “oh I’m so sorry you’re going through this,” or “I can’t believe this! You’re parents suck!” I just wanted a place where I could come and rant and that’s it.

So, here’s some background: I grew in Calgary, Alberta, the youngest of four kids and the only daughter. My mom is a Nurse and my dad works as a Driver Supervisor. My oldest brother was diagnosed with leukaemia when he was 3 and my dad was stationed in Germany while he was in the army. He had gone through a lot of invasive chemotherapy in Germany and it seems to have affected his cognitive abilities. My brother, we’ll call him Aaron, relapsed when he was 8 at which point the doctors asked my parents if they could test my bone marrow to see if it was a match. I had just been born (I don’t know the exact time frame of when this would’ve been but my brother and I are 8 years and 19 days apart so I was still a baby at this time,) and neither of my brothers were a match so the doctors said that they needed to check mine, turns out I also wasn’t a match. After this, Aaron was in and out of the hospital both in Calgary and in Spokane and my mom went with him for most of those visits while my dad was at work, which meant that my brothers and I spent a lot of time with aunts and uncles and cousins. My second oldest brother, let’s call him Brady, had to grow up quite fast — becoming a defector babysitter and pseudo chauffeur (but on a bicycle, it was quite the scene) — while me and my other brother, we’ll call him Charlie, more or less went on with our childhood. There was a lot of pressure on Brady because Aaron effectively became the most dependent than the rest of us, i.e. he was the youngest even though he was the oldest, and I think Charlie really looked up to Brady because of how “cool” he seemed to be. Brady was good at everything. Still is. He plays nearly every sport and is good at them all, he’s a pretty handsome guy, which I only know because every single one of my friends had a huge crush on him, and he’s smart as a whip. He’s also incredibly compassionate. So, it’s easy to see why Charlie looked up to him. It’s also easy to see why, when he couldn’t “measure up” he acted out. We all became the typical stereotypes of siblings: Aaron was the oldest but he was the favourite by default, Brady was the star child, the champion, Charlie was the screw up and the preverbial “middle child” and I was the girl. It came with its challenges — I had to be cute and girly and loving and soft and playful but I had to be more careful when it came to playing outside and I had to understand my “limits” when it came to “certain things,” which really just meant if I were to play with the boys in the neighbourhood, I had to know when to stop. As we got older, the roles shifted slightly. Brady became the favourite, Aaron became the best boy, Charlie stayed the middle brother but he seemed to pass the “screw up” title to me. Aaron and I, once upon a time, had a good brothe-sister relationship. We laughed, we played, we hugged, all the stuff, but somewhere along the way it changed. I can’t say exactly what made it change — maybe it was the fact that in nearly 5 years, I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my mom or that I spent more time at my cousins place than at my own home — but whatever it was, turned pretty dark. We were constantly arguing, I would get in trouble for provoking him but he wouldn’t get in trouble for chasing me around the house with a knife, until eventually we just ignored each other completely. Fast forward to 10 years ago, I graduate high school, Charlie had just moved in with Brady, who had moved out a few years before, leaving me alone with my parents and Aaron, who was constantly upset that he couldn’t move out the way his brothers had. He wanted to be normal but he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t. It was rough but so was our relationship and, as much as I tried, I couldn’t get over a lot of the crap that went on in our childhood. I felt bad for him and the challenges he had but he wasn’t trying to learn how to do anything on his own and it became clear to me that he wouldn’t.

Fast forward four years, I lose my hostess job and start University but have to take out student loans, knowing I’d end up being $100,000 in debt when I graduated. It’s going well, I get a chance to study abroad for six months and I take it because why the hell wouldn’t I? Little did I know that before I left, my mom was going through some pretty serious stuff at work; to a point where her new boss was making it impossible for her to feel confident in her work. She had been at this hospital for 30+ years and loved her job but now she was depressed and anxious all the time. So, there I am in Vienna for only about a month or so when my mom calls me to check in and she pretty much falls apart. It gets worse from there and she has to go on anti-depressants. More happens in between all of this, but that’s a story for a different day. More and more, her and my dad are fighting and I’m more and more put in the middle of them, effectively putting me in a constant state of undiagnosed anxiety.

For now, that’s where I’ll leave it: just because I have some other things to attend to 🙄 but I will be back with another post later on...

[sunflowerkiwi93]

Now That We’re Done - HS

All Parts: HERE

Summary: A twenty year old dancer, Elizabeth Payne, is recovering from a traumatic past with the help of her older brother, Liam. The two of them have been yearning for peace for quite some time, and when a good friend comes to live with them for the summer they start their journey towards finding it.  Through ups, downs, relapses, and two albums- Liz fights through her own mind to get better.

Warnings: There are mentions of abuse, PTSD, and anxiety throughout every part.  Also- mature content. One of the guys doesn’t turn out to be so great- this story is not intended to give him this image.  This is all purely fiction.

Part Six

Rolling out of Liams bed around nine o’clock, I was staying as quiet as I could without waking him.  I ran to my room in a hurry not wanting to bump into Harry.  I could hear him from the kitchen, he was singing and cooking.  My goal was to shower, get myself ready and get out to Harry before Liam woke up.

About half of that happened.  By the time I was heading out of my room looking ready for the day, Liam was heading out of his rubbing his eyes.

“Good morning,” He smiled at me.  I smiled back and let him pass me and then took a detour into the bathroom by the kitchen.  Liam made it out to Harry and they exchanged greetings.  They mumbled back and forth about what was to eat and then laughed at Liams joke about him needing to pay Harry for all the cooking he’s doing.  I laughed under my breath and rolled my eyes.

“Is Liz up......heard her?” I heard Harry say.

“Yeah I walked......she should be.....” Liam faded out.  I wanted one of them to say something about last night.  I wanted to hear just one thing about it, but I knew that was probably an awkward spot for my brother to be in.

“She came in.....slept there......we talked a bit,” Liam’s voice came in and out.

“Was she doing okay?” Harry came through clear as day.  I was only hearing most of his voice, almost none of my brothers.  I knew I couldn’t have been wrong about what he said last night.  Liam said something to him and I could understand none of it.

“That's a great thing to hear......going to do something?” Harry asked my brother.  I wish I could hear what Liam said to him.  I left the bathroom and came around the corner acting surprised to see them both there in the kitchen.  Like clockwork I hopped onto the stool beside my brother and smiled at Harry who’s eyes lingered on me a bit longer today.  Internally I was praying I wasn’t imagining it.

“What’s your plan today, kid?” Harry asked, sliding a plate of bacon in front of me with a grin, “That plate is just for you.” He joked and I cheesed thinking of our first morning together last week.  Liam's eyes passed back and forth between Harry and I.

“First, don’t call me kid,” I cringed, Harry and Liam let out a laugh, “And I don’t know I was maybe hoping we could go somewhere?” I asked leaving the floor open to either of them.  Harry and Liam shared a glance.

“There’s an idea,” Harry said smugly.  Liam had clearly told him part of what I was saying last night, “Why don’t we, Liam?” He called out as if my brother wasn’t right at the counter.  Liam just shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” He said to mine and Harry’s surprise.  Both of us turned to look at him.

“Are you okay?” I asked with a pout.

“Yeah,” Liam nodded, “Just woke up with a headache.  I think I’ll stay in today, thinking of taking a quiet one.” His eyes looked down at me, sending me a silent message.  I smiled at him.

“Okay.  Harry and I can go?” I asked again, facing Harry who was already nodding quickly.  He crunched a piece of bacon between his teeth and raised his eyebrows pointing the rest of the bacon at me.

“Where shall we go?” He asked with his mouthful.  I snatched the other half of the bacon from him and stuck it in my mouth finishing it.  He looked at me with sad eyes, dropping his hands down by his sides.  I started to laugh but nearly choked on my food which got Harry and my brother to roar with laughter.  We laughed for a minute and came back with some deep breaths.  Harry's eyes fell on me.  He wiped his hands across his face, brushed them through his hair, then licked his lips and leaned over the counter toward me.

“So?” He raised a single eyebrow.  I smirked and took in his face.  His skin was still golden and his eyes were brighter than ever.  His lips were pulled into an inquisitive pout as he watched me too.

“I need a shower,” Liam broke our silence slipping off his stool, “You guys be careful, please?” He pointed to Harry and he nodded at my brother.

“Always,” His eyes turned back to mine, “Alright, miss.  Let’s get out there,” He straightened his body out and came around the counter to hold my hand and help me off the stool I was sitting on.  He reached into his pocket and pulled my phone out, I guess Liam had given it to him before.  He held it out for me to take and I slipped it into the back pocket of my shorts.  They were a pair I hadn’t worn in a year.  I topped it with a navy blue tank top. Harry was dressed in dark pants and white t-shirt.

“Look at you, all cute,” He grinned as he followed me to the door.  I glanced at him over my shoulder and just shook my head trying to hide my blushing face.  He beat me to the car and opened the back door for me and let me slide in first.  I knew he was perfectly comfortable with driving us but for my sake I knew Liam suggested we have someone else take us around.

“Was this planned?” I questioned, slipping my seatbelt on raising an eyebrow at him once he was in the car beside me.  He let out a heavy breath that I suppose was a muffled laugh.

“You were the one up and ready to go,” He cocked his head looking at me suspiciously, “I believe you knew and just followed along.”  I scoffed and nudged his arm away from me.

“I did not know!” I defended myself.  Harry smirked and shook his head, again his eyes lingering on me longer than before.

We stopped at the coffee shop before we went anywhere else.  Harry opened the door for me, after looking around the spot of course, he then held my hand helping me out of the car.  We ordered our drinks, Harry paid, and then we hopped into a booth toward the back of the shop.  When Harry's name was called he got up, grabbed our coffee and came back to me.

“Thank you,” I said, taking a long sip.

“Goodness,” Harry joked watching me, “You love it don’t you?”

I nodded obnoxiously, “My favorite. Liam picks this up for me a lot.” Harry gave me a soft smile and took a sip of his.

“I’m thinking maybe I could come out by myself soon and get it for myself,” I told him.  Harry's eyes lit up.

“Really?” He asked, sounding excited, “That’s great.”

We went on to talk about what else I could possibly do alone or with him, and the list got longer and longer.  Harry watched me as I spoke.

We finished the coffee and went on our way back into the car.  As soon as we got comfortable a familiar tune sounded from the radio.

“Oh boy,” Harry said flatly right away following it with a chuckle. His song Kiwi was coming through the speakers.  I gasped loud, jaw falling open, “No, no, no.” Harry grinned as I leaned in to shake his arm.

“I’m having your baby!” I shouted along with the song starting to swing my hair around.  I asked for it to be turned louder.  Harry watched in shock.

“It’s New York baby, always jacked up!  Holland Tunnel for a nose is always backed up!” Harry joined me and I shook my shoulders to every beat.  His eyes stayed on me.

“It’s getting crazy! I’m having your baby!” I continued to sing along.

“This is great,” He clapped his hands together before falling forward in complete laughter.

“She sits beside me like a silhouette,” I slowed down and gripped his arm, “Hard candy drippin’ on me till me feet are wet,” I closed my eyes and held a hand to my chest dragging it up along the side of my face, “And now she’s all over me it’s like I pay for it,” I ran a hand through my hair, whipped it around, “It’s like I pay for it,” I opened my eyes to look at him.  He sat there with his jaw slightly open watching me.  I giggled at him and watched him as well.  The song played out to the end and I rocked out to every second.  The radio was then turned down.  He glanced down at my hand still holding onto his arm.  I quickly pulled it back.

“That was incredible,” He stated.  I sat back in my seat and bit my lip.  His eyes still haven’t turned away.  I turned mine back and shot him a sly look.

“Some songs just make me move,” I shrugged, “And most of the time it’s when no one’s looking.” My heart skipped a beat at the words that just left my mouth.  I could feel heat rising to my face so I looked out the window before he could notice.  I noticed he never turned away from me.  We sat quietly humming to the radio for a while until we stopped in front of a record store.  We were in the center of the city now, I hadn’t even realized how far out we’ve come.  I sat up straight and my body went stiff.

“Alright to go in?” Harry asked softly.  I hesitated before agreeing.

“We can wait a minute,” He said, but I shook my head, unbuckled myself and went to open my door, “My god, wild child.” He jumped out his side at lightning speed.  I stepped onto the sidewalk as Harry came to my side.  I looked in both directions and saw minimal people, so I started for the door and Harry followed letting me take the lead.  The door opened with a jingle and the older woman, maybe in her fifties, at the counter looked up to us and smiled.

“Hey kids!  How are ya?” She asked.  I reached back for Harry as I returned her smile.

“We’re great, and you?” He sounded so charming.  He put his arm around my shoulder as he finished his conversation and guided me through the store.  The aisles were skinny but the racks were tall, almost taller than Harry.  He fell behind me again and placed both hands around my shoulders.  We wandered for a while, about half an hour, and I listened to Harry talk to me about his favorite artists.  Whenever we came around to one that I liked I pointed it out to him.  He would ask me questions about them and listened intently sounding completely intrigued with what I had to say.  We were strolling through the E-F-G section when we both excitedly reached for Fleetwood Mac’s, Rumors.

“Whoa!” We said at the same time.  I playfully pushed his hands away and snatched the record up.

“Okay, okay,” He groaned, reaching into his pocket for his phone.  He held up his camera, “Smile for me,” He breathed.

His camera snapped and I could tell he was sending it to someone.

“Excuse me,” I said a bit annoyed, “Who is that for?” I stood to my tip toes to try to read his phone.  He held it high where I couldn’t see it at all.  Slouching down I pouted and looked up at him.

“It’s just Stevie,” He shot me a wink.

“Harry!” I shouted and he shushed me right after.

“Record shops are chill, don’t shout, everyones high,” He whispered in a mocking serious tone making us both fall into a fit of silent laughter.  I took a much needed deep breath and blew it out louder than expected making us crack up once more.  I held my stomach and leaned into Harry's chest, both of us trying to calm down.  He held the back of my head and took a few breaths and contained himself.  I came back as well and looked up at him.  We were both still cheesing, I just couldn’t get my smile to go away.  Harry’s fell a bit as his eyes scanned my face.

“You look beautiful,” He sighed.  My smile faded slowly and my eyes softened.  Harry's phone vibrated and he pulled away a little to peek at it.

“Ha, Stevie thinks so too,” He grinned at me.  I pinned a hand to my face and hid my geekiness.  His hands found my shoulders again as we paraded around some more.  We snaked up and down every aisle and finished the alphabet.  Harry had a decent stack of records in his hands.  He kept talking to me about needing extra inspiration for his second album.  Coming to the front of the store the woman at the front smiled at us again.

“You want to go to the car or wait here?” He asked me.  I glanced out the window and saw a few girls outside the door, Harry saw them as well.  He knew I would stay inside so he shot me a wink and waltzed up to the woman to pay for his proud findings.  I wandered over to a basket of clearance records on the wall across the store.  I flipped through it aimlessly admiring the different album art.  I flipped all the way to the last one and it surprised me.  It was a vinyl copy of One Directions first album, Up All Night.  My eyes scanned across all five of their faces.  All of them smiling, obviously extremely proud of their work.  I giggled under my breath at how young Harry looked, even my brother.  My eyes became stuck on one face and he was sitting right next to Harry.  

I can remember those days.  When my brother brought all of them home during the filming of XFactor.  How I felt like an absolute child around them because I was only fourteen.  I remember crushing on him for a while, but letting it go.  I had thought I wasn’t good enough, so I stopped pining after him.  Not that a seventeen year old would think to like me.  Harry and I got on really well, we were the closest in age, he was sixteen and our ages overlapped by half a year.  When I turned fifteen he turned seventeen a few months after so it was just a chase of growing older.  After XFactor was over they moved, and they went to record the album.  I fell out of touch with some of them for a while.  I remember barely getting to see my brother, but by then the majority of my time was taken up by dance.

Still staring at the album cover I didn’t even hear Harry walking towards me.  He hooked an arm around my neck.

“What are you gawking at?” He questioned, “Oh man,” His voice fell dramatically and I couldn’t help but laugh at it.

“Feels like ages ago,” I said.

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, “Thank god!” He exclaimed, continuing the dramatic facade.  I playfully hit him in the chest and turned to leave the shop, but he stopped me before I could go any further.  His arm snaked around my waist.

“You okay?” He motioned toward the album still sitting out in the open.

“Yes,” I reassured him, “I am.  At least I need to be.” He cocked his chin up at the end of my sentence.

“Aha,” He grinned.

“Stop,” I rolled my eyes and tried not to smile, “Let’s go.” I grabbed his hand and pulled him to the door.  He came around me to make sure he held the door for me, but also made sure he went outside first.

“You take care of that one,” The woman behind the counter winked at Harry.  He waved to her.

“I always have,” He called back and then walked me to the car.  I kept my cheesiness at what he just said to myself and got back into the car.

As we pulled away from the store Harry was fiddling around in the bag that had all the records in it.  He pulled out four and handed them over to me.  Surprised, I took them from him.  The one on top was a Led Zeppelin record.  I gasped.

“Harry,” I whined.  I looked at the other three.  A Madonna record, an Elton John record and on the bottom was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors.  I stared at this one for a moment.  Harry wasn’t paying attention when I turned my gaze to him.

“Harry?” I whispered, poking his leg.

“Hm?” He snapped out of his thoughts.

“Why’d you do this?” I put my hands on top of the records.  His eyes went from the records, to my eyes, then back to the records.

“They’re your favorites.  Everyone needs their favorites on vinyl,” He said.  I understood him, nodded and stacked them back together.  I could still feel his eyes on me, but when I went to look at him he turned away.  My emotion started to get the best of me and I couldn’t help it or stop myself.  I leaned over the seat and kissed his cheek and thanked him.  He was surprised, I swear his cheeks went pink.  He kept his attention forward.  I directed mine out my window and laid my head back.

Harry brushed a hand across his face and pushed it through his hair.  He cracked a smile and shook his head.

The rest of the day was spent in and out of pointless stores, and going into different ice cream shops just to try flavors.  We took the time to figure out who had the better chocolate and Scoops for Two came through with the win.  Harry pulled me into a guitar place and tried to get me to play an instrument.  I fought him but decided I’d try the drums, and boy did Harry regret that.  I was banging on them like there was no tomorrow not caring what anyone thought.  He took a video as he was laughing.

“That better not go to Stevie!” I shouted over my horrible noise.

“If you don’t stop it just might!” He threatened and I jumped off that seat as fast as I could.

We stopped for some food at a new place that popped up while I was holed away at home.  Harry had only been there once but they knew his name, and the girl at the counter had no problem flirting with him.  He just ordered politely and held onto my hand.  Again we found a booth in the back away from any future commotion and our food was brought to us.

I dove into my fries straight away.

“You having a good day?” Harry asked me full of life.  I widened my eyes and smiled with a mouthful of fries.

“Good is an understatement,” I told him once my mouth was empty.  He smiled back at me, his mouth full now.

“I feel so great,” I said, putting a hand on my chest.  I closed my eyes and shook my head, “I’ve missed so much.  In the city and just life in general.”  

I went on and on about the things we did and what we saw.  How far away from the house we had travelled and how I realized I could control how I felt.  We talked about the things we could still do.  Harry went on to tell me how much we had left to see, the parks and the paths through the woods where you could see the flowers and stroll in the sunshine.

“I’d love to go,” My chin was sitting in my hands and my elbows were propped on the table.

“It’s almost the end of June.  We have all summer,” Harry smized.  He was leaning forward against the table too.

“Want to get out of here?” He sat back and raised his eyebrows.  I nodded and we were up and out in a minute.

Driving towards home Harry and I sat closer in the backseat, and we had returned to our conversation of the things we could do.  He talked again about the walks and how far you could go and the peace you would feel just from the sounds of the birds and the feel of the breeze against your skin.  I was gazing at him with such adoration.  His mind was beautiful and so complex.  The way he used his words and the way he would speak was enough to make you melt into the floor, especially when his voice fell deep.  Our arms were brushing up against each other as if we were trying to occupy the same space.

“Can we walk from here?” I cut him off sharp.  He turned to me in question.  I knew we were almost home, from where we were we had 10 minutes left in the car.

“Course,” He agreed and we pulled off to the side of the road, “No need to stay with us, we’ll make it.” Harry thanked our driver  who stayed with us all day and shut the door.  I took a deep breath, closing my eyes, taking in the summer air.  We were on a quiet road, not too many cars or people around this area.

“It feels so good to be outside,” I said quietly.

“It’s the best,” Harry smiled watching me, “Shall we?”  He held out his hand for me to hold and we started in the direction for home.  

“I don’t wanna be inappropriate or anything to tell you this, but you had a great day,” Harry said to me as we walked side by side, our arms still pressed together.

“Not inappropriate at all, I agree with you,” I answered.

“Like... you... you were just-“

“Is Harry Styles at a loss for words?”  I teased faking a panic.  He groaned audibly and laughed at himself.  We strolled by a small park no where near the size of the ones Harry was talking about, but I pulled him in towards it anyway.

“Liz, it’ll be dark soon,” He said, trying to pull back.

“It’s what, seven thirty? We have like forty five more minutes of sunlight let’s not waste it,” I pulled a little harder and he gave in shuffling towards me.

“Who is this girl?” He exclaimed, “Is this Liz?” He asked playfully.

“Yes,” I paused and looked to him with fire in my eyes.

“I haven’t seen this side in a while,” He reached for my shoulder and pulled me into his chest.

“She’s comin’ back,” I rolled my eyes.  I threw my arms around his shoulders and behind his neck and he slid his around my waist.  I took a breath and my heart started to beat faster.  My eyes were glued to his and this time I couldn’t break away.  He leaned down and pressed his forehead to mine.  Around us, once again, the sound of crickets and our soft breathing.  The world moved in slow motion. I was stuck where I was unable to move hoping to God he was going to say or do something.

He suddenly tilted his head slightly to the side and came closer barely brushing our lips together before he pressed them against mine.  My heart erupted into flames, my hands slid up into his hair as he held me tighter.  He pulled away for a second.

“My god,” He breathed heavily before pressing his lips to mine once more.  I felt myself fall completely into his touch as his hands moved around my waist.  I slid mine down to his neck, our lips still moving together.  My thumbs graced his cheeks softly and my palms wrapped the sides of his neck.

Harry pulled away again after another minute or two.  There was no way either of us could tell time right now.

Our eyes met.  I looked to him in awe and he returned it.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered and we both smiled softly.  My heart fluttered at his little laugh as he watched me.  He reached a hand up to my face and leaned down to kiss me once more.

“We have to go,” He said quietly as if someone were to hear him.  I pouted my bottom lip and he scrunched his nose.

“Okay,” I sighed, grabbing a hold of his arm and putting it around my back.  We walked back in comfortable silence, my head resting on his shoulder bobbing along with our steps.

“Hey,” I looked up at him and tugged on his shirt.  He focused down on me.

“Yes?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Can you do that again?” I shot him a goofy smile and he laughed out loud then leaned down to kiss the top of my head.

“That’s not gonna cut it,” I shot him the goofy smile again and got him to laugh again.

“Oh no, I’ve created a monster,” He shook his head as I laughed at him mercilessly.

[gamebird]

This morning I found that my daughter has not been taking her anti-depressant for a couple weeks because according to her, “I felt happy anyway, so I didn’t need them.”

I’ve seen five or six people in my life cycle through this bullshit, so I know it’s very common. My dad and my ex-husband both went through periods of ‘My diabetes medication has leveled out my blood sugar, so I will now stop taking it,’ so I know it’s not just the psycho-active stuff that causes this perverse fuck-up in thinking. I’ve also seen people do it on dieting, from the classic ‘I skipped breakfast, so it’s okay for me to eat twice as much as normal for lunch’ to the ‘I’ve reached my target weight, so I’ll go back to eating excessively.’

So, again, not a trait for anti-depressants. But I’ve seen it at work with people on mood-altering medications as well.

What’s my best way of countering this with her? She’s 14. Last year she tried to commit suicide twice (both times by pills) and she’s improved a great deal since then. Probably due to the medication.

As for myself, even with my daughter’s well being on the line, I find it very difficult to keep to a schedule where I get her up to take her medication, argue with her to unlock her door, persuade/argue/demand that she get out of bed, use my limited social skills to the maximum to get her to come to the pill caddy, take her pills, watch her take her pills, and then double-check that she actually took them. It’s very nearly beyond me, even though I know at the end of the road of not doing this involves her having another relapse. But the prospect of having to start every single day fighting with her over this is crushing me.

[every-day-is-the-gospel-tru-blog]

Song of Solomon 8:6

"Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned."

So recently, I’ve found God for the first time in many years, since I was like eleven. So, I’ve not believed or had anything to do with Christianity because I felt that all the trauma that happened in my life was God’s fault, that He didn’t really love me and that He wanted me to suffer greatly. I thought, “If that’s God’s plan, He must really hate me.” 

When I was around three until I was ten or eleven, I went to a private Catholic school. While I was there, I was bullied really badly. I’m bisexual, and I feel like the other people in the school knew before I did, which was very confusing for me. They did horrible things- they wrote me hate notes, wrote tons of rude or hurtful things on my locker, destroyed my artwork, and said rude things about my appearance that still affect me to this day. 

I was going through a rough period at that time of my life. I was being sexually abused. My dad started to have mental health issues, and started beating me for small things that made him really angry (and were mostly things I couldn’t change for him.) On top of that, my brother was fighting drug and alcohol addiction. So yes, that was all really tough for me.

My mom took me out of the school and placed me into public school in sixth grade. While I was grateful that I was away from everyone there, I was starting over. I didn’t have friends at all. And then the popular group adopted me into their clique. I was thrown in a new world of makeup, fashion, hair, and boys. And while I didn’t understand it, I wanted friends so much that I didn’t care about the quality of friend they were to me. 

And then, my ‘friend’ told me that I was fat and no one was my friend because I needed to lose weight. I was already really thin, under 90 pounds. So, believing her fully, I stopped eating. I would starve myself until I couldn’t stand the hunger, and then I would only eat one or two Rice Krispies treats, and starve myself again. I lost weight dangerously fast; thirty pounds down, I knew I was going down a dangerous path. And I strayed further from God. 

When I was so dangerously thin, I thought to myself, “I’ve absolutely had it. If this is God’s plan, He must hate me. He isn’t real. He isn’t here with me. He doesn’t exist.” 

So, I stopped praying. I stopped reading the Bible, praising Him, and going to Church, even on Christmas and Easter. I actually threw my Bible out the window! I sold my favorite Christian books, gave away my rosaries, stopped going to my favorite religious camps. 

When I was twelve, I had my first suicide attempt. I had enough; I was empty, I was depressed, I was drinking alcohol so much that I would be getting wasted every single night, waking up and not knowing what happened the night before. I would shoplift, and lie, and cheat, and steal, and drink drink drink. I was a bit of a whore, too, I’m not going to lie; I had sex with various people, trying to fill up this void inside me. But nothing worked. 

I was hospitalized into a mental institution after my suicide attempt, and I met some really nice people who were sick, just like me. I met some good friends. I was in there for a month and a half, and I was so behind in school that it wasn’t even funny. When I got out, I didn’t see a point to anything; I didn’t see the point of going to school, or trying to learn, or even trying graduate high school. I was hurtling down a dark dangerous path, and it still gets darker; hang with me still, guys. 

Then, while I was twelve, I started self harming. I started cutting myself, and buying blades. When I was in school one day, my sleeve rolled up and someone saw my arms, which led to them telling the entire school. And there began my bullying. People would say things that were really horrible, and some people gave me bags of razors and taping them to my locker. Some of them actually gave me a water bottle full of bleach and told me to kill myself. 

I had my second, third, and fourth suicide attempt when I was thirteen. I was institutionalized again. But I didn’t want to get better. I liked the habit; I liked the feeling of bliss it gave me. I liked being able to control something in my life. But I still was so frustrated because I still felt this empty void in my chest. 

When I was fourteen, I was put in a residential treatment facility, which is a hospital but you stay for at least six months. I would still self harm; I would scratch huge gashes all over my body. I would find anything to use to self harm; I even sneaked in contraband. Just so you know, don’t ever do this, because the consequences were that I pushed my discharge date to two months later than the initial plan. 

And when I was fifteen, I relapsed with my alcohol addiction. On top of that, I would throw up after I ate. Every time. Which really was horrible, because my weight fluctuated like crazy and I always felt sick. And my teeth felt fuzzy. All the time. Not fun. 

Skip to when I was seventeen. I was in a new school and met my best friends in the world. I was chain smoking cigarettes; I was still cutting; I was still drinking; I was still angry at the world. At that time, my friend sexually abused me for six months. At school I broke down and told my staff, and they immediately helped me. 

Eighteen, I was still cutting and smoking cigarettes. You know the drill. 

Nineteen, I had been freshly out of an abusive relationship. My heart was broken and tender and colder than ever before. He had warped my vision on life, love, and true existence. 

And then, just a few days ago, I finally just sat down and said, “Lord, I accept You into my life.” And when I finally said that, I felt so much peace and love and acceptance. I felt my heart heal; I felt my soul be healed; my suicidal thoughts and feelings were gone. My urge to self harm is gone. I don’t have that void anymore. 

Now, I wish I had accepted God. I wish I turned to Him earlier. I wish I had Him in my life more. When I prayed that night, I started crying from the remorse, apologizing so much for leaving Him. He is the seal on my arm; He is the seal on my heart. I love you, God. Thank you. 

-Alex

August 28, 2019

[depressionresource]

On “It Gets Better”

(TW: excessive swearing, angry tone, suicide, self harm, sexual assault, emotional abuse, queer issues, medical stuff)

When people say "it gets better," it sounds empty. They don't know you--right? They don't understand the depths of what you're going through. You're different, broken. You're never going to be better. Fuck them for even saying that.

I've been there too.

Let me just give you a quick rundown of my life for the last ten years, just so you know that I really do understand how much your life sucks.

Here's what's on my mental illness resume:

I've survived three suicide attempts; a full entire decade of wanting to die every single second. Of blowing out birthday candles and wishing for the end of it all, every year. Thinking that everyone felt like this and I was just too weak to deal. Turns out it was depression, anxiety, panic attacks, a phobia, PTSD, and a dissociative disorder-- not normal shit. I went through six therapists, four of which were complete assholes, and two doctors trying to find medication that works (one of which was also a fucking asshole). Did stuff like excusing myself from classes and club meetings to silently sob in the bathroom for ten minutes and then come back like nothing happened. Hundreds of cuts and the resulting scars. Hating myself and everyone around me. Missing seven classes a week because I couldn't get out of bed. Eating too much, eating too little. Taking a break from college and thinking I wasn't strong enough to make anything of myself. Four years of sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape. Emotional abuse. Threats of violence. A brief stint of homelessness. Break ups that left me reeling. Coming out as bi, coming out as transgender, and getting some heavy queerphobia in return.

I thought nothing but cowardice was holding me back from suicide. I believed wholeheartedly it was never going to get better.

Spoiler alert: it did.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here's how getting better works. This is the part nobody tells you.

1. There are people that are going to help you. The vast majority of people are assholes, if not actively malicious, but there are a few gems out there that will genuinely try their best to get you to better places. They are out there and you will find them. They can be doctors, they can be therapists, they can be friends and lovers. They will teach you lessons by accident and on purpose. Be the best person you can be for them, because they're worth it. Even if they move out of your life, what they did for you lives on in your refusal to give up on yourself.

2. There are methods that you've never even heard about that professionals can use to improve your life. You might avoid therapy thinking "What is more whining going to do for me?" Instead, think of therapy as one-on-one tutoring. Have you ever heard of dialectical behavioral therapy? Probably not, but it can change your life like it has mine: step by step.

Sure, therapists need to get to know you and your life and your situation (which does involve plenty of "whining") but then they help you figure out how to deal. Together you can work on solutions that work for you. Some of them will be weird and silly, but they will work because you have discovered them yourself. You are unique, what you've been through is unique, and therefore you need your own unique game plan.

3. Someday, you will be in control of your life. (I'm assuming you're a teenager now, since most of Tumblr is.) Forget what everybody has said about high school being the best years of your life. High school is a living hell. You're an adult (pretty much) and yet you have no fucking control over your life. When the school district or your parents say jump, you say how high. It sucks.

Just wait until you're like twenty or twenty five before you decide that life isn't worth living, okay? By then you could be in Taiwan. Or Cuba. Or Burning Man. Or just a plain-ass apartment with people who love and understand you. You can spend your money on what you think is important. You can make your own schedule. You can eat whatever you want. (You can have booty calls over whenever you want.) You can cut off toxic people entirely-- including family. Of course, once you're out there you'll find that you actually want to do the responsible thing for you, but YOU get to decide what that looks like.

4. Getting better is hard fucking work. It's trying fifteen different medications and then taking five pills every day with breakfast. It's going to therapy and talking about the last things in the world that you want to talk about. It's doing the exact opposite of what you desperately want to do. It's about hearing and acknowledging the hard truths about what you've done to others and owning up to it.

And it never ends. You choose and re-choose recovery every single day when you get out of bed. You're never going to be perfect, but you're going to strive every day to be better than the day you were before.

This is not about "bootstraps" nor is it about "tough love." Both those concepts are harmful and ridiculous. That doesn't mean, however, that you're off the hook. Just like an athlete, you have to be constantly moving your way to a better place if you're going to get anywhere.

5. You're never going to be cured. Some part of you will always be sad and sick. You will always be fighting. It gets a hell of a lot easier with time and with practice, but the shadow will never leave. Sometimes, you will fuck up and relapse, and you need to accept that. You will have bad days.

This doesn't mean that you can't have an amazing, meaningful life. It just means you're going to end up ten times stronger than the people who kept you down and fucked you up.

Right now, I have found some medications that keep my brain in some sort of order. I'm in therapy and I do a shit ton of work on my own. I have had three or four people in my life who have encouraged me and taught me how to do better and how to love myself more. Recovery is the entire focus of my life, but I'm getting somewhere. And the more I work on it, the better I feel and the faster I get where I'm going.

6. None of this is fucking fair. You're going to have to work ten times harder to get through life than other people with more agreeable brains. You did nothing to deserve this suffering, but it's up to you to fix it.

Get angry about all the needless, meaningless bullshit you've been through, tap into that spite, and let it help you grow and keep growing.

Decide today, and every single day from now on, that you're worth it.

[afriendlypokealien]

News and helpful information on POS Equipment & Point of Sale.

Maggie Luna and her three children. She lost her parental rights in 2015.  Courtesy of Maggie Luna

Maggie Luna tried to fit all of the love she had for her three children onto a tri-fold poster board a week before her court date. Each section of the plain white board was adorned with a photo timeline dedicated to one of her children, illustrating Luna’s presence in their lives from birth up until the day they were taken from her. It was a desperate attempt to persuade a Harris County judge to let her keep the kids.

But the judge didn’t bother to look up at her or her poster before terminating Luna’s rights to her children.

When she lost her parental rights in 2015, Luna was battling drug addiction, in an abusive relationship, and struggling to hold down a job that could support her three children. Six years later, she says she’s in a much better place. Luna has spent the last three years sober, in therapy, and learning how to use her own experiences to push for change through advocacy work. Now, she’s hoping for another chance at motherhood. 

About 5,500 parents in Texas lose legal rights to their children every year. A bill passed by the Texas Legislature this session could give parents a pathway to getting those rights back for the first time, giving many parents and their children in foster care a second chance to reunite as a family. 

“This is a great change for Texas,” says Kate Murphy, senior child welfare policy associate at Texans Care for Children. “We know that redemption is possible and circumstances change. It’s really exciting to give families a second chance, and to do it in a way that is thoughtful and safe, when that’s something that is desired by both the child and the parent.”

Luna grew up in a home with alcoholism and domestic violence, but she managed to stay afloat for most of her childhood. She was in Pre-Advanced Placement classes and played the bass clarinet in the school marching band. She dreamed of joining a symphony one day. But at the age of 16, when her parents separated, it became harder to cope with life at home. That’s when her battle with addiction started.

“I went from being this straight A’s, amazing student, to smoking weed with these other kids and skipping classes,” she says.

In the years following, Luna developed an addiction to meth and heroin. When she became a mother, she says she was ashamed that she wasn’t strong enough to stay clean for her kids. In 2008, Child Protective Services was called on her due to her drug use. They placed her on a service plan, which included rehabilitative treatment. Luna says it only became more difficult to be honest and reach out for help, because she feared her children would be taken from her.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong. Every single day was a battle with myself, like, why can’t I get it together? Why can’t I stay clean and keep it together for my children?” Luna says. “I just couldn’t keep my head above water, but I couldn’t ask anyone for help because I didn’t want to lose my kids.”

In 2011, Luna was caught writing fraudulent checks. An investigator told her that if she was honest and cooperated fully, they would work with her because she was a mother. Luna says it felt like an opportunity to finally ask for help. She cooperated, and ended up in prison for two years. After getting out of prison, Luna says she relapsed, ultimately failing a drug test in 2015, resulting in the termination of her parental rights. 

“When they took my kids, I spun out of control,” Luna says. “I had no reason to want to get better anymore.” 

She says she resigned herself to the idea that things were never going to get better, and ended up in prison again the next year on a drug possession charge. It wasn’t until her mother managed to adopt Luna’s eldest child, and started bringing her in for visitations, that she began to see a path forward. She got into Santa Maria Hostel in Houston, a halfway house and treatment center for women, and then to a women’s home. She learned how to write a resume, took financial planning classes, and even embraced religion for the first time in her life. Luna credits the women she met through those programs for turning her life around.

While she found a way to maintain a relationship with eldest, she hasn’t had contact with her other two children since 2015. The youngest, a girl, was quickly adopted by another family. Her son, who was five years old at the time, has still not been adopted. Luna says he has been in and out of foster homes over the years, and is heavily medicated for multiple mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“Honestly, I believe my girls are in better spots right now. This is not for me to rip my daughter from the adoptive home that’s been caring for her,” Luna says. “But my son, he’s suffering. Why is he sitting in foster care? I have an extra room for him to come home to. I have plenty of food, a brand new car. Just give me a second chance.” 

Luna believes that her son’s struggle with mental illness is a result of trauma. He’s been taken from his mother, been separated from his siblings, and Luna fears, abused in foster care. “I don’t know what he’s going through in the system, and that terrifies me,” Luna says. “But who better to help him with what he’s going through than someone who knows what it’s like to be traumatized at that age? Someone who has gone through it.”

Julia Hatcher has worked as a family defense attorney in Texas for more than 20 years. She says the law could not only help parents who deserve a second chance, but also kids in foster care who have a slimmer chance of adoption. About 1,200 Texas children age out of foster care every year and are at a significantly higher risk of experiencing homelessness, economic insecurity, and becoming involved with the justice system themselves. Hatcher says getting children out of foster care and into stable loving homes should be the priority, especially in light of an ongoing federal lawsuit that accuses the state of neglecting foster children. 

While the bill could potentially help Luna reunite with CJ, it only grants a pathway to parents whose rights were involuntarily terminated: In other words, parents who went to court instead of handing their children over to Child Protective Services willingly. Parents who voluntarily signed their children away to the state, won’t be able to use this new avenue to reunite their families.

CPS got involved with Sommer Brooks’ family in 2017, when someone made a call suspecting drug abuse while the family was temporarily living out of a hotel. Not long after, she was arrested and ordered to a residential treatment program in Harris County. When she completed the program and moved into a transitional living home, Brooks found out CPS was trying to terminate her parental rights for not complying with a previously agreed upon service plan that required she maintain a job and a place of residence.

“They really railroaded me to relinquish my rights permanently,” Brooks says. “They basically told me that if I didn’t relinquish my rights voluntarily, that it would jeopardize my rights to my other children. And if I wanted to have any kids in the future, they would be forced to remove my child from me before I left the hospital.”

Julia Hatcher says this kind of pressure by CPS isn’t uncommon. “Unfortunately they use that as a threat to coerce parents into signing voluntary relinquishments,” she said. Brooks relinquished her rights to her 18-month-old son, and currently has no way of getting him back.

“We need mothers to tell these stories,” Luna says. “We inherently trust the system, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.” She has shared her personal testimony at the Texas Legislature a number of times in hopes that it inspires change for other other families, and that it helps mend her own.

“I may not ever see my kids until the day that they come looking for me themselves,” Luna says. “But I’m going to keep fighting like they could come home tomorrow. I want them to know that I kept trying.”

The above post was published on this site.

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[joeythegenerousking]

When Will I Be Enough?

> My story of a dream turning into a tragedy and the battle to get back to the top.

It all started when I made the move to beautiful California in the summer of 2017. I decided to pack up my life in NY where I was born and raised to move to Los Angeles. I was leaving everyone and every thing I knew to move somewhere so foreign to me. After all I had never been to California, and I didn’t know a single person in the state, let alone on the West Coast in general. However something told me it was the journey I needed to take. So I took a leap of faith, got on a plane and flew out to a new life where I would let nothing stand in the way of my dreams becoming a reality.

I arrived in Los Angeles and moved into a beautiful home in the hills with about six other roommates. At first LA was a dream, something unforgettable and almost perfect. After a few months of living with so many people, one of my roommates and I began to date, shortly after deciding to get our own apartment in Hollywood. I couldn’t have been happier.

In the beginning he treated me like royalty. He took me to dinner several times a week, bought me expensive presents, supported me emotionally and made me feel so important/worthy. Little did I know how quickly that was about to change. Unaware of the skeletons in his closest and the demons he held within him. A few weeks after moving into our place, he had come home and informed me that he had quit his job, leaving me in charge of all the financial burdens. When I asked for an explanation, he told me he felt he needed some time to himself to work on himself mentally. A few days later I had found out he had struggled with substance abuse issues and after relapsing, his job had let him go. I then found myself dating a man who was addicted to meth. Something I had never encountered in my life and had no clue how to deal with.

By this point I had become so co-depended on him, excluding everyone around me. The small amount of friends I had made in LA, I let go of to focus on him, and essentially take care of him. He had taken my vulnerable state and manipulated me into believing he was all I needed. Within a few short months, I was convinced into trying meth with him and shortly after became addicted to it myself.

Within six months this ‘perfect’ life I had created in LA had become a nightmare. I was stuck in a relationship with a man who was addicted to meth, had gotten me addict to the drug, that I financially was supporting, who was also now abusing me not only emotionally and mentally but not physically. As awful as it sounds, any normal human would have probably walked away but he had manipulated me so badly to the point when he told me no one else liked me or would ever love me, I believe him. Due to this, I was scared to leave him.

With in the short year we were together he had beaten me to the point of being hospitalized five times, isolated me from every friend I had, separated me from any communication with my family and put me into a great amount of financial debt. I was so broken, I had lost myself. I was a shell of a person who felt trapped with no way out.

One night after he had been using for several days and went into a drug psychosis, and was convinced I had been hired by his ex to spy on him. He stole my phone and locked me in our bedroom telling me I was not allowed to leave. He was being very abusive and hurt me pretty badly. He held me hostage in the bedroom for almost three days until I was finally about to fight him for my phone and call the police.

Once the police arrived I told them I wanted them to stay while I packed my things and moved out. It took a lot of thinking and consideration as I was scared to leave and had no where to go. However I knew I couldn’t stay because if I did I would end up dead. So I took the chances and left to a hotel. The next day I took a flight back to NY to be with my family where I felt safe.

After spending two weeks with them I flew back to California and left LA to move down to Orange County so I could stay clear and safe from my ex as he kept trying to contact me and was threatening me. That’s where I am today, working on myself and my dreams. I’m yet again finding myself starting over. In a new place , where I know not a single soul, and am all alone.

It’s been a struggle to say the least. I feel alone and scared almost every day. Almost every day I feel like I have no one who loves me or who I can love. I feel unimportant, unworthy and unloved. And for a fact at least once a day I want to give up and stop fighting. I’m here though and I’m continuing to push through because I don’t know what else to do.

I may be alone, I may not have anyone, or anything however I have hope, faith and courage and believe one day I will be able to truly say I am happy. And until I find friends here in California to love me, I will have to learn to love myself even if I don’t I must pretend I do.

[woodyandarchless-blog]

The biography of Lucy Woodwood

I was born November 19th. I was raised, if you could call it that, in a single parent family. You may be wondering what i mean by if you could call it that. My dad left a month before my 5th birthday. I’m guessing he had enough of my mothers behavior and attitude but at the time like most children that age I thought i had done something wrong. My mother, in name only as she never acted much like one, had not one but two substance abuse problems. Before my dad left she just used to drink though she was a mean drunk. I hated it when she was drunk she would shout and scream and throw things at my dad telling him how useless he was as a man how all men were the same. I would just lie there in my bed head under the cover crying wishing she would just stop. My dad wasn't useless he took me to the park, to the zoo, to doctors appointments. He was the one that cooked the meals, paid the bills, kept the house clean, yet still she would have a go at him for no reason. Like I said as a child I thought it was my fault that my dad had left I though I was to much for him to cope with, as I grew older though I  realized it wasn't me it was her, after years of abuse he’d had enough and left. That's when my mother started to go out every night leaving me locked in the flat, that's when all the different men started to come around, and that's when she turned not only to drink but to drugs. 

I was kind of lucky in away for all she wasn't there for me my grandparents only lived a couple of blocks away and so they did things with me now and again. My favorite memory from my childhood was when they took me to the coast. I was six years old and it was the first time I’d seen a beach and the ocean, I think my eyes must have nearly popped out of my head. I loved pops and ma and they were my only link to my dad though when I would ask them about him they would change the subject. It wasn't until they died I found out they hadn't heard from him after he left me mother and me. I guess he wanted a clean break. 

After pops and ma died I was basically left to raise myself. My mother was always either to stoned or two drunk to even notice what was going on around her. The only time she seemed sober enough and clean enough to know anything was when she would go to get her money. Every week it was the same routine, get money, get whiskey, go home, get drunk, fall asleep. That's when I would go in her purse and take out enough money to pay the bills and buy food for us both and an extra $1 in a jar I kept hidden in my room. That was my freedom money as I called it, I knew one day I to would be like my dad and leave and knew I would need funds to make sure I could get as far away from her as possible. That's what my freedom money was, that was my hope of one day having a normal life whatever normal was. 

As the years went by the roles were reversed. I basically became the parent, making sure the bills were paid, there was food on the table, the house was clean, she got to all her appointments on time and clean. I even got a part time job after school so there was extra money coming in so we could afford to pay the bills and still put a little away for myself. The different men were still coming in the house but I would always lock my door I didn't want to know who they were. When I was 15 however that changed. I was sat listening to some music when I heard my mother screaming. I ran out of my room and saw some guy hitting her because she wouldn't give him her purse. As much as I hated the woman I called mother I still wasn't about to stand there and let her get hit. Without thinking I jumped on his back and started hitting him only to get picked up like some old rag doll and thrown across the room. Fighting the pain as I heard my mother scream I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the largest sharpest knife I could and stuck it in his leg. He screamed so loud I thought my ear drubs were about to pop, the next thing I knew he was off my mum and backhanding me across the face before running out the flat. I instinctively jumped up and locked the door behind him before going to see if my mother was ok, only to get another backhander off her as she started to yell and scream at me for hurting a man she loved. After screaming back did she feel that way about all the dicks she had every night I ran and locked myself in my room and packed a bag determent to leave till I heard her crying in her room. I couldn't leave her like this she needed someone to look after her and if I didn't who would. 

Four months had past and things seemed to get better my mother seemed to try and get clean. she had her relapses where she would get so drunk I’d have to put her to bed but less men were coming round and she even tried to make breakfast for me a couple of times. A couple of days after my 16th birthday I came home to find a cake on the table and a note from my mother “Gone to get candles happy birthday” I laughed at the fact she was a few days late but at the same time was so happy that she had remembered for the first time in god knows how many years. I decided while I was waiting to go have a bath to relax as work had stressed me out that day. As I was getting out and wrapping a towel around myself I heard the door open and went out with a smile thinking I would find my mother there with the candles for the cake. What I saw instead was my drunken mother in the arms of some guy who would make Freddy Kruger look like a model. I still to this day hear his words as I walked out the bathroom “Wow sweetness your hotter than your mother”. Skin crawling with disgust I went into my room slamming the door behind me and got ready for bed I never really thought anything about it. As I lay on my bed I could hear my mum and this guy laughing in her bedroom at which point I put my headphones on turned up the music and tried to go to sleep. I cant remember what time it was when I was woken by a sudden weight on top of me I felt like I couldn't breath and opening my eyes I saw the same disgusting guy naked leaning over me. I told him to get out and screamed for my mother as he tried to climb into my bed telling me he wanted to know if I was as good as her. I continued fighting and at one point felt a little relived when I saw my mother in the door way that soon faded when she smiled and walked off. Somehow I'm not sure how I managed to not only get out from under him but to get him out my room and quickly locked my door. As he was banging on my door I quickly got changed grabbed the bag I had packed months earlier and the money I had been saving and climbed out the window and down the fire escape. The fact my mother had seen one of male friends trying to rape her daughter and all she did was smile about it was the last straw i couldn't stay there anymore she could look after herself from that moment on. I not only left the flat but i also left New York and got as far away as i could making sure i had enough money to survive till i could find a job. 

I ended up living in some quiet all be it sleazy little back water place, the only reason I was there the rent on the apartment I found was so cheep I could afford the two months in advance. The good thing about this place was it was only a couple of hours by bus to the ocean which is where I spent a lot of my time for the first couple of weeks, remembering the good times I had at the beach with pops and ma and trying to work out what I was going to do for money. Luckily for me on the outskirts of the town there was a bar that was hiring, and again luckily for me they didn't care about your age. As long as you knew your drinks, which thanks to living with an alcoholic for so many years I did, had a pretty face and were willing to dress sexy you were hired. I didn't really like the idea of dressing in low cut tops, mini skirts and heals while in a sleazy dive like that but it was necessary evil if I wanted the job, and unfortunately I needed a job to be able to survive. The guys who came into this bar reminded me of the guys that my mother had brought home every night, ugly, drunk and only after one thing. The boss was worse than the customers at times he was an ugly smelly fat slob who delighted in rubbing against you as he walked past even if there was plenty of spare to get past he would still rub up against you and all I could really do about it was force a smile and continue with what I was doing. I couldn't afford to loss the job. 

As the months went past and I proved to the boss that not only to know my drinks but how to handle the customers, not only the sober ones who had little regard for manners but also the drunk ones, he seemed to relax the dress code a little my skirts got longer and my heals smaller and he never said a thing. even though I was showing less every night the first thing I would do when I got home was climb in the shower and scrub that place off me followed by food and then if I had a really bad day I would curl up on the bed and cry myself to sleep. I soon got to know most of the regulars in the bar including a woman called Stacey. she would normally come in with her husband but there was the odd time she came in alone and when she did we would sometimes stand and talk when things were slow. We got to become good friends and would go shopping together and all sorts, it was nice to have someone I could have a laugh with and talk to. She would come round mine sometimes when her husband was away and I had a night off and we would talk about her marriage. I guess you could say it was through her I found out I seem to have a gift of being able to help people with there problems. Because I helped her out with a few she told others how good I was and soon while I was serving the customers at the bar they would start to ask my advice on different things. As much as I hated the bar, my job at that point I started to like a little more and even enjoy. I wasn't having to rush home every night to wash the smell of the place off me and some times would even stay back for a drink and a chat with the owner and a couple of the other girls who worked there. I was beginning to feel like this place was home. 

The night before my eighteenth Stacy and a couple of the other girls from town decided to throw me a surprise party at the bar. I was so shocked when I walked in that night for work and saw streamers and balloons and banners all I could do was cry with joy I felt at last I belonged somewhere and that people did care what happened to me. I guess you could say I felt loved for the first time in a long time. Later that night the good mood and atmosphere that was surrounding me altered when Stacey's husband come in and started calling her all sorts just because we were dancing and having a laugh. Grabbing her by her hair he started to drag her out of the bar and I followed trying to tell him she hadn't done anything wrong and that he should just back off go home and calm down. After pushing Stacey in the passenger side of the car he went to go round to the drivers side and I stepped in front of him pleading with him to just let my friend go because she hadn't done anything. All I got in reply was a punch to the face at which point I don't remember much. I was laid on the floor and some guy came running across and started fighting with Stacey's husband, she while that was going on had got out the car and came to see if I was ok. It didn't take long for this other guy to knock Stacey's husband almost out cold then he helped her to get me up and they took me home where I fell straight to asleep. 

When I woke up, Stacey was asleep on the bed beside me and the guy who had come to our rescue was asleep on the sofa. I slowly got up wincing in pain and made my way to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror I could see I had a lovely big black eye which was swollen shut. As I came out the bathroom the guy woke up and introduced himself. He said his name was Wesley and that he had been watching me for awhile and had been waiting for the right moment to ask me out as he thought I looked pretty and that I was a sweet girl. I half smiled thanked him and answered that with the nice black eye I didn't look so pretty. He at that point kissed me and said yes I was and that he wanted to take me to dinner that night black eye and all as a birthday treat. I was in shock that anyone felt like that and agreed to go for all I didn't know him, after all he had just saved me as far as I was concerned that made him an alright person. 

That night Stacey helped me to get ready and to hide the black eye as much as possible. I’d just finished getting ready when Wesley knocked on the door. When i opened it there he was stood in a suit with a bunch of flowers, i handed the flowers to Stacey and we left. As we were driving i asked where he was taking me and he said somewhere special then pulled over on some back road. I asked why we had stopped and he said because he’d been wanting to do something ever since i got in the car he then lent over and kissed me. As the kisses got more passionate his hands started to wonder and i asked him to stop, telling him that i hadn't been with anyone before and didn't really want my first time to be in a car. All he did was smile and say “virgin huh”. The next thing i knew the seat belt was undone, the door locked and my seat went back and he was on top of me. At that point everything seemed to be in slow motion and silent, i was screaming but i couldn't hear it, i was hitting, biting, scratching but nothing seemed to stop him and he was to dam strong for me to push off. When he finally finished he sat back in his seat smiling and suggested we now went to dinner. I just laid there numb, unable to move. When he eased me up so he could put the seat upright so he could drive us to dinner I unlocked the door and ran. Finding a hole in the fence a little ways down the road and around a corner from the car I dived through it and hid behind the trees not sure if he was following me or not. It wasn't long before I saw his car go slowly past as he looked out both ways. I stayed where I was for what seemed like hours before daring to move and make my way home. When I did get near to my apartment I looked in the parking lot first to make sure his car wasn't there when I saw it wasn't I ran up to my room and locked the door behind me relived that Stacey had seemingly gone home. I quickly ran a hot bath and climbed in. I didn't care the water felt like it was burning me and I started scrubbing I didn't care about the red marks I was leaving all over my body because I was scrubbing so hard I had to get clean I needed to get clean I needed him off me. 

I stayed locked in my apartment for about five days not answering the phone or the door to anyone. constantly climbing in the bath trying to get clean. after about the fifth day I had nothing in my apartment to eat or drink so I knew I had to go outside even though I didn't want to. Dressing in old baggy clothing I grabbed my purse and slowly made my way out, not bothering to do my makeup or hair. the worse I looked the better no guy would want to be near me and I liked that idea. As I approached the shops I froze. There coming out of the shop was Wesley only he wasn't alone he had his arm around a girl and was kissing her. My skin began to crawl and my blood boil not only from seeing him but from the fact I knew the girl was only fourteen. I decided I had to follow them and as I did I rang the local sheriffs office knowing that they would come straight out as the girl in question was the niece of there Sargent. With no answer I left a voice mail message for them saying that they had turned into a wood and that I was following. After I hung up I had lost sight of them but went in anyway I wasn't going to let him hurt someone else. As I was wandering in I heard her scream, seeing him on top of her trying to do to her what he had done to me I saw red and picked up a large stone with both hands and hit his head as hard as I could before grabbing the girl by the hands and running out of the wood with her constantly repeating that everything was going to be ok everything was going to be alright. Looking back I’m not sure if I was trying to convince her or me of that fact. Just as we left the wood two police cars showed up I told then what I’d done and where he was. One of them went running to where he was while another called for an ambulance. me and the girl sat in the back of one of the police cars and waited. We watched as the the guys from the ambulance went rushing in and stretchered him out. 

Once he was out the officers drove us to the station for our statements. I told them everything except the fact that he had done it to me, instead when they asked why I had followed him I said because I heard he had a reputation for hurting young girls and didn't want to see her get hurt. That's when they told me that he was wanted in connection to other similar incidences and not to worry what I did would be seen as self defense. I was sat numb, emotionless I could see the officer talking but I couldn't hear him. My mind was racing I started to wonder if I would have been better off staying at home with my mother. I snapped out of the trance when another officer came in and said that it was touch and go as to if he would make it. The officers finished taking my statement and let me go. The uncle of the girl was the officer who gave me a ride home. thanking me for saving his niece and said I did what I had to do as he had a knife at the girls throat if anyone asked I had to remember to say I did what I had to do he had a knife at her throat he made me repeat it twice to him before I got out the car. A couple of days later I found out he had died the police told me that there wasn't enough evidence to charge me so I was free to go, and go I did. I packed up all I could and moved once more this time to Las Vegas. 

It was the complete opposite of where I had been no one wanted to know my name, no one even seemed to want to say hello and I liked that fact. I wasn't about to make the same mistakes again. This time no one would get near my heart however at that point I lost myself to. I hit the bottle hard everyday. I lost both my jobs but I didn't care, all I cared about was the alcohol, it wasn't going to hurt me, or leave me it was my best friend it was the only friend I needed. 

About three moths had past and I woke up one morning beside some guy I had never seen before and went to the bathroom. When I looked in the mirror what I saw shocked me. No longer was I looking at my own reflection instead what I saw was my mother looking back at me. The realization that I was becoming her frightened me into cleaning up my act. 

 It was at this point in my life things changed dramatically. I remember the very little of the night. I was sat silently sobbing on a park bench in the rain I felt like there was no hope for me when a couple of males approached me. When I had seen them walking towards me I felt that the worst was going to happen, but I was fine with that as I felt my life was already over. But as they got near one of them sat beside me and asked me what was wrong. I couldn't answer I had no idea where to begin or even if I should begin with not knowing them. The next thing I remember I was sat in a living room with my brothers my mind a little confused as to how I had got to where I was and what I had been doing before hand but my brothers told me not to worry about it as it wasn't important. 

I spent several weeks with all three of my brothers and loved every moment of it but then Graham had to return to England leaving me with alone with just Elijah and Klaus. I spend several happy months under their roof but eventually once more I felt it was time to move on. The difference between  this time and all the other times I had kept moving, was all the baggage I had carried with me through out my life felt.. lighter and I felt happier, however I still would never stay in one place for longer than four or five months. I found jobs working as an advice columnist for different papers normally just filling in while there proper advice columnist were on holiday or ill. Luckily it gave me enough money to be able to pay rent and buy food I didn't need anything else. I never let anyone in I kept them all out. I built large walls around me that would stop them all from getting in. The constant moving from place to place helped me to make sure no one got in as I was never in one place long enough to make friends. 

Then March 2007 I moved back to New York and got a job working at one of the papers when I saw one of my old school friends worked there also. When I saw her I was shocked to see she was covered in bruises so I dragged her into the ladies room and forced her to tell me what was going on. She told me that the man she moved in with did this to her at which point I told her she had to get out of the relationship. She told me she had nowhere to go no one to turn to. Looking in her eyes I saw the frightened little girl I used to be and told her she did now, she was moving in with me and I was going to help her. Later that day we went to hers and packed up her things and moved them all back to mine. It felt kind of strange letting someone in but she was an old friend and needed my help. It was the least I could do for her as she and her family had been so kind to me as I was growing up. I helped her find her own place get a great job and we even found her a great guy who has been warned that if I ever hear that he has hurt her I will track him down and make him pay for it. 

Once she was fully settled and happy I started to look once more for a new job and ended up finding one in Arizona, met a man, got engaged but unfortunately due to his work we had to part. I lived quite happily for awhile even after my job finished, and the man I had loved had left. I had managed to find a place I thought of as home, not that I spent a lot of time there as I spend most of my time at the home of my brothers, but eventually the lack of having things to do, despite the fact running after Klausy at times kept me busy, and the heartaches I had felt from letting people in only to lose them began to make me yearn for another new beginning and luckily for me I got one with my other brother. 

 Now here I am in England working for the vampire king of Britain, my brother Graham. It has given me a fresh new start in a brand new place which was exactly what I needed and i am loving every moment of not only my work but being able to spend more time with my brother.  

[haileyjayden3]

The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety

The key strength that you need to work on in addiction recovery, or sobriety, is that of personal growth.

I have watched a lot of people who attempted to recover from drug addiction and alcoholism, to include myself. I have watched many people fail and a few of us have been blessed enough to succeed.

When I was very early in recovery, because of the way my personality and brain is “wired,” I wanted to know the exact principles and concepts that would help to insure my success in recovery.

So I started asking questions, I started exploring various recovery methods, and I started to read quite a variety of literature on different theories of recovery.

I have come to the conclusion that, while the exact programming might matter a great deal for the newcomer, it is not as important for someone who is living in long term recovery. After the struggling addict or alcoholic makes it through “early recovery” and builds a foundation in their life, it is less about the exact programming and more about personal growth.

If there is a key strength in early recovery, it is that of surrender.

If there is a key strength in long term recovery, it is that of personal growth.

The threat in long term sobriety is different. You are no longer fighting by the skin of your teeth to make it through each day sober. And yet, people with several years in recovery still do relapse sometimes. Why is that?

People in long term recovery relapse for a different reason than the person who relapses who only had six months sober.

If the person with six months sober relapses, it is because they had not yet finished building their foundation, their new life, they failed to use the tools of the program and reach out for help and avoid the trigger situations.

When a person with 10 years relapses, it is because they got complacent. Period.

The person with ten years knew how to stay clean and sober. You don’t make it to ten years sober without having that strong foundation and the knowledge of how to navigate a life of recovery. The person with 10 years sober knew how to make it through a tough situation, they knew how to reach out for help, they know they could call their sponsor, or their peers in AA, or whatever. They had a solution and they knew what those solutions were.

They just didn’t use them.

Why not?

Because they got complacent. They got lazy.

So the question is: What does it really mean to get lazy in recovery?

What does it mean to be complacent?

I can tell you what it means, because I have been studying this concept.

In long term recovery, complacency is a lack of personal growth. If you stop learning and you stop challenging yourself to become a better and better person, then you are headed on a path that might end with complacency.

This can be a very tricky thing because after 10 years sober, becoming complacent does not just happen overnight. It unwinds slowly, over time.

Many people believe that it has to do with AA meetings. You hear things like “And then they quit going to AA meetings every day, and before you know it, they were drinking again.”

But it’s not really about AA meeting attendance. That is not the secret to beating complacency.

The secret is in personal growth. The secret is to stay in the process, to keep working those steps continuously, to never declare yourself to be “done” or “cured” or “finished” with recovery.

This really doesn’t apply that much to early recovery, because in the beginning, you need to listen and learn and soak everything up like a sponge. You need to go to lots of meetings, attend inpatient treatment, go see a therapist, a counselor, a sponsor–tapping into every resource that you possibly can in order to get the help that you need.

But it should be fairly obvious that once a recovering alcoholic has 2, 5, or 10 years sober, that the answer should not be “do more of all that stuff.”

What works for the newcomer is not necessarily going to help the person who is well established in recovery. And yet both people can still be at risk for relapse.

The key is that you remain teachable, that you keep analyzing yourself and your life, so that you can keep making improvements to who you are as a person.

Life keeps showing up and happening to you. But you get to keep choosing your reactions, and part of the goal is to keep improving how we choose to react. If that is not changing over time then you are likely not learning anything, and therefore you will end repeating your mistakes. Not good.

The goal of recovery is to have higher and higher level mistakes! So that when you do make a mistake, the consequences of that mistake are far less detrimental.

When you first get into recovery, it is likely that you will start out at inpatient treatment. Then you might follow up with daily AA meetings, and hopefully get a sponsor.

In a very short period of time, you will go through all sorts of positive changes. It will feel awkward at times, and you may feel as if you are floundering, but people will comment and say to you “you are right where you need to be right now!” And it will be annoying to hear this, but one much later you will look back and realize that they were right. You cannot see the growth that you are making when you are struggling to get through it, because it feels bad sometimes. But that is where the real growth happens.

After a few months of strong recovery effort, the personal growth will slow down. You have built a foundation.

But instead of slipping into “maintenance mode,” my recommendation is that you get with a sponsor, a therapist, or a coach of some sort and push yourself further.

Keep pushing yourself. Now that you have a foundation, you can start to get much more deliberate in your personal growth. Improve your health, get into shape, work on your diet. Quit the cigarettes at some point.

And just keep going. Self improvement is an extension of your recovery. Improving yourself deliberately is how you extend your recovery and protect it for the future.

Self improvement and personal growth is the anti-complacency serum that you need.

It is when we stop growing, when we stop learning, when we stop pushing ourselves to improve in life that we become most vulnerable to relapse.

Again, this is an issue of timing. In early recovery, go to rehab, go to AA, and go real hard at taking every suggestion that you can.

After you have a foundation of sobriety, start to seek new ways to analyze your life and make improvements. Self improvements. Become that better version of yourself, the version that you were always meant to be.

Want to get started? Call a rehab center today if you are still stuck in addiction. It is the single best option to get started on this path of positive growth.

The post The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from http://www.spiritualriver.com/alcoholism/the-key-strength-that-you-need-to-develop-in-sobriety/

[emlydunstan]

The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety

The key strength that you need to work on in addiction recovery, or sobriety, is that of personal growth.

I have watched a lot of people who attempted to recover from drug addiction and alcoholism, to include myself. I have watched many people fail and a few of us have been blessed enough to succeed.

When I was very early in recovery, because of the way my personality and brain is “wired,” I wanted to know the exact principles and concepts that would help to insure my success in recovery.

So I started asking questions, I started exploring various recovery methods, and I started to read quite a variety of literature on different theories of recovery.

I have come to the conclusion that, while the exact programming might matter a great deal for the newcomer, it is not as important for someone who is living in long term recovery. After the struggling addict or alcoholic makes it through “early recovery” and builds a foundation in their life, it is less about the exact programming and more about personal growth.

If there is a key strength in early recovery, it is that of surrender.

If there is a key strength in long term recovery, it is that of personal growth.

The threat in long term sobriety is different. You are no longer fighting by the skin of your teeth to make it through each day sober. And yet, people with several years in recovery still do relapse sometimes. Why is that?

People in long term recovery relapse for a different reason than the person who relapses who only had six months sober.

If the person with six months sober relapses, it is because they had not yet finished building their foundation, their new life, they failed to use the tools of the program and reach out for help and avoid the trigger situations.

When a person with 10 years relapses, it is because they got complacent. Period.

The person with ten years knew how to stay clean and sober. You don’t make it to ten years sober without having that strong foundation and the knowledge of how to navigate a life of recovery. The person with 10 years sober knew how to make it through a tough situation, they knew how to reach out for help, they know they could call their sponsor, or their peers in AA, or whatever. They had a solution and they knew what those solutions were.

They just didn’t use them.

Why not?

Because they got complacent. They got lazy.

So the question is: What does it really mean to get lazy in recovery?

What does it mean to be complacent?

I can tell you what it means, because I have been studying this concept.

In long term recovery, complacency is a lack of personal growth. If you stop learning and you stop challenging yourself to become a better and better person, then you are headed on a path that might end with complacency.

This can be a very tricky thing because after 10 years sober, becoming complacent does not just happen overnight. It unwinds slowly, over time.

Many people believe that it has to do with AA meetings. You hear things like “And then they quit going to AA meetings every day, and before you know it, they were drinking again.”

But it’s not really about AA meeting attendance. That is not the secret to beating complacency.

The secret is in personal growth. The secret is to stay in the process, to keep working those steps continuously, to never declare yourself to be “done” or “cured” or “finished” with recovery.

This really doesn’t apply that much to early recovery, because in the beginning, you need to listen and learn and soak everything up like a sponge. You need to go to lots of meetings, attend inpatient treatment, go see a therapist, a counselor, a sponsor–tapping into every resource that you possibly can in order to get the help that you need.

But it should be fairly obvious that once a recovering alcoholic has 2, 5, or 10 years sober, that the answer should not be “do more of all that stuff.”

What works for the newcomer is not necessarily going to help the person who is well established in recovery. And yet both people can still be at risk for relapse.

The key is that you remain teachable, that you keep analyzing yourself and your life, so that you can keep making improvements to who you are as a person.

Life keeps showing up and happening to you. But you get to keep choosing your reactions, and part of the goal is to keep improving how we choose to react. If that is not changing over time then you are likely not learning anything, and therefore you will end repeating your mistakes. Not good.

The goal of recovery is to have higher and higher level mistakes! So that when you do make a mistake, the consequences of that mistake are far less detrimental.

When you first get into recovery, it is likely that you will start out at inpatient treatment. Then you might follow up with daily AA meetings, and hopefully get a sponsor.

In a very short period of time, you will go through all sorts of positive changes. It will feel awkward at times, and you may feel as if you are floundering, but people will comment and say to you “you are right where you need to be right now!” And it will be annoying to hear this, but one much later you will look back and realize that they were right. You cannot see the growth that you are making when you are struggling to get through it, because it feels bad sometimes. But that is where the real growth happens.

After a few months of strong recovery effort, the personal growth will slow down. You have built a foundation.

But instead of slipping into “maintenance mode,” my recommendation is that you get with a sponsor, a therapist, or a coach of some sort and push yourself further.

Keep pushing yourself. Now that you have a foundation, you can start to get much more deliberate in your personal growth. Improve your health, get into shape, work on your diet. Quit the cigarettes at some point.

And just keep going. Self improvement is an extension of your recovery. Improving yourself deliberately is how you extend your recovery and protect it for the future.

Self improvement and personal growth is the anti-complacency serum that you need.

It is when we stop growing, when we stop learning, when we stop pushing ourselves to improve in life that we become most vulnerable to relapse.

Again, this is an issue of timing. In early recovery, go to rehab, go to AA, and go real hard at taking every suggestion that you can.

After you have a foundation of sobriety, start to seek new ways to analyze your life and make improvements. Self improvements. Become that better version of yourself, the version that you were always meant to be.

Want to get started? Call a rehab center today if you are still stuck in addiction. It is the single best option to get started on this path of positive growth.

The post The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://www.spiritualriver.com/alcoholism/the-key-strength-that-you-need-to-develop-in-sobriety/

[violetsgallant]

The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety

The key strength that you need to work on in addiction recovery, or sobriety, is that of personal growth.

I have watched a lot of people who attempted to recover from drug addiction and alcoholism, to include myself. I have watched many people fail and a few of us have been blessed enough to succeed.

When I was very early in recovery, because of the way my personality and brain is “wired,” I wanted to know the exact principles and concepts that would help to insure my success in recovery.

So I started asking questions, I started exploring various recovery methods, and I started to read quite a variety of literature on different theories of recovery.

I have come to the conclusion that, while the exact programming might matter a great deal for the newcomer, it is not as important for someone who is living in long term recovery. After the struggling addict or alcoholic makes it through “early recovery” and builds a foundation in their life, it is less about the exact programming and more about personal growth.

If there is a key strength in early recovery, it is that of surrender.

If there is a key strength in long term recovery, it is that of personal growth.

The threat in long term sobriety is different. You are no longer fighting by the skin of your teeth to make it through each day sober. And yet, people with several years in recovery still do relapse sometimes. Why is that?

People in long term recovery relapse for a different reason than the person who relapses who only had six months sober.

If the person with six months sober relapses, it is because they had not yet finished building their foundation, their new life, they failed to use the tools of the program and reach out for help and avoid the trigger situations.

When a person with 10 years relapses, it is because they got complacent. Period.

The person with ten years knew how to stay clean and sober. You don’t make it to ten years sober without having that strong foundation and the knowledge of how to navigate a life of recovery. The person with 10 years sober knew how to make it through a tough situation, they knew how to reach out for help, they know they could call their sponsor, or their peers in AA, or whatever. They had a solution and they knew what those solutions were.

They just didn’t use them.

Why not?

Because they got complacent. They got lazy.

So the question is: What does it really mean to get lazy in recovery?

What does it mean to be complacent?

I can tell you what it means, because I have been studying this concept.

In long term recovery, complacency is a lack of personal growth. If you stop learning and you stop challenging yourself to become a better and better person, then you are headed on a path that might end with complacency.

This can be a very tricky thing because after 10 years sober, becoming complacent does not just happen overnight. It unwinds slowly, over time.

Many people believe that it has to do with AA meetings. You hear things like “And then they quit going to AA meetings every day, and before you know it, they were drinking again.”

But it’s not really about AA meeting attendance. That is not the secret to beating complacency.

The secret is in personal growth. The secret is to stay in the process, to keep working those steps continuously, to never declare yourself to be “done” or “cured” or “finished” with recovery.

This really doesn’t apply that much to early recovery, because in the beginning, you need to listen and learn and soak everything up like a sponge. You need to go to lots of meetings, attend inpatient treatment, go see a therapist, a counselor, a sponsor–tapping into every resource that you possibly can in order to get the help that you need.

But it should be fairly obvious that once a recovering alcoholic has 2, 5, or 10 years sober, that the answer should not be “do more of all that stuff.”

What works for the newcomer is not necessarily going to help the person who is well established in recovery. And yet both people can still be at risk for relapse.

The key is that you remain teachable, that you keep analyzing yourself and your life, so that you can keep making improvements to who you are as a person.

Life keeps showing up and happening to you. But you get to keep choosing your reactions, and part of the goal is to keep improving how we choose to react. If that is not changing over time then you are likely not learning anything, and therefore you will end repeating your mistakes. Not good.

The goal of recovery is to have higher and higher level mistakes! So that when you do make a mistake, the consequences of that mistake are far less detrimental.

When you first get into recovery, it is likely that you will start out at inpatient treatment. Then you might follow up with daily AA meetings, and hopefully get a sponsor.

In a very short period of time, you will go through all sorts of positive changes. It will feel awkward at times, and you may feel as if you are floundering, but people will comment and say to you “you are right where you need to be right now!” And it will be annoying to hear this, but one much later you will look back and realize that they were right. You cannot see the growth that you are making when you are struggling to get through it, because it feels bad sometimes. But that is where the real growth happens.

After a few months of strong recovery effort, the personal growth will slow down. You have built a foundation.

But instead of slipping into “maintenance mode,” my recommendation is that you get with a sponsor, a therapist, or a coach of some sort and push yourself further.

Keep pushing yourself. Now that you have a foundation, you can start to get much more deliberate in your personal growth. Improve your health, get into shape, work on your diet. Quit the cigarettes at some point.

And just keep going. Self improvement is an extension of your recovery. Improving yourself deliberately is how you extend your recovery and protect it for the future.

Self improvement and personal growth is the anti-complacency serum that you need.

It is when we stop growing, when we stop learning, when we stop pushing ourselves to improve in life that we become most vulnerable to relapse.

Again, this is an issue of timing. In early recovery, go to rehab, go to AA, and go real hard at taking every suggestion that you can.

After you have a foundation of sobriety, start to seek new ways to analyze your life and make improvements. Self improvements. Become that better version of yourself, the version that you were always meant to be.

Want to get started? Call a rehab center today if you are still stuck in addiction. It is the single best option to get started on this path of positive growth.

The post The Key Strength that You Need to Develop in Sobriety appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241844 https://ift.tt/2IlDmNb

[lecriseu-blog]

I, too, once had a time in my life where the days were dark, barely worth waking up in the morning for. I, too, once had a time in my life where the night was where I thrived, in freedom from rejection, where solace was found in the self-ostricization from the rest of humanity. I, too, felt my entire being was only filled with barren emptiness, and my personality was long forgotten.

. . . 'filled' with 'emptiness'.

It's such an odd way to describe that feeling. But the illogicality of this emotion is supposed to be barren of any sort of logic. Mental illness simply has zero logic. It has no rhyme, no reason, or maybe a better way of describing it is, it is entirely difficult to pinpoint a single affect for the sufferer. Depression, and its many other minions, are obscure to everyone. . .

. . . including its victims.  

Such a concept, that one can be 'filled with emptiness' is unfathomable to most. But I know whoever is reading this simply knows where I'm coming from. Perhaps you are now travelling back in time, or reliving a dark moment where you, too, once, were 'filled with emptiness'. This is light comparison to being triggered. If any of you non-sufferers are reading this, there is your example of the word 'triggered'. It is not fun to be triggered. it is like having a flashback of war, except the battle was or is waged against yourself.

Right now, I am being triggered by telling this. It is entirely too difficult for me to describe the feeling, it is almost vexing. When I am triggered, I am charmed by its elusive pull on my vulnerable strings. Simultaneously, I know where it is pulling me to, and it is definitely not Disneyland. Whether it is to death, self-harm, or any other, it is dangerously alluring. This is only a tiny speck of insight into how your own mind can eventually be your ultimate harm.

A general belief, to those who are uneducated on the subject, is that the 'key' to solving mental illness is to simply retrace one's steps back into the particular moment in time that could have possibly turned their world upside down. However, this is an entirely ignorant suggestion, and I know this because I am a recovering victim of mental illness.

Notice how I say 'recovering'. There is no one-hundred percent. There is no 'going back to who you once were'. There is no wave of the magic wand to make you who you were before all this happened and if somebody tells you that, it is simply bullshit. . .

. . . But, don't let that diminish any hopes of recovery. Recovery is possible. However, it takes incredible mental strength to battle against the consist deceit of your own mind. Your war will go on for a long, long time. . . maybe your whole lifetime. The outcome is subjective to each individual. But if you choose to fight, and choose to take a stand against yourself, for yourself, it will get incredibly easier over the years.

The thoughts will be there, yet, over time they will become less and less frequent. On occasion, they may peek in to test your strengths, or to see if they can poke at your weaknesses, or perhaps prod at you at your most vulnerable moments. But after you have trained your mind for years for those types of scenarios it truly gets easier to end the battle with those thoughts. And you can win those fights quicker. Your days of suffering with the dark will become less over time. When you've consistently developed cautious coping mechanisms to every single little scenario or thought that you know is one of your weakpoints, you are prepared for those prods from dark thoughts.

You are your own worst enemy. Fortunately, you are your own self. Therefore, your worst enemy is your closest. And you know what is your enemy's every thought, and every move. You've lived with it long enough to know. This is an advantage that not every person on the battlefront has. This is an advantage you can utilize.

Think of it as a game of chess. You are ultimately playing both the black and white side. After a few years of playing this game, it is no surprise that you are beginning to have the inability to differentiate between either side — your world has slowly become grey, and your sensibility is null and void to what's positive and what's negative. What is genuine and what is fake? Where does the facade end and where the hell does the reality begin?

I, too, was once at a long game of chess with myself. I recall nothing but my own thoughts and pains during that time. Friends, family, birthdays, holidays, school — I cannot tell you the tale of those years concerning what happened outside of my mind. I was consumed with nothing but my thoughts and my loneliness. Though I tried, I could not remember who I once was, and that was unfathomable that I could not remember myself before all this.

My heart was filled with emptiness. Every moment I pulled myself down the dark well without a ladder, I felt I hadn't eaten in days. Life was not there, or rather, it was, but I was merely a weightless, nonexistent form, spectating life going on around me, all the while I simply could not recall at all what happened in that day. If you were to ask me what happened on one of those particular days, I could only tell you how I felt.

My mind once had a grip on my undivided attention, and I lost many relationships, for better or worse. My mind once had me around its finger. My mind was hell. My mind was wretched. My mind was a bitch. My mind abused me more than anyone else had ever abused me in my entire life.

I take charge of my mind now. I don't know whether it was me hating my mind or my mind hating me first. But slowly, I turned it around and took the reins of my mind. It peeks into my life every now and again, it tries to seduce me back into that dark fantasy once more. It is substantially powerful, and I have had my relapses over the course of years.

I just turned twenty-six years old last month.

I was fifteen when my world turned grey.

The battles are never far away, but they are less often, and less powerful than they once were. I'm simply too tough for my enemy now.

I can't tell you the magical potion or spell or the certain way to wave your wand at yourself and pull yourself back together to see the light. But as cliche as it sounds, love is powerful. It is unformidable. It is incredible. It is miraculous. I am not saying to go out and find love from someone else. Never, did I find someone with the ability to make me whole once again. Long, long ago, I gave up on making others responsible to help me hang on to my own life.

It was simply when I chose to love myself, and only loving myself, did I see a difference.

It was not overnight. I trained hard.

The first person I ever let go, was someone who depleted my growth. It was my first love. It was my only love for five years and we thought we would one day marry each other and we would be always happy together and I suddenly dropped him without notice.

I realized my soul was crying out for love, and I had not listened to it for five years or more. My heart was aching for acknowledgement, but I didn't want to. It made me ashamed for how I felt and how I looked and how I was and how annoyed people were at me at my darkest moments so I shoved it away because I was not only a burden to others but ultimately I was a burden to myself.

As soon as I dropped my first love, I sought to become my own person, to recover, to grow and live life on my own, and focus on myself, and only myself.

There was a revelation, if you will, that struck me and I realized I entirely put so much focus on my first love for so many long years that I did not seek to grow and nurture myself. I consistently sought to nurture a relationship that had been dying long before I realized it.

There was a revelation that other people are not entirely too dependable, and most will be temporary. Some of them will be stepping stones in my life. For better or worse they will help me grow.

There was a revelation that I suddenly didn't want to die, but I couldn't stop hurting myself. Sparing a few details, I acted on a cry for help, for I knew I needed it. I was too long gone and I had no other way of knowing to cope with this pain and I knew of no other way to vocalize my need for help to someone. All the other words I had said seemed to fall on deaf ears.

There was a revelation that I was going to be stuck with myself for the rest of my life. No other person was going to be by my side that long. I figured that that was the most important relationship to work and focus on.

My treatment was about twenty percent, and my self-treatment was eighty percent in my success to recover. I am not fully recovered. But over the years, my battles have become less and less difficult to manage. It depends on how much work you put into nurturing yourself and accepting yourself for all its flaws. . .

. . .One has the most special, most unique relationship with theirselves. A lot of people take it for granted more than any other relationship they'll have with any other person out there. You don't need a phone to call, nor a paper to write and mail a letter to, you don't even need to talk, for you are always there and you understand the silence.

Yourself knows every single moment in your entire life from day one to the day you die. It remembers every nook and cranny in your memory, every moment you ever made a mistake, and it knows all of your thoughts and feelings and whether they be good or bad, yourself still sticks with you and loves you and urges you to stay alive.

You only ever need to pay attention to it.

I, too, once had a time in my life where the days were dark, barely worth waking up in the morning for. I, too, once had a time in my life where the night was where I thrived with freedom from rejection, where solace was found in the self-ostricization from the rest of humanity. I, too, felt my entire being was only filled with barren emptiness, and my personality was long forgotten.

I still cannot recall what I once was before my mental illness. But I believe I am a grown version of that. I have little strands of gray in my hair from the stresses I inflicted upon myself. There are scars that remain that will never fade.

I am not ashamed of my scars anymore, I look back on them as a reminder of the tribulations I put myself through. My scars now serve as a warning that I cannot take my own mind for granted, nor can I put myself before another ever again. My scars remind me that I have fought the most difficult war a human being can ever sign up for.

My scars remind me every day that I have a purpose. When I see someone struggling down a path nostalgic to my own, I share those scars with them and assure them they are not alone.

My purpose in life is to be the friend I never had at my darkest hour.

Hello, reader. I am your friend. I am your confidant. I am indebted to you for giving me a reason to live.

[jeroldlockettus]

The Demonization of Gluten

Celiac is the only autoimmune diseases for which we know the trigger that turns the immune system against the body. The culprit? Gluten. (Photo: Pixabay)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “The Demonization of Gluten.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Celiac disease is thought to affect roughly one percent of the population. The good news: it can be treated by quitting gluten. The bad news: many celiac patients haven’t been diagnosed. The weird news: millions of people without celiac disease have quit gluten – which may be a big mistake.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

In the 1930s, a Dutch pediatrician named Willem Dicke began to study a mysterious, often-fatal disease that was afflicting his patients. Children were losing weight and becoming malnourished despite consuming plenty of calories. The symptoms were intense and widespread.

Alessio FASANO: The damage is the intestine. This is a systemic disease that does not spare any tissue organ in your body.

That’s Alessio Fasano.

FASANO: I’m professor of pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children.

Willem Dicke suspected the illness was somehow related to the children’s diet. But it wasn’t until years later that he found the proof he was looking for. It came in the form of a grotesque natural experiment produced by the Second World War. In 1940, Germany had invaded and occupied the Netherlands. In 1944, Dutch railway workers held a strike in support of the Allies. This prompted the Nazis to cut off food shipments to Dutch civilians.

Alan LEVINOVITZ: This was called the Hunger Winter.

That’s Alan Levinovitz, a religion scholar at James Madison University.

LEVINOVITZ: It was horrific. Children everywhere were starving.

Some people resorted to eating grass or tulip bulbs; thousands died of starvation. But Willem Dicke noticed something strange. His pediatric patients who’d been sick before the war …

LEVINOVITZ: … were actually improving. Then in 1945, the Hunger Winter ended. Bread was dropped over Holland and everyone’s lives improved — except for those of the children , who immediately relapsed into the condition that they had been suffering before.

FASANO: And this pediatrician, Dr. Dicke, would reason what we did not have during the war, now, is coming back. That can be the culprit. He made the hypothesis where grains are the culprit.

That’s right, grains. Which the kids hadn’t been eating during the Hunger Winter — but now, after bread came back, they were. So Dicke ran a little experiment.

FASANO: He took six of these kids, put them on a gluten-free diet, showing that the symptoms were completely gone, put them back on a regular diet, showing that the symptoms came back. That was the cornerstone, and still is of our understanding of how you trigger celiac disease.

And that is how our modern understanding of celiac disease came to be. Even today, it’s still somewhat mysterious. But one thing that isn’t mysterious at all is the trigger:

FASANO: And it’s gluten.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we’ll look at the recent spike in celiac disease, and why, historically, it’s been underdiagnosed:

FASANO: The symptoms unfortunately are not straightforward like many autoimmune diseases.

We’ll look at the intersection between health trend and media sensation:

LEVINOVITZ: Jenny McCarthy was hugely influential.

We look at the economic implications of the gluten-free movement — both micro …

Kadee RUSS: I probably spend upwards of $1,200 a month on groceries.

And macro …

Jennifer BOND: The northern plains of the U.S. have seen declining plantings of wheat.

“Gluten, Gluten Everywhere.” Right after this:

*      *      *

Alessio Fasano is one of the world’s leading authorities on celiac disease and gluten.

FASANO: I can’t make that statement myself.

But we can. And he is. By the time Fasano started his medical studies, in the 1980s, celiac disease was understood much better than in Willem Dicke’s era. So let’s start with what we know. First of all, the name, celiac. It’s from the Greek, meaning “a sickness of the belly.” And how is the disease defined?

FASANO: This is truly an autoimmune disease. It’s like having diabetes, multiple sclerosis, or rheumatoid arthritis.

So celiac is an autoimmune disease — with, as Fasano puts it, a recipe containing at least two ingredients.

FASANO: 1) A genetic predisposition — many genes needs to come together to make you at-risk. 2) An environmental trigger that is mismanaged by your immune system.

And what sometimes happens when the environmental trigger meets the genetic predisposition …

FASANO: The immune system starts to attack its own body rather than get rid of the enemy.

An immune system attacking its own tissues — that’s the definition of an autoimmune disease. But there’s one major way in which celiac is unlike other autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Celiac is unique among autoimmune diseases …

FASANO: … because the culprit, the enemy, that turn the immune system to attack your own body, is known. And it’s gluten.

This known enemy, gluten, is a protein that’s found in rye, barley, and, most prominently, in wheat. Gluten is what gives structure to foods like bread, pasta, and cake. So gluten is the trigger for celiac disease; and the treatment then is what?

FASANO: The treatment is the elimination of gluten from the diet.

Stephen J. DUBNER: How quickly and how completely does that treatment address the issue?

FASANO: Some people will have resolution of the symptoms rather quickly. Others will take much longer. [In] the vast majority, it will be a complete resolution.

DUBNER: How does it feel to know that you’re responsible for people crossing those beloved food items off their lists forever?

FASANO: Being Italian, I feel awful. It is definitely a tremendous change in lifestyle. No question about that. We face this all the time. A newly diagnosed celiac will go through a serious change and feel [things] from denial to be[ing] upset — to frustrated, to depressed — because one of the most natural [things] to humankind, eating, will become a very challenging mental exercise rather than a very spontaneous activity.

Fasano got his medical training in Italy.

FASANO: There was a university in Naples where celiac disease was a big deal.

Indeed, the University of Naples had a celiac research center; Italian schoolchildren were enrolled in large-scale screening programs. Epidemiological studies showed that roughly 1 in 300 Italians had celiac disease. That’s pretty common! And because it was fairly common, Fasano wasn’t that interested in studying it further.

FASANO: One of the reason why I decide to move to the United States was because I was sick and tired [of] talk[ing] about celiac disease and work on it.

In 1988, he arrived at the University of Maryland. In the U.S., celiac disease was thought to be much rarer than in Europe: 1 in 10,000 people versus 1 in 300.

FASANO: Days passed by, weeks passed by, months passed by, and I didn’t see a single case of celiac disease. I went from the twenty cases a day that I [was] forced to see in Italy, to zero.

Fasano’s plan to get away from celiac disease had worked. But he began to wonder why there was such a huge difference.

FASANO: I was wondering, “If the genetic background is the same in Europe, and we eat the same gluten-containing grains that they consume in Europe, why is celiac disease so frequent there and does not exist here?” I reasoned, “Either the disease does not exist in United States, so it will be a very interesting proposition to understand why.” And the alternative was that it was overlooked and so was underestimated.

In other words: was celiac disease really so rare in the U.S. or were American doctors just missing it? Fasano decided to find out. He headed over to his local Red Cross to get some blood samples …

FASANO: … I was shocked to know that I had to pay for it. They asked me for $6 apiece. I said, “You must be out of your mind. I would never pay [that] amount of money.” We engage in this back-and-forth negotiation that is actually the heart and soul of the Neapolitan attitude. You never pay whatever they ask for.

Eventually they settled on $3 apiece. Fasano bought 2,000 samples and began testing them. If someone who has celiac disease eats gluten, their body produces abnormally high rates of certain kinds of antibodies. Gluten has been recognized as an intruder and their body is trying to fight it off — but instead the antibodies end up attacking healthy cells. This activity can be detected in a blood test. So, when Fasano screened the Red Cross blood samples, what did he find?

FASANO: The prevalence was one in 250.

A prevalence of 1 in 250! The previous estimate in the U.S. remember, was 1 in 10,000. This new finding would make celiac disease 40 times more common in the U.S than previously thought. Under the old estimate, only 27,000 Americans likely had celiac disease; the new estimate suggested it was more like a million.

FASANO: That gave us the impetus to move to this large epidemiologic study on the national scale, in which we recruited more than 40,000 people.

This new, national study, published in 2003, yielded an even higher estimate. It found that 1 of every 133 Americans had celiac disease. This was pretty much in line with the most recent European numbers. So America wasn’t so different from Italy after all! According to Fasano’s research, more than 2 million Americans had celiac disease. How was it possible that a disease so well-identified in some places had been practically invisible in the U.S.?

FASANO: The symptoms of celiac disease unfortunately are not straightforward like many autoimmune diseases. Intuitively, the vast majority of the symptoms are gastrointestinal: chronic diarrhea, weight loss, failure to thrive.

The knock-on effects are various, and serious.

FASANO: You can have anemia because you can’t absorb iron and with that, chronic fatigue. You can have joint pain, a skin rash. You can change your behavior because inflammation spills into the brain. You can have infertility.

Over the last couple decades, the diagnosis and treatment of celiac disease in the U.S. have greatly accelerated. That’s good news, especially since an effective treatment — the gluten-free diet — is well known. But rather than waiting to be diagnosed, and then going on a gluten-free diet, wouldn’t it be better if we could prevent celiac disease in the first place? If we could understand where it exists, and why, and exactly how it’s triggered?

Benjamin LEBWOHL: If you ask someone, “What causes celiac disease?” the pat answer is, “Gluten causes celiac disease.” But I don’t think that’s a fair response. That’s like saying that peanuts are the cause of peanut allergy. Right?

That’s Benjamin Lebwohl. He, like Fasano, is a gastroenterologist.

LEBWOHL: I’m the director of clinical research at the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.

Lebwohl and other researchers have looked all over the world for clues that could explain why celiac disease is triggered in one person and not another.

LEBWOHL: It used to be thought that people who were susceptible to celiac disease were Irish or Northern European and perhaps, more broadly, Caucasians. But celiac disease is present in Asia. It’s actually quite prevalent in northern India. In virtually every country in the world, celiac disease has been identified.

Okay — but: are people who eat a lot more gluten more likely to get celiac disease?

LEBWOHL: We know that there is this necessary genetic makeup. We also know that there are regions in the world where the genetic makeup isn’t so different but the environment is quite different and there’s a lot more celiac disease in one spot than another. For example, in India we know that the necessary gene is similarly present in the north and the south of the country. But there’s a lot more celiac disease in the north than the south and it’s not just a matter of increased detection. The going explanation — and I think this is a plausible explanation — is that there is a lot more gluten consumption in the north. Whereas in the south it’s a much more rice-based cuisine. Now, that has not been conclusively proven but it’s awfully compelling when you have a population with a similar genetic makeup but very different gluten levels in their diet and suddenly you’re seeing these widely disparate rates of celiac disease.

FASANO: The highest frequency, believe it or not, is the Berber nomadic population in North Africa — six percent. This is a very ancient population that was displaced from their normal position because of the civil war in Northern Africa.That led to very high mortality because of malnutrition, famine, no food available. Unicef and the W.H.O. stepped in and they have to decide what to send there to save these people. The question was, “What we can send the desert that is not perishable, that can be used for many purposes? The answer was wheat. The population there for 4,000 years — whose diet was based mainly on camel milk, camel meat, fruits and vegetables — for the first time in their history, were introduced to gluten.

DUBNER: Was it the sudden influx of that diet that triggered it or was it a case of selection among the population just the way that natural selection works over time? Was it related to that?

FASANO: The latter. That’s the reason why probably this really reflects the natural history of celiac disease. There were people there were much more susceptible. Remember, once upon a time there was high mortality of celiac disease. The most violent reaction to gluten destroy[ed] the vast majority of the intestine, making intestine not capable to absorb or digest food stuff are the ones that didn’t make it.

So it’s likely that celiac disease used to be much, much more prominent among earlier generations, and that natural selection has worked its magic. But since it’s still relatively prominent, researchers are trying to learn everything they can about how it strikes — often by studying populations where it strikes the hardest. Benjamin Lebwohl again:

LEBWOHL: Not everyone knows about the great celiac disease epidemic in Sweden from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. But there was one. This was an epidemic that primarily affected the youngest children, so infants and children under two years of age. It typically caused what we call the classical form of celiac disease: babies with diarrhea, failing to grow, etc. Then in the mid-90s, just as rapid as the rise was a rapid fall. The working hypothesis was that it had to do with how those infants were being fed. Rates of breastfeeding were not very high and in general were not overlapping with the first introduction of gluten into the diet. Moreover, infant formula had very high quantities of gluten, which is very different from today. When more overlap with breastfeeding was encouraged and when gluten was minimized from the infant formula, that coincided with the end of the epidemic. But that’s correlation, and we have been hesitant to say that’s causation.

There’s another clue from a study in Finland and Russia.

LEBWOHL: There was a study that compared rates of celiac disease in two regions very close to each other geographically but very different socioeconomically. These two regions were in Finland and right across the border with Russia in a region called the Russian Karelia. The genetic makeup of those two populations was similar. They both had rates of the celiac disease genes that were comparable. But when screened, celiac disease was present in about one in 100 in Finland and about one in 500 in the Russian Karelia, right across the border.

The researchers suspected that income had something to do with it. One theory: lower-income people had more exposure to certain bacteria that somehow protect them from celiac disease. For instance, the bacteria H. Pylori, known to cause ulcers, seems to cut the risk of celiac disease in half.

LEBWOHL: We found that, actually, there’s more celiac disease in people who live in ZIP codes of a higher income than those who live in ZIP codes of a lower income. The effect is not large, it’s not very strong, but it’s there and appears to be independent of other factors we controlled for. There’s something about either growing up wealthy or being in a wealthy environment and subsequently losing the ability to tolerate gluten.

Okay, so: people are still getting sick from celiac disease, they’re still dying from it, and the epidemiology isn’t locked down. So, given that the disease’s trigger is known, how much sense would it make, as a preventive measure, for everyone to go gluten-free?

LEBWOHL: Adopting a strategy of going gluten-free can really backfire.

*      *      *

DUBNER: Can we hear the story of your being diagnosed with celiac disease?

Emma MORGENSTERN: It was about eight years ago in 2009 and I started having heartburn for about six weeks.

Emma Morgenstern is a producer on our show. And she’s the reason we’re doing this episode about celiac disease.

MORGENSTERN: I didn’t really get a full diagnosis until I went to see a G.I. specialist. Then he did an endoscopy — where they stick a camera down your throat and take a biopsy of your small intestine — and he did confirm with that endoscopy that I had celiac disease.

DUBNER: How hard was it for you to go gluten free?

MORGENSTERN: Ugh. [Laughs.] It was just awful. I came to terms with it fairly quickly because I had to. But you start having to think so much about what you’re eating and it’s just it’s a lot of work to be gluten-free.

DUBNER: I know that you recently came back from your honeymoon in the south of France. Congratulations. Mazal tov.

MORGENSTERN: Thank you.

DUBNER: I know you had a great time. But I would imagine that that is a relatively challenging and tempting place to not be eating gluten, yes?

MORGENSTERN: Oh, you mean with the croissants and the baguettes and the pain au chocolat?

DUBNER: I wasn’t going to name them by name. I didn’t want to torture you.

MORGENSTERN: Yeah, that was a bummer.

As much of a bummer as celiac disease has been for Morgenstern, it’s been helpful for us to have a producer on this episode who actually has the disease. Because she knows a lot about it and has been thinking about it for years. But, alas, Emma Morgenstern is a radio producer with celiac disease; for our show, it sure would be nice to speak to an economist with celiac.

DUBNER: Hey, it’s Stephen Dubner. Is that Katheryn Russ?

RUSS: Hi, Stephen. Yes. You can call me Kadee.

Kadee Russ teaches economics at the University of California, Davis.

RUSS: I specialize in international trade and finance.

Russ had overcome a lot to get to where she is today.

RUSS: I’ve had stomachaches and stomach problems since I was very small. I had a pre-term birth due to HELLP, which is another autoimmune disease. I had vitamin D deficiency for years. Anemia for years. These persistent headaches for years.

After all of those medical problems, Russ was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2011.

RUSS: You read in the news that everyone thinks they have celiac disease or are gluten sensitive. I was really afraid to say anything to the doctor until I thought I had some evidence of it. I went gluten-free for about four months first, maybe closer to six. Just to be sure. Then she told me that I had to eat gluten for six weeks before I could be tested.

DUBNER: Were you willing to do that?

RUSS: Yeah. I wasn’t sure at first whether or not it was necessary to be tested. It makes a night and day difference.

DUBNER: Why?

RUSS: First, the way that you’re treated in the medical community. They take the gluten issue very seriously. If you’re admitted to the hospital or something, people need to be watching out for any gluten exposure for you. Second, it’s hereditary. If you test positive for celiac disease, then everyone in your immediate family at least needs to be tested. Celiac disease, if left untreated, shortens your life. It’s very important that people know. Then, also, how seriously you as a person take it. If you know that you have an autoimmune disease, then you’re much more likely to take it seriously than if you think, “I get a stomachache or something after I eat something, so I only take a bite every once in awhile.” Whoa! No. Celiac disease is a totally different world than that.

The landmark 2003 study, you’ll recall, put the incidence of celiac disease in the U.S. at 1 out of every 133 people. But then there are people who say they have a gluten “sensitivity,” or perhaps an “intolerance” …

LEBWOHL: … having symptoms that might resemble celiac disease — that are not celiac disease but you still get better on a gluten-free diet. The term for that is non-celiac gluten sensitivity or non-celiac wheat sensitivity.

That, again, is Benjamin Lebwohl. A diagnosis of non-celiac gluten sensitivity, he says, is trickier to pin down because there’s no test for it. We asked Lebwohl, therefore, if non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a real thing.

LEBWOHL: It’s really counterproductive to question whether non-celiac gluten sensitivity is real. Clearly, the symptoms are real. The suffering is real. I don’t have to tell you how many patients I’ve seen. I promise they’re real. What we don’t know is what exactly is driving their symptoms. What’s the biological basis? Many of them are coming to celiac-disease specialists because they really don’t have elsewhere to go in the area of so-called conventional medicine because there isn’t a well-defined pathway for these patients. We need to better understand them, listen to them, try to understand what’s driving your symptoms. I’ve certainly seen patients where it really appears to be gluten that’s driving symptoms, even though we can’t for the life of us find a marker in the blood or the intestine. We need to study these patients. We need to take care of them. I certainly wouldn’t doubt that it’s real, though. We just need better science.

There are also plenty of people who go gluten-free apparently because they’ve heard that going gluten-free is a good idea. Here’s a Jimmy Kimmel segment from a few years ago.

Jimmy KIMMEL on Jimmy Kimmel Live: Now some people can’t eat gluten for medical reasons, which that I get. It annoys me, but I get it. But a lot of people here don’t eat gluten because like, someone in their yoga class told them not to. I started to wonder, how many of these people even know what gluten is. So we decided to find out.

Interviewer on Jimmy Kimmel Live: Do you maintain a gluten-free diet?

Interviewee on Jimmy Kimmel Live: I do indeed.

Interviewer on Jimmy Kimmel Live: What is gluten?

Interviewee on Jimmy Kimmel Live: For me, how it affects my body …

Interviewer on Jimmy Kimmel Live: But what is gluten?

Interviewee on Jimmy Kimmel Live: This is pretty sad because I don’t know.

LEBWOHL: There are people who go on a gluten-free diet under the assumption, and this is largely a mistaken assumption, that it will promote weight loss. There are probably people who are buying gluten-free food and avoiding gluten simply because of a vague notion that it’s healthier, even though that might not be the case. Among people who are on a strictly gluten-free diet, the great majority do not have celiac disease. The best data we have to date gives an estimate of about 1.5 percent of people in this country being strictly gluten-free even though they don’t have celiac disease.

Recent studies suggest that as many as 30 percent of Americans are trying to reduce their gluten consumption or avoid it altogether.

FASANO: We went from the complete obsolete, not known, field of what celiac disease is and what gluten really can do to your body to the opposite extreme.

Alessio Fasano again.

FASANO: We did such a good job that now, the awareness of gluten and gluten-free lifestyle becomes one of the most popular if not the most popular diet ever embraced the United States. And this creates a tremendous amount of confusion.

Part of that confusion is that “gluten-free” doesn’t really mean “healthy.”

LEBWOHL: Adopting a strategy of going gluten-free can really backfire. First of all, because gluten is everywhere it’s so difficult to avoid. It can make eating out, grocery shopping, socializing or dating really fraught. There are also potential health concerns with going gluten-free. Gluten-free substitute foods often have more calories than a gluten-containing item. They often have higher fat content. A gluten-free diet is often a diet low in whole grains, low in fiber. We actually compared people who ate high-gluten diets to those who ate the lowest-gluten diets. We found, actually, that overall, when looking at the outcome of rates of heart attack, for example, there was no significant difference with regard to heart attack risk according to how much gluten you eat in your diet. But if you then take into account whole grains, those who ate more gluten in their diet, due to having a higher whole grain content in their diet, actually had a lower heart attack risk. In other words, a gluten-free or low-gluten diet, if deficient in whole grains, could actually increase the heart attack risk.

FASANO: Let me clarify something. Not only gluten is not a villain, but without gluten you and I, we still jump from one tree and another. We [would] not have build the Coliseum or the Eiffel Tower because before the agriculture and, therefore, predictability — humankind spend 90, 95 percent of activity for food procurement and 5 percent for reproduction. No time to unleash ingenuity or doing anything about it. Without agriculture — therefore, without gluten — we would definitely be at the same level of any other species and probably would not be the dominant species. I would personally never, ever recommend a gluten-free diet to somebody that does not have the medical necessity. Myself, I eat gluten. I do this with moderation as we should do for anything.

LEBWOHL: A gluten-free diet is also potentially more expensive, particularly if looking at gluten-free substitutes.

RUSS: Oh yes. It’s much more expensive.

The economist Kadee Russ again.

RUSS: I’m afraid to tell you how much I spend on groceries a month. I spend a lot of money.

DUBNER: I’d like to know.

RUSS: I probably spend upwards of $1,200 a month on groceries. There are three of us in the household. It’s very expensive. You can do just gluten-free and that would probably be a bit cheaper. I’m one of those people that does the gluten-free and tries to go organic, pastured, grass-fed, etc.

DUBNER: Tell me what you can about how much more expensive gluten-free foods are.

RUSS: The few studies that I’ve seen have put gluten-free foods at somewhere between two and four times the price of —

DUBNER: Holy cow.

RUSS: — non-gluten-free equivalents. One of the more widely cited studies says 242 percent higher.

DUBNER: Wow. Fortunately, you’re an economist. You can answer this question from a price-theory standpoint: how much of that has to do with supply and how much to do with demand?

RUSS: I did some sleuthing to try to look into that question. I looked at brownie mix and if we look at a standard national brand, it may cost 12 cents per ounce. Now the lowest cost gluten-free alternative that I could find was 16 cents per ounce.

DUBNER: Not bad.

RUSS: Yeah. About a third more. But I don’t know if it was a loss leader or not. The next lowest I found was about 23 cents per ounce. That was also on sale.

DUBNER: Now getting into the two times range.

RUSS: Exactly. If we take the lowest cost one and then separate out the others, at 30 cents per ounce or more into a premium category, then among those premium categories we see markups of between three and 40 percent.

So if the gluten-free diet is less nutritious and more expensive — why would someone who doesn’t have celiac disease, or gluten sensitivity, want to go gluten-free?

LEVINOVITZ: Gluten-free came on the heels of the low-carb craze. In the aftermath of Atkins, the idea that carbohydrates are bad for you is still very prevalent. For a population that has been told time and time again that what is making their waistlines expand is carbohydrates, it makes complete sense to think that there’s a hidden villain in these high-carbohydrate foods: gluten. That’s the real culprit.

That’s Alan Levinovitz.

LEVINOVITZ: I’m an assistant professor of religious studies at James Madison University.

He’s also the author of a book called The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat.

LEVINOVITZ: Right.

You may be wondering why a religion professor has written a book about diet.

LEVINOVITZ: If people reflect on it, they’ll find that diet is actually at the heart of whatever knowledge they have of religion. One of the first things people think of when they think of Judaism is keeping kosher. There are certain foods that are prohibited by God and certain foods that you’re allowed to eat.

But Levinovitz doesn’t study Judaism, either.

LEVINOVITZ: I specialize in classical Chinese thought as well as the intersection of religion, science, and medicine.

And what he realized …

LEVINOVITZ: I realized that there were some really interesting parallels between Taoist monks’ prohibitions on the five grains — the so-called wugu — and modern avoidance of grains. The promises that these monks made were promises of miracles. They said you could fly if you didn’t eat the grains. You could teleport. You could avoid disease, live forever, clear up your skin. I started to think to myself, “What if what seem like scientific prohibitions on foods today actually have more in common with these religious prohibitions than most people think?”

Instead of Taoist monks, now we have celebrities.

LEVINOVITZ: Jenny McCarthy was hugely influential when she told everyone that she had put her autistic 3-year-old on a gluten-free, casein-free diet. Once you had celebrities coming out against eating gluten-containing foods, you immediately got unscrupulous physicians jumping on the bandwagon.

Jumping on the bandwagon and pointing at gluten as the cause of any variety of ailments.

LEVINOVITZ: They would say things like, “If you go gluten-free, it will cure your arthritis.” “If you go gluten-free, it will help you lose weight instantaneously.”

It hardly seems to matter that many such claims are light on facts. Food companies, sensing a spike in demand, have been only too happy to supply the supply. You’ll see “gluten-free” tags all over the grocery store these days, as if it’s a symbol of excellence and purity; the same goes for a lot of restaurants. And you can see this shift reflected on a macro scale.

BOND: My position allows me to really dig deep into what’s going on in domestic markets for all classes of wheat, as well as crops that are called pulses like dried peas, lentils, chickpeas, which are real popular right now, and dry beans.

That’s Jennifer Bond. She’s an economist with the U.S.D.A.’s Economic Research Service. She points out that when it comes to the consumption of certain foods, it’s a lot easier to establish correlation than causality. Furthermore, wheat consumption has had plenty of historical ebbs and flows.

BOND: In the 1800s, Americans were eating 225 pounds of flour per person. A hundred years later, that dropped by almost 100 pounds per person. Then it rose again slightly as incomes increased and we had access to more diverse food. Then in the ’70s, there was actually a trend towards increased consumption of wheat again, in part driven by the desire to consume less animal protein. For about three decades, we saw increasing per-capita consumption until the recent high point in the 2000s. Then Atkins hit and put some downward pressure on per-capita consumption for the next seven years. Per-capita consumption began to rebound a little bit, until, perhaps, the emergence of the gluten-free trend — which we are seeing a correlation between per-capita consumption of wheat flour and increasing sales of gluten-free products.

Okay, so wheat demand has been all over the place. What’s the current trend on the supply side?

BOND: On one hand, we have record-low plantings of wheat and on the other hand, pulse-crops plantings reached a new record high this last year. Again, it’s hard to say specifically that consumer tastes and preference trends are driving the expanded availability of pulse crops. But what the data is showing us is that there has been some pretty steady growth in chickpea and lentil per-capita availability in particular. Pulse crops tend to be grown in the same area as wheat is grown too. The northern plains of the U.S. have seen expanded production of chickpeas, dried peas, lentils, and declining plantings of wheat.

So for people with celiac disease, or otherwise concerned about gluten, this would seem to be a big win. Gluten-free products are becoming more easily available, and awareness is growing. And on the medical front: it no longer takes a large-scale famine, like the one in Holland during World War II, to identify celiac patients. These developments are exactly what doctors like Alessio Fasano and Benjamin Lebwohl have been working towards. Right? Well …

LEBWOHL: Despite all of our interest in celiac disease and efforts to raise awareness….

Lebwohl again.

LEBWOHL: … it looks like the majority of patients with celiac disease are still going undiagnosed, and therefore eating gluten possibly to long-term medical harm. Despite that we have all these other people who don’t have celiac disease and have adopted the gluten-free diet. It could very well be that our efforts for outreach and awareness of celiac disease have been basically met on the wrong audience or a different audience. Our efforts to say “celiac disease can affect all races and ethnicities, young and old, the many faces of celiac disease” has not fallen on deaf ears, but fallen on other ears, a different set of ears. Those with celiac disease by and large haven’t gotten the message.

I went back to Emma Morgenstern, our producer who has celiac disease, to ask about Lebwohl’s concern with all the undiagnosed cases still out there.

MORGENSTERN: We should be concerned about it. Celiac can be really harmful to people who don’t know they have it.

DUBNER: I guess one prescription would be for much more widespread screening. But as we’ve seen with a lot of maladies, an increase in screening can also turn up a lot of false positives, which can lead to its own set of problems. How much of a concern is that in the case of celiac disease?

MORGENSTERN: I definitely think that’s a concern. I have recently found myself in the position of maybe having been overdiagnosed.

DUBNER: [Laughs] For celiac disease?

MORGENSTERN: Yeah. [Laughs]

DUBNER: Tell me more.

MORGENSTERN: With doing research for this episode I was reading about the recommendations for celiac patients and follow-up, and I realized that I hadn’t actually done any follow-up for almost eight years since I was diagnosed. I decided that I would go to see a celiac specialist.

DUBNER: How did that work? He or she looked at your file or ordered up new tests and data? What happened?

MORGENSTERN: I had brought my medical records, including the records from my original diagnosis. I gave that to her. She started flipping through it. Then, she looked up at me and said, “You know what? I would not have diagnosed you with celiac disease based on these results.”

DUBNER: Oh my goodness.

MORGENSTERN: I was just totally shocked to hear her say that and didn’t quite understand how it was possible that she and my original doctor could come to different conclusions.

DUBNER: I have to say that I feel like the story that we’ve been telling in this episode and the image that we’ve been drawing is that it’s a thing that you have or don’t have. But is there that much gradation in the “yes” or “no,” whether you have it or not. Or were you in, maybe, some kind of pre-celiac condition that your original doctor was concerned would tip into full celiac?

MORGENSTERN: That is exactly my understanding of it. When they do the biopsy with the endoscopy, they categorize the damage to your intestine on this thing called the Marsh scale. So they categorize the symptoms as Marsh 1, 2, or 3. Marsh 3 is the most severe damage. Marsh 1 is the least severe. I had Marsh 1 symptoms when I was diagnosed, which I didn’t even really think about. I didn’t assimilate that information when I was diagnosed. According to my new doctor, that Marsh 1 symptom level is not enough for her to put somebody on a gluten-free diet. She doesn’t think the original diagnosis was wrong exactly, but she would call it aggressive.

DUBNER: I assume the way to test whether you truly don’t have celiac disease is to ingest a lot of gluten. Question number one: does that mean that you have been commanded to go eat a whole bunch of bagels and pizza for a while? Number two: if so, don’t you feel like the world’s biggest sucker for not eating them for eight years?

MORGENSTERN: It’s how you look at it. I have been commanded to eat gluten for six to seven weeks and then have an endoscopy.

DUBNER: What was the first piece of food you ate with gluten and what did it taste like?

MORGENSTERN: I had pizza and it was not that amazing but then I had croissants and those are amazing. That is just something you cannot replicate gluten-free.

DUBNER: Are you having any adverse effects?

MORGENSTERN: I feel pretty much fine. I’m a little bit worried to say that or superstitious about saying that, but so far I haven’t had any problems.

DUBNER: Do you think there’s still a good chance that you actually do have celiac disease?

MORGENSTERN: Yeah. I’ve been trying to manage my expectations about not having it because it’s very possible that I’m going to go have the endoscopy and they’ll say, “You need to stay gluten-free forever.” I will be OK with that. As far as being a sucker… I do feel a little …

DUBNER: I don’t mean to call you a sucker, Emma, because I’m so fond of you. Let me rephrase it: have you thought about a lawsuit perhaps?

MORGENSTERN: It’s crossed my mind. When I told my sister about this whole situation, she said to me, ‘You should sue that doctor for a million croissants.”

*      *      *

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio — we check in on a wildly ambitious project we first told you about several months ago. It set out to solve a problem …

Katy MILKMAN from a previous Freakonomics Radio episode: A problem that, if we fixed it, could truly solve every social problem we could think of.

The project is called Behavior Change for Good. It’ll involve millions of real-world research subjects, a long list of corporate partners, and one of the most impressive collections of academic researchers we’ve ever seen.

Angela DUCKWORTH: We think because this is like the Hall of Justice, with all the superpowers in one place, that we might have a shot at doing something that hasn’t been done before.

These academic superheroes spent a couple days together drawing up their plans for world behavioral domination — and we were there. We’ll share with you the bold ideas:

David LAIBSON: We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars in colleges and we’re not getting much value for our money.

The candid pushback:

Lyle UNGAR: I disagree actually.

And the risks of such a high-stakes enterprise.

Danny KAHNEMAN: If they fail, that’s going to be quite costly for a long time.  

That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Emma Morgenstern. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Harry Huggins and Brian Gutierrez; the music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at radio@freakonomics.com.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Jennifer Bond, agricultural economist with the United States Department of Agriculture.

Alessio Fasano, professor of pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children.

Alan Levinovitz, professor of religion at James Madison University.

Benjamin Lebwohl, director of clinical research at the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.

Kadee Russ, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis.

RESOURCES

30% of U.S. Adults Trying to Cut Down on Gluten, claims NPD Group, Elaine Watson (March, 2013).

“Gluten-free and Regular Foods: a Cost Comparison,” Laci Stevens and Mohsin Rashid (2008).

Gluten Freedom: The Nation’s Leading Expert Offers the Essential Guide to a Healthy, Gluten-Free Lifestyle by Alessio Fasano, Rich Gannon, and Susie Flaherty (Wiley, 2014).

“Pioneer in the Gluten Free Diet: Willem-Karel Dicke 1905-1962, over 50 years of gluten free diet,” by Gerard van Berge Henegouwen and Chris Mulder (November, 1993).

The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat by Alan Levinovitz (Regan Arts, 2015).

“Prevalence of Celiac Disease in At-Risk and Not-At-Risk Groups in the United States: A Large Multicenter Study” by Alessio Fasano, MD; Irene Berti, MD; Tania Gerarduzzi, MD; et al (February, 2003).

“Lower Economic Status and Inferior Hygienic Environment may Protect Against Celiac Disease” by Anita Kondrashova, Kirsi Mustalahti, Katri Kaukinen, Hanna Viskari, Vera Volodicheva, Anna‐Maija Haapala, Jorma Ilonen, Mikael Knip, Markku Mäki, Heikki Hyöty & the EPIVIR Study Group (July, 2009).

“Long Term Gluten Consumption in Adults Without Celiac Disease and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: Prospective Cohort Study” by Benjamin Lebwohl, Yin Cao, Geng Zong, Frank B Hu, Peter H R Green, Alfred I Neugut, Eric B Rimm, Laura Sampson, Lauren W Dougherty, Edward Giovannucci, Walter C Willett, Qi Sun, Andrew T Chan (May, 2017).

EXTRA

Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.

Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Celiac Disease Foundation

“Pedestrian Question — What is Gluten?” Jimmy Kimmel Live (May 6, 2014).

The post The Demonization of Gluten appeared first on Freakonomics.

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