You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'Become'

My 6 year old daughter is becoming addicted to junk food, and I’m scared she’ll become overweight?

  • Posted on July 25, 2010 at 1:27 pm

What should I do?

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You might become a cult hero

  • Posted on January 25, 2010 at 10:11 am

You’ve written a few good songs, made a dollar or two jamming with a few bands or busking on the corner. Now, you’re no longer satisfied: dreaming of stardom, you’re hungry for the big time.


The worst thing to do is to hold out for the big break that never happens: Better to play for the love of music. With no false hopes and no illusions, start from zero. Somewhere, there’s an audience for you. Let someone hear you – mother, daughter, friend, lover – and listen to what they have to say. Drink in the encouragement and consider their criticism. It’s all good. Just get someone, anyone, anywhere, anytime to listen to you. Sing in the dark, sing in the park. Play for friends, for strangers, for young and for old.


All you need is a song and a crowd; the rest comes easy, one step at a time. The day will come when you’ll earn a place of respect. People will notice when you walk into a room. You won’t hear a pin drop when you begin to play at a local coffee house. The whole room will “rock” when you plug in and play at your neighborhood blues cafe.


But, if that’s not enough and you still want to get signed to a major record. Pet your dog. Kiss your wife or girlfriend goodbye. You’ll be away for a long, long time playing for people you don’t know in places you’ve never been before. Your chances of becoming a rock star are about as good as winning a lottery. Call it a glass ceiling. Call it a brick wall, mainstream success is rare.


They say the Beatles started their career playing in strip joints in Hamburg, Germany. Forty years ago, Hamburg’s infamous red-light district was where some of the world’s most popular rock musicians paid their dues. One day Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles when they packed the Star Club with whores, pimps, transvestites, sailors and fans of “beat music” swilling alcohol and dancing until dawn. Epstein saw something in them that no one else could see. Somehow he knew one day their raw sound would thrill audiences with a magic that will never return again.


Maybe someone will notice you one day. All you’ve got to is get the right people interested in what you’re doing and hold that interest long enough for them to “buy” what you’re doing. The more interested they are, the longer they stick around, the more ideas they’ll get for selling what you have to offer.


‘The cream always rises to the top’ doesn’t mean the best rise to the top. Without at least some marketing savvy, the average musician won’t make it very far alone no matter how good he is. Which brings me to my next thought. A performing career isn’t for most people. Most so-called pro musicians live below the poverty line spending their daylight hours watching TV in a dingey downtown apartment waiting for the phone to ring with a booking for your next paying gig. When you’re a seventeen year-old drop out, playing bar songs for a crowd of rowdy drunks might be someone’s idea of a good time but there are better ways to make a living.


If you want a life, think again. With a strong regional presence, it’s possible to make a name for yourself as an artist. If you travel a circuit, and stay around long enough your audience will grow and your CD sales will climb. If you’re good, you might become a cult hero or even a regional icon

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How the Family Members of Addicts Become Dysfunctional

  • Posted on January 9, 2010 at 8:06 pm

How the Family Members of Addicts Become Dysfunctional by Ken P

 Nobody escapes paying the price for alcoholism, drug addiction, and codependency in society. Even if you are fortunate enough not to be a drinker at a level that is diseased, (about 10% of our population drinks enough to hamper their daily performance) or one of the four adults who are in line daily enabling one who is (i.e., 48% of all adults over the age of 18 were either directly impacted by a diseased drinker as they grew up, or are being effected at the moment), then you are paying for the disease through higher taxes and insurance rates.
   It requires four reasonably functioning people to maintain a single non-functioning addict. These four others are forced to practice a unique sharing of the lies that form the spider web supporting the addict. In truth, these four usually come from the addicted person’s immediate family. These are the people who pay the highest price of all for addiction, with the possible exception of the addict. Let’s take a closer look at these people.
   First, there has to be one primary enabler. For alcoholic women, for example, this is typically a high functioning husband, a wealthy father, or a boss who spreads the work the alcoholic doesn’t do among many other workers. In time these dysfunctional enablers are sucked into the alcoholism vortex because alcoholism is a disease that is progressive. It creeps into systems slowly over many years. As the alcoholic gradually declines in functional capacity others, in terribly subtle ways, take up the slack.
   Maybe in the early days the drunk or hung over wife’s husband will cover for her by doing routine chores. He prepares more meals, washes more clothes, or stands in as the only parent during back-to-school night. Here is the husband taking his kids to the pediatrician, or playing with them at the park while mom is at home throwing up, or, less dramatically, she’s “…just too tired.” These are what my sons and I used to call “one of those Saturdays.”

Those Saturdays start like this.

“You guys just go ahead and go. I have to stay home with this headache.”

   The reasons for the headache are as diverse as the alcoholic’s imagination, but whenever she manages to shift her guilt to anybody else (usually her husband and/or kids), she makes them responsible instead of her alcoholism. And they all accept the terms!
   The husband hears her bad mood like this;

“She is mad at me because of the fight we had last night when I said that awful thing about her mother.”

   The oldest daughter, who is probably in the super-enabler role, might interpret this as;

“Mom is upset this morning because I didn’t do enough of the housework yesterday.”

   Little brother, who might be in the disappearing child or mascot role might translate;

“Mommy is mad because I wet the bed again last night and she has to stay home to wash the sheets.”

   The important truth that they all must ignore is that none of their guilt-ridden reasons apply. Their mother and wife has gone months now without feeling good. She hurts inside…physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. She lives in a world parallel to that of her husband, where the single goal each moment is to minimize pain. But for her part, she has the added burden of minimizing the pain while planning every event to coincide with her need for the security she knows only the bottle can provide.
   Here is a beautifully right on description of the “hunger” taken from Caroline Knapp’s best selling book, Dinking, A Love Story.

“The need is more than merely physical: it’s psychic and visceral and multi-layered. There’s a dark fear to the feeling of wanting that wine, that vodka, that bourbon: a hungry abiding fear of being without, being exposed without your armor. In (AA) meetings you often hear people say that by definition, an addict is someone who seeks physical solutions to emotional or spiritual problems. I suppose that’s an intellectual way of describing that brand of fear, and the instinctive response that accompanies it: there’s a sense of deep need, and the response is a grabbiness, a compulsion to latch onto something outside of yourself in order to assuage some deep discomfort.”

(PP 58)

   So the whole family is in the tight grip of the lady’s deep need for alcohol. That is why program people call it “a family disease.” The great lie, the great secret kept by everybody, is that the lady of the house is an alcoholic. The issue is beyond a moral question, beyond shame. It is an absolute. It is refusal by everyone in the family to be willing to admit this truth, even deep within themselves. This refusal perpetuates everybody’s pain.
   Both partners in the addiction dance are highly subject to what retailers call POP, or point of purchase advertising. This dynamic involves a momentary feeling of happiness that comes when some eye-appealing object is seen on the store shelf and immediately purchased. At the height of our disease process, Deb and I were having garage sales every month because we both bought so much junk. It was always just “stuff,” like books, bobbles, and beads. That did no help our financial situation either. I eventually learned to check myself by asking myself a question every time I started to buy some new toy. I would ask myself…”how much will I get for this in the next garage sale?”
   When this evolves into making major purchases such as cars, it can lead to a common outcome with addiction…bankruptcy. I once heard a wise AA quote his sponsor about this form of self destruction. His sponsor told him;

   “You are broke all of the time because you keep buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have trying to impress people you don’t know!”

   If you recognize yourself or someone you love int his description of a dysfunctional family, THERE IS HELP! Call Al-Anon or Nar-A-Non to learn where there are meetings right in your community…right now!

Al-Anonis at 1-888-4AL-ANON.

Nar-A-Non is at 1-800-477-6291.

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