Kathleen S. (formerly, Kathleen W., prior married name) is an American who was born in Santa Cruz, grew up in Arcata and lived in Berkeley, California, USA, for seven years in the '60s. "My parents were Jack London-type sweethearts who sat on the back porch, holding hands, watching the sunset and planning their next day." "My much-older brother, however, molested me when I was just three and he, seventeen. That taboo-violation put my family out of their depth: My father had a heart attack when he discovered it and died of his second heart attack when I was ten. My mom became a pill-junky who drank and had pneumonia twice a year until she, too, died of a stroke when I was just eighteen -- leaving the molester to administer the estate! My brother-molester did all he could to prove, "She's no good!" (which would, in his mind, have proved I'd been "at fault," at THREE.) I drank for POWER, as a teen. I was an overachiever; I was granted a full scholarship to the college of my choice in a national competition, but I was too unstable to make use of it then. Instead of going to Stanford to learn higher math and make atomic bomb triggers for General Electric, I took the first installment in $100. bills and went to LA -- as far from my Humboldt County home as I could go and still be in California! "Uncontrollable," I was called -- flashy, fast and hard to keep. I worked for Dr. Humphry Osmond (who coined the word "psychedelic" in a letter to Aldous Huxley), interviewing people who used LSD when it was still legal in America, helped put together the Fillmore East in NYC and spent time at Timothy Leary's place in upstate New York. I was loved and treated well but I couldn't settle down. I was a sad, angry, hypervigilant child in a young pretty-woman disguise, it seems to me, as I gathered a plump brief-case of credits and credentials that got too burdensome to carry and I couldn't pick them up. And the demons chasing me from my upsetting childhood hadn't been outrun. After several years of struggle, I had the good fortune to become a daily drinker -- of whiskey, with an ice cube and a twist of orange -- instead of just depressed and I floundered into Alcoholics Anonymous on New Year's Eve, 1975, having taken someone to a detox, where I was advised to "Look at your own drinking, because you couldn't know this person if you weren't mixed up in it!" I didn't think I was alcoholic, but my life was unmanageable. I knew that. I stayed sober, however. Things did get better. Things unfolded, as they sometimes do, so that my background, my struggle with tobacco and my need to get free of "triggered" reactions that still put me "on the run," even eight years sober, came together through some course-work at a healing arts college in 1984. I learned to combine 12-Step work with Ericksonian hypnotism (NLP,) using "right-brain" insights to intervene on buried patterning. The results are powerful, and permanent, as well as entirely in line with AA's roots with Carl Jung and William James. I'm one of several founders of the Adult Child 12-Step programs and a former Board Member of Co-dependents Anonymous, Inc. Since 1988, I've authored several first-person revisions of Bill W.'s "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" to incorporate these tools into the fabric of recovery -- where they belong and work well. I hope you find these materials helpful for yourself and for those under your care. I welcome feedback and do respond to email correspondence.
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