Denial is a big part of addiction. The step from denial into recovery is a huge one, and for women lawyers it is very large indeed. As a young associate in a private firm, I faced a terrible fear. That fear was about addiction. I had gone straight from college into law school and from […]
We all struggle with denial. Denial is part of being human. It affects everything we do, the way we think, what we believe, and how we perceive our world. Denial is our ego’s way of dealing with realities that are painful or unpleasant. Denial shades our memories, prejudices our perception and manipulates our future. We […]
Alcoholism is a brain disease. Brain research in the past several years has taught us much more than we have ever known before about the mechanics of how alcoholism affects us. At the same time, it has reaffirmed older wisdom about alcoholism that has too often been neglected. Seneca, the Roman poet, observed that some […]
I didn’t consider alcohol as a remedy for my unhappiness and depression in high school. I was introverted, although active in school activities, but I never felt like I belonged in social situations. While my classmates were having fun outside the classroom, I was at home reading a book. I discovered alcohol when I was […]
I am forty-six years old and have been a lawyer since 1976. I practice in a Piedmont city. I concentrate in civil litigation. Martindale Hubbell has give me an “av” rating, which I consider to be almost meaningless but which I mention because it may help you identify with my type, whatever that is. I […]
Jim, California To almost any outside observer in 1980, I was sitting on top of the world. Maybe not a very big world, but one that a lot of us know. I was 28 years old, a very successful solo practitioner with a practice growing beyond my wildest dreams, and a “hometown boy” to boot. […]
I am a lawyer. I am also an alcoholic. I drank in college, but the alcoholic drinking started in the military and persisted through law school and the next 22 years. I was a quiet drinker. I did not hang out in bars; I drank either in the office at night or at home. I […]
Standing at the doorway of the courtroom, I reflected on how I had come to be here as a civil court judge. My reverie took me back to another time when I stood at the door of a different room, where a meeting of recovering alcoholics was in progress. I recalled wondering how I had […]
I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA — the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations […]
How do we understand the gap between the level of alcoholism that exists among North Carolina lawyers and the fact that most of the time most of us look like we’re functioning pretty well? The recent survey that Professor Darcy Siebert completed of North Carolina lawyers reported that 25% of the lawyers in the state […]