Recovery in the Middle Ages - Two Middle-Aged Suburban Dads Talk About Recovering From Addiction to Drugs & Alcohol.

RMA-Episode 77 Show Notes:   This week Mike and Nat continue their mini-series on mental health in recovery by tackling the multi-headed beast that is PTSD. What is it? How does it manifest?  Most importantly,  what can we do about it?  Traditional treatment of substance abuse in America often focuses on the symptoms (alcohol or drug use), rather than the underlying problems, (trauma and underlyin...

RMA-Episode 76 Show Notes:   AND, we’re back! After a week of darkness, RMA returns with an episode for the ages. Mike and Nat dive into a review of David Poses groundbreaking 2021 work, The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery . In The Weight of Air, Poses chronicles his struggle to overcome mental illness and addiction. By age nineteen, he'd been throug...

RMA-Episode 75 Show Notes:   What is self care, and why is it important? Building off this week’s Monksters Speak, Mike and Nat do a deep dive into the concept of self care and talk about how getting your life in balance is important to a healthy and successful recovery. Making sure you set aside the time for self-care is an important tool for attaining and maintaining that balance. But what is it...

RMA-Episode 74 Show Notes:   Mishka Shubaly wears many hats;  writer, musician, ultrarunner, podcaster. His Kindle Singles for Amazon have all been bestsellers. He writes true stories about drink, drugs, disasters, desire, deception and their aftermath. His work has been praised for its grit, humor, fearlessness and heart.    His first hardcover memoir, "I Swear I'll Make It Up to You"  is a compe...

RMA-Episode 73 Show Notes:   This week on RMA it’s the Recovery in the News Roundup, coming to you from the new studio at Castle Greyskull! Mike and Nat combed through SoberliningsPlaybook’s Wednesday Weekly, and picked out some stories that bear further investigation. We do a deep dive on Dry January’s effect on small business, why women aren’t seeking SUD treatment at the same rate as men despit...

RMA-Episode 72 Show Notes:   Are You Talkin’ to Me? Negative self-talk and a poor self-image are recurring issues for people in recovery. Thoughts are powerful, and they can shape a person’s life and impact the way they experience the world. This week, on a special Get Smart with Erin, the gang does a deep dive into the world of negative self-talk and discusses strategies to quiet that voice in yo...

RMA-Episode 71 Show Notes:   Is anonymity in recovery a good thing, or does it stand in the way of the effort to de-stigmatize addiction? The movie Anonymous People purports to answer that question, and it is the topic of discussion on today’s episode.  According to the filmmakers of this groundbreaking 2013 documentary, deeply entrenched social stigma and mass participation in widely successful a...

RMA-Episode 70 Show Notes:   We spend a lot of time here at RMA talking about the mental health aspects of addiction and recovery. This week we are going to shift gears and get physical. What are the roles of diet and exercise in recovery and how do they fit into the maintenance of sobriety over the long term? What are the benefits of starting and maintaining some kind of exercise program? How do...

RMA-Episode 69 Show Notes:   Imagine being a documentary filmmaker and following your subjects around for 36 years. That’s what Jon Alpert did when he documented the lives of three petty criminals and drug addicts in Newark NJ, from 1984 to 2021. The resulting movie, Life of Crime,  is an achingly candid and at times brutal documentary for HBO spanning a lifetime of crime, incarceration and the co...

RMA-Episode 68 Show Notes:   Happy New Year! It’s the RMA New Year’s special! This week Mike and Nat are joined by Grant Boyken, editor-at-large of the RMA newsroom, moderator of the RMA Facebook Group and the mastermind behind the preeminent recovery news website SoberliningsPlaybook.com. Grant, Mike and Nat  break down the year in recovery, highlighting the stories that made news in the recovery...

RMA-Episode 67 Show Notes:   Merry NatXmas! It’s the RMA holiday special! This week we play listener voice-mails, share some holiday cheer and get in tune with the spirit of the season. There’s music, laughter and poetry coming your way. Happy holidays to all.   Plus, Recovery in the News, The Week in Weird and Monksters Speak on a fully boosted, aggressively festive, live from the North Pole epis...

RMA-Episode 66 Show Notes:   Saddle up! Today RMA sits down with Paul Churchill, host of Recovery Elevator and author of the book, Alcohol is Sh*t, How to Ditch the Booze, Re-ignite Your Life, and Recover the Person you Were Always Meant to be. In February 2015 Paul launched the Recovery Elevator Podcast as an accountability tool to quit drinking. Today, the podcast has surpassed 3 million downloa...

RMA-Episode 65 Show Notes:   This week on RMA,  Erin Moore returns to the podcast to discuss addiction, connection, alienation and Maia Szalavitz’s recent Op-Ed in the NY Times, Opioids Feel Like Love. That’s Why They’re Deadly in Tough Times. What is the relationship between our endogenous opiate system and social disconnection? Can connecting with other people really lower our propensity for add...

RMA-Episode 64 Show Notes:   We're back! And boy do we have a show for you. This week Mike and Nat discuss the ins and outs of Jack Trimpey’s Rational Recovery. What is it? How is it different from AA? Can you incorporate the principles of RR into your own recovery? Tune in to find out.   Plus, Recovery in the News, The Week in Weird, and the life update, on a rational, beastly, self-directed of R...

RMA-Episode 63 Show Notes:   Ready or not, the holidays are around the corner! The stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve is fraught with peril for the newly sober and seasoned sobernaut alike. This week on RMA’s Thanksgiving Extravaganza, Mike and Nat share tips and tricks for making it through with mental health and sobriety intact. To help provide structure to the conversation, they read a...

RMA-Episode 61 Show Notes:   This week is all about taking it easy on RMA. No guests, no books to review, no movies to watch. Instead, Mike and Nat talk about two podcasts in the recovery space that they’ve been listening to lately, It’s All Bad, and Hooked. The former is a war-story centered podcast out of LA, which goes deep and dark into meth crack and heroin use on the West Coast. The second p...

RMA-Episode 61 Show Notes:   This week on RMA: Addiction. Is it a disease of the brain, or is it something better thought of as a maladaptive learned behavior? Unbroken Brain by Maia Szalavits offers a radical and groundbreaking new perspective, arguing that addictions are learning disorders and shows how seeing the condition this way can untangle our current debates over treatment, prevention and...

RMA-Episode 60-Show Notes:   This week on RMA we welcome our first in-studio guest, Joseph Naus, the author of the wildly successful addiction and recovery memoirs, Straight Pepper Diet and The Palsgraf Revelation. Joseph was kind enough to give us some time to talk about his books and his recovery, and he also accompanied Nat on his Recovery in the News scat singing!    We recorded two episodes a...

RMA-Episode 59 Show Notes:   This week on RMA-The Last Stop: When a good kid goes down the wrong path, parents are left feeling hopeless. What do they do when their kid starts doing drugs and drinking and getting into trouble with the law? I’ll tell you what they shouldn’t do. Don’t have a transport company pull them out of bed in the middle of the night and send them to a place like the Elan Scho...

RMA-Episode 58 Show Notes:   This week on RMA, we review Dopamine Nation, the new book written by Dr. Anna Lembke, Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University and director of its dual diagnosis clinic.    This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is ess...

RMA-Episode 57 Show Notes:   Did you ever think you were making progress in your recovery only to be derailed by something that you thought was helping you? That’s what happened to this week’s guests Jeff and Bianca D. Some of you may recognize Jeff’s name from the RMA Facebook group where he is one of the moderators. He also designed the latest RMA T-Shirts (available for purchase at www.middleag...

RMA-Episode 56 Show Notes:   This week on RMA-We continue our discussion of emotional sobriety as an essential element of recovery by taking a look at a few of Dr. Berger’s 12 Smart Things. Find out what you have in common with a Bonsai tree!  Don’t let other people edit your reality, man! Also, know thyself and above all, watch your projections.    Plus, the week in review and the usual hijinks o...

RMA-Episode 55 Show Notes:   This week on RMA-Emotional Sobriety as an essential element of recovery. What is it? How can we achieve it? Why is it important? You’ve heard us say that the real work begins once the drinking and using ends. This week we explain what that means. The quality of our recovery is determined by how we respond to the problems or challenges in our lives. But because we don’t...

RMA-Episode 46 Show Notes:   What is a “high-functioning” alcoholic?  I think there are a fair number of people out there who are able to keep drinking and using while at the same time enjoying success in a career and having a normal-appearing life. The keyword there is “appearing” because as anyone who has been there can tell you, when you are wrestling with an addiction while trying to hold toge...

RMA-Episode 53 Show Notes:   This week on RMA: Tandem bicycles, tandem kayaks...tandem sponsors? Last week we looked at the darker side of sponsorship and how to avoid some of the common pitfalls that some might say are inherent in the sponsor model. This week we sound a more upbeat note and make a modest proposal: sponsorship the RMA way. How do we find a recovery mentor? What utility is there in...