Inner Alchemy Recovery Reset

06/18/2026

For as long as there have been recovery groups, meetings, 12-step programs and support groups, there have been people on the margins, who were made to feel unwelcome. Some because they were gay. Others, because of their skin colour or their gender-identity. Some because they didn't embrace the superstitious notion of someone else's deity.

We created Recovery Reset to provide a place where people are accepted as they are. Cali-Sober, abstinent, Q***r, immigrant, religious or atheist. A place where people are accepted is a place where people heal.

06/18/2026

Join me for a few minutes of deep breathing, somatic experiencing and letting go...

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06/17/2026

06/17/2026

Nothing could ever have prepared me for the sudden death of my husband in March of last year. One month shy of our 17th anniversary, I held his hand in the operating room as he was disconnected from life support, so that they could harvest his kidneys to save another soul in need.

I've experienced grief in my life. More than the piercing pain of losing my parents, which will always hurt. One hundred and eight loved ones died in my arms in the first ten years of the AIDS pandemic. A dozen more died of overdoses — accidental or intentional. Every one of them loved… deeply.

I don't know that I will ever understand the kind of pathology that sees love and chooses to hate it. And so I choose love. And I choose to celebrate love whenever I am privileged to witness it.

06/16/2026

We often treat addiction like it’s the primary problem. We focus entirely on the substance or the behavior, thinking that if we can just stop the action, we’ve solved the issue.

But anyone who has walked the path of recovery knows the truth: addiction is rarely the root cause. It is the symptom.

The real driver is almost always underlying pain, deep-seated fear, or unresolved emotions. It is the mind’s desperate, survival-driven attempt to medicate a wound that hasn't healed.

When a person is drowning in anxiety, trauma, or a profound sense of isolation, the addictive behavior feels like a lifeline. It becomes a coping mechanism for an environment or an internal state that feels completely intolerable.

If we want to build lasting recovery, we have to look past the surface. We have to stop asking, "Why the addiction?" and start asking, "Why the pain?"

True healing doesn't happen just by removing the vice. It happens when we address the fear, process the grief, and create a safe space to sit with our emotions without needing to escape them. That is where real freedom begins.

06/12/2026

My newest article is out on the blog: https://open.substack.com/pub/recoveryreset/p/why-i-believe-aa-and-na-are-cults

Thanks for your support!

06/12/2026

Hardships suck. No matter where they show up in our lives, that fact remains. But one of the things twenty years of recovery has taught me was that when we look beyond the hardship… beneath everything that seems to be going wrong… we discover that life is a series of extraordinary moments — each with the potential create an extraordinary life.

06/11/2026

I've been asked if I am not worried that prospective clients, providers or potential employers might see my posts and choose not to work with me.

I'm unconcerned. I want them to see who I am — a person who cares deeply enough about those who feel they have to hide who they are — so that perhaps some of them might be inspired to stand with me and heal.

06/10/2026

I understand that many people feel like 12-Step programs saved their lives. And I am grateful they are still here with us. But nothing else saved their lives. THEY saved themselves.

They were NEVER powerless. They NEVER needed "divine intervention". What they needed was someone to walk with them. To meet them where they are at. To help them heal the root cause of their struggle, not the symptom.

06/09/2026

At this time of year, I stop to think of all of those LGBTQ+ clients and patients I've worked with over the past four decades. So many of them were looking for a way out of active addiction. They didn't want groups with cult-like dynamics. They knew they were not powerless. They just wanted to navigate their way out of the hell that seemed to trap them, in a world that didn't understand them.