Please enjoy the excerpt from my chapter “My Addiction Story: We Can Heal from Chronic Pain” in the newly released book Dare to Be Sober.

“…Captivity is a mentality. It was a thing I carried with me. It’s hard to understand how confusing freedom is when you have been a prisoner for so long. It’s hard to understand how hard it is to grasp that you even have choice, that you can act. It’s hard to understand how unimaginable the sun is if you’ve been living underground for years. Herein lies the crux of the matter for those of us when we are caught in the grip of active addiction. Look at the courage and the extraordinary force it takes to break out of the inertia of being such a prisoner for so long and the action that one must take to change the momentum, the course of one’s trajectory, from the unimaginable to the exquisite knowing of real freedom. Surrender is truly a super power and our Higher Power is always listening and at the ready to lift us back up to the sun. We need only bow and ask, but bow and ask we must…”

You can pick up a copy of this book at (and for those of you who are thinking about The Clarity Statement, I tried to bring clarity to this book’s title, but was overruled.)