Tom Adams
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If you’re lucky, you’ve never been stung by a jellyfish. If you spend time at the ocean or a bay on the East Coast and like to swim in very hot weather, you are likely to know what jellyfish are. Maybe you have even been stung once or twice.
Happy summer’s end and fall! Thanks for supporting my time off from Critical Conversations. Today’s post is reflections on my time off this summer. First, by way of context, you may have figured out that I like to stay busy. The first challenge in taking much of June,...
This week’s post is about slowing down during the summer. I offer some reflections on the gifts and challenges I’ve experienced. I will continue to “practice” during August, including taking a break from posting Critical Conversations. My next post will appear on September 8.
I am coming to the end of leading two weekly book discussion groups of A Marriage that Changed the World: Lois and Bill Wilson and the Addiction Recovery Movement. For over three months I’ve been meeting with one group on Sunday morning and another on Monday morning, one in person and one on zoom. As we read Chapters 18 and 19 about Bill and Lois’ final years this past week, I was moved to tears several times.
I got some unexpected gifts from seeing a billboard reminding me that May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Today’s post is about those gifts and the challenge of appreciating the mental health challenges we each face with compassion and understanding. I might not...
This week’s post is part of a series aimed at increasing awareness about how families are impacted by addictions and how they recover. Most days I experience painful evidence of alcoholism and other addictions being passed from generation to generation. Learning and writing about the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and Al-Anon Family Groups (Al-Anon) and the addiction recovery movement they spawned is one way to hopefully slow this cycle and pass on awareness of recovery to current and future generations.
Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, April 22, 1951, Lois Wilson hosted a lunch at her Stepping Stones home for the wives of A.A. members from the U.S. and Canada attending the A.A. General Service Conference in NY, her neighbor and friend Anne Bingham and other wives of local and regional members of “wives’ groups”. This little-known meeting was the first step towards a Clearing House, the precursor of the Al-Anon Family Groups, a world-wide Twelve Step fellowship for families and friends of people with drinking problems.
Addictions are America’s most costly and least fully acknowledged health crisis. The direct and indirect costs to the person with the addiction—be it alcohol, drugs, gambling, overeating, technology, or work—and their family are staggering and still not fully quantified in any comprehensive way.
Most people in Akron know that Alcoholics Anonymous was founded here. What we may not fully appreciate is that Akron also helped launch family recovery—and, with it, the broader addiction recovery movement. That legacy is more relevant than ever, in Akron and around the world.
I’ve been focusing on gratitude this month as we head towards Thanksgiving, and in Twelve Step circles, celebrate Gratitude Month.
Tom Adams writes and speaks on topics vital to the intersection of our personal lives with our community and global lives. He has for decades been engaged in and written about nonprofit leadership and transitions, spirituality and spiritual growth, how we each contribute to a more just and equitable world and recovery from addictions and the Twelve Step recovery movement.