Addiction Recovery Resources. Owned and operated by Lakeview Health
Author, Marilyn Spiller is a writer, speaker, sober coach and recovery advocate with a 20-year history of international hobnobbing and outrageous over-drinking. Five years sober, she writes a popular blog called Waking Up the Ghost, and acts as the Executive Director of Marketing for Sanford House at John Street, Sanford House at Cherry Street, and the Sanford House Outpatient Center.
Marilyn Spiller has written 15 articles so far, you can find them below.
It can be hard for someone to understand your situation when they have never experienced what you have gone or are going through. With that being said, explaining addiction to someone is a wildly complicated task. When family members confront you about your alcohol addiction it can be difficult to find the right words to
My best friend and I quit drinking at the same time. She quit because she was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis and I quit because I was a late stage alcoholic. The fact is, she got the liver I deserved, but she didn’t hold it against me. It’s been almost four years now, and our friendship
Sung to the tune of “I’ll be Home for Christmas” with the same level of nostalgia and hopefulness… This will be my fourth sober holiday season. I am grateful and clear-eyed and, well, nostalgic. Remembering some of the drinking traditions I used to have when I was a partier. That’s the rub for someone like
I was in a roadside bar a few weeks ago. My favorite kind of watering hole: rustic, rural with a long, cluttered bar top and a surly barmaid. There were some animal heads hanging crookedly on the wall and a beat-up pool table under a broken light. I am not making this sound as charming
My friend Tall Girl and I were having an email conversation. She had just come back from New York and she was telling me about going to MOMA and seeing “her favorite Jackson Pollack” on display.I said, “People have favorite Pollocks? All those paint splotches just look the same to me. I like his dribbly
In what is probably my least favorite Frank Sinatra song, old blue eyes croons, “Regrets, I’ve had a few – but then again, too few to mention…” Too few to mention? Really? As a recovering alcoholic, I’ve had plenty of regrets to count, and I hate the smugness of the lyric. Sorry Frank. Early in
I got an email from a friend the other day. A decidedly chagrinned friend, asking me to write an article about the pitfalls of making a phone call while drunk. He said, “I had a little incident the other night. I received a scathing email from a female friend of mine (maybe no longer a
Here’s the good news: I am kinder and gentler after two-plus years of recovery. The bad news? I was pretty awful in the early days of my sobriety: angry at the world and resentful of the pickle I had gotten myself into. On top of that, I’ve written it all down in a daily blog
We were on the home stretch, and a friend of mine said, “If there is such a thing as the Fountain of Youth, this is it.” At the time we were three hours into a rigorous hike in the Puerto Rican mountains, and I was not feeling youthful in the least. The Puerto Ricans call
I was stressing about Christmas to my friend David, and he interrupted me to say, “Marilyn, it’s just another day.” It stopped me in my tracks because I have never thought about the holidays that way – as if they could be approached like my recovery, one day at a time. I am a holiday
