A news story going viral is about Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, who told his employees that he intends to raise the salary of every employee to $70,000 over the next three years. He is cutting his own salary of nearly $1 million down to $70,000 and using company profits to pay for their […]

Imagine that someone has wronged you. They have committed a grievous offense that calls for a heart to heart talk. You hope for an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an apology, and assurance that it won’t happen again. Instead, your conversation turns into an argument and is deeply unsatisfying. What went wrong? Some people refuse to be […]

Alcohol effects people differently. Some people become more fun, some fall asleep, some feel depressed, and some get ugly. Intoxication alone does not cause violence. Not everyone who drinks will become aggressive, but alcohol may increase the risk of violence for some people in some situations. Some people believe that liquor causes them to behave […]

Addiction Campuses is a substance abuse treatment center with locations throughout the US. Among their marketing materials, they have a poster entitled “Enabling Addiction: Are You Loving Someone to Death?” They contend that “Enabling your loved one can put them in their grave.” They have some helpful guidelines on the difference between enabling and loving. […]

I can’t browse Facebook without periodically seeing a post regarding welfare and drug use. “People who test positive for illicit drugs shouldn’t be eligible for welfare.” I get it. People who have money for drugs should not get financial assistance if that supports their drug use. There is a social contract in play between the […]

NBC News Anchor Brian Williams was suspended for six months without pay. He apologized for “misremembering” a military incident while reporting overseas event. He committed the sin of stretching the truth. Bill O’Reilly also faces accusations of exaggerating the dangers he faced while he was a foreign news correspondent. Most people would say that honesty […]

Many people can define substance abuse and addiction but few can define recovery. Even people who are recovering from an addiction are hard pressed to define it. There is no consensus on what recovery means. The bulk of scientific study focuses on addiction and treatment. As time enfolds we will know more and more about […]

When Chicago gets hit with a snow storm, they have their own etiquette for how one parks on the streets. Chicagoans have a tradition of holding their spot with chairs after they’ve cleared a space for their car. There is no law pertaining to one’s right to hold a spot for themselves, but it is […]

I recently read a Huffington Post article entitled: “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think.” The author states “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.” This piqued my interest in reading the book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the […]

So, did you hear about the Canadian man who played the lottery and missed the jackpot by seven seconds? You could say that he was very unlucky. He bought two tickets for the weekly lottery draw in 2008, but his winning numbers were printed seven seconds after the deadline. He argued that he should be […]