I've had it. I give up.
It's utterly impossible.

I have more than fifty, maybe even one hundred different so-called "accounts"–linkedin, huffington post, twitter, cable, phone, internet, website administrator, google, yahoo–the list has become a ten-page typewritten list of account names, numbers, passwords, and pin numbers.
I can't remember any of them.

And each time I call a company for either customer support or account management information, I sound like a thief.

"And may we have your pin number to verify your account?" they ask.

And I stammer over three or four that spring to mind. Sometimes I have to make them wait and go look it up.
But they tell you–very urgently–never, ever to repeat a password. Make each one unique. Make each one impossible to guess. Fill them with numbers, letters and symbols for which most of us don't even have names, like "ampersands" (&).

I don't know how much better I'd be at this if I were 25. I can't imagine it would be all that much easier. But I do know I'm not alone in the sandy-haired set.

One woman at the grocery store had to input a password to get access to the cashier so she could  scan our food order. She stood there mesmerized. She was probably a little older than I am. But her face became utterly blank.

Finally, she turned to me, chagrined, "I can't remember my number," then locked the system back up and went to get her boss. It became a 15-minute process.

So.

This leaves us with a bit of a problem. Do we carry around lists of passwords? That would make having a password rather foolish since anyone could just grab it out of our pockets or off our computers.
Do we have a separate system under a single password, in which all our other passwords are available? Sounds like an idea, but it still leaves us one password away from identity theft.

My husband had a great idea.

"Why not just have one password for the whole lot of 'em?"

"What?"

"Fuggedaboudit."

I thought that was the best idea I'd heard all day.

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I'd never met the man before and we were having a pleasant conversation. We were talking about wines, then about where we lived and where we'd been. He'd spent a lot of time in the southwest, where I had lived for a while. He said he visited several times a year to study with a guru whose name was utterly unpronounceable and unrecognizable. I told him I’d never heard of his teacher, and he said, “Oh, he’s world famous.”

He asked me why we had moved back to NY and I simply said "family." He looked at me quizzically. I explained we had aging parents and felt the need to be with them. While sometimes challenging and other times cumbersome, it has not been a personal or emotional burden. Both my husband and I feel that it is a gift and a blessing to be able to do this and share what will be their last years on earth. It has not been easy, but it has been right and often joyful.

So, suffice it to say that I did not whine, grumble, or pout while I was talking to him. I felt neither needy nor resentful as I described the situation. However, without a second between sentences, he waved his hand, "Oh, you need to detach from all that. I left everyone I know in Europe and I don't think of them at all."

He said this as if it were a model of good behavior, an example for all, particularly me, to follow. I believe he meant well, but I was taken aback.

A bit of  history: For much of my early life, detachment  was precisely what I needed. I had to learn to see where I began and ended and other people began and ended. I needed to learn what it was I truly longed for and what was the contrivance of a frightened heart. I needed to let go of expectations and deal with what was true about both people and circumstances. In concrete terms this meant I had to stop trying to control others. It is an ongoing lesson, no doubt. But, over the years and with increasing faith in God, I get better at it. For me, letting go has only been possible because I've been able to hand the reins over to Some One I believe is better at it than I believe I am. That's how I have learned to accept the circumstances I cannot change, deal with the loves that have been lost, and allow for the sorrows I cannot soothe.

So the idea of detachment–and its importance in healthy relationships–is not new to me. But his idea of it was, which was to use it as a weapon of self-negation so that feeling, love, and attachment to others in any fashion was unfashionable in that it revealed a gross psychological immaturity.

Is that true? Should we detach in order to feel nothing for friends, family, beloveds who are not with us? Should we cut ourselves off from longing of any kind? Should we exorcise our hearts so we can be more “spiritual?”

Since this encounter I have broached this topic with numerous people whose spiritual stances I particularly respect for their erudition and grounding: a Buddhist, an Orthodox priest, a Hasidic housewife, a Catholic theologian.

I half-expected my Buddhist colleague to agree with my friend at the wine store. But he said, “No, people who say that don’t understand what Buddha meant. We are meant to deeply feel each moment, not to use our minds as weapons against ourselves. We are called on to feel sorrow and joy fully, to be fully.” Detachment, as he explained it, was a way to see what was true about self and other.

The Orthodox priest had an interesting take on it and agreed that we are asked to feel for others, look to help, and love; that, indeed love was the greatest and highest calling. However, he added, “We are also told to be in the world, but not of it. We are born into a fallen world. And expecting it to be other than it is, is foolish and makes us ineffective. When you know you are in a pig sty, why do you get surprised when you get dirty? You’re in a pig sty. It’s a mess.”

Contrary to my new friend’s call to detach, as I grow older I find myself more surefooted in my commitment to be available, to respond when needed, and to love while I have the chance. As I see it, there may be many flaws in trying to control, but there is no failure in love.

But I continued to pursue the thoughts of others on the topic.

When I asked my husband what he thought about detachment, he admitted he found it hard. “Especially,” he added, “when it comes to what other people think and how they feel. I always want everyone to be happy. I want to like everyone and everyone to like me.”

I brought it to my mother, who in typically no-nonsense fashion, said, “What do you mean by detachment? You mean to let go? Well, then, seems to me you want to detach from evil, but not from good. It’s a matter of choice, isn’t it?”

All this left me with more questions than I’d started with, and certainly more than I bargained for when I went in to buy a bottle of wine.

What should we detach from or attach to?
Does love mean attachment? Are they distinct?
What about the desire to love (as a verb, not as a fuzzy feeling) and make others happy? Should my husband have not bought me flowers the other day because he knew they would delight me? Should he have detached enough to not care how I felt?

We know that control and manipulation and heartache are the results of a failure to detach when that is what is necessary, but what happens without any attachment whatsoever?

In my experience, the failure to attach is like a house built without struts or support beams. There is no connective tissue and the organism eventually fragments, falls apart. We see this in abandoned or severely abused children who are left to their own devices far too early. Without anyone to depend on—to attach to, they become like leaves loosed in a gust of wind. They have no sense of who they are, how they feel, or how to deal with those feelings as they arise. They are socially utterly lost. As a result, what they wind up feeling most of the time is a blend of rage and panic. Anyone who’s worked with these children comes to understand, if only viscerally, the utter necessity of attachment in order to live. This is not limited to humans. It has been shown to be equally as important in other animals, particularly primates.

The problem, of course, is that attachment—even a healthy one—comes with a price tag. When we lose the one to whom we are attached, or the thing (a house, a sentimental picture, a job), we lose a part of ourselves and we grieve. We feel pain. Sometimes the pain is so great that we are forever altered, our lives a limping replica of what they once were. This phenomenon is not limited to humans, either. We see evidence of exquisite attachment and wrenching grief in primates, dogs, sea lions, dolphins, whales, elephants, and geese. Attachment–at some level–seems to be universal.

I think I know what the fellow at the wine store was trying to say to me—that he has learned how to avoid that pain. He was saying that he had become self-aware as a spirit who was temporarily occupying a body, that he had successfully conquered his fears, vanquished his needs as the irrelevant yearnings of a feeble psyche, become part of small club of humans who have surpassed their own humanity.

Foible or fortune, for today I remain rather human.

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I was my own worst nightmare, a caricature of the anxious stunt-mom, the stuff I have warned my sister about far, far too many times for both her and my own liking. And even writing this to you, I am embarrassed. I'm supposed to know better. This is generally the sort of thing I teach to parents — how to generate a sense of authority, safety, and assurance and then transfer that to their children or loved ones. I'm supposed to be the maven of ,Verbal First Aid not the Grand Ol' Mama of Woe and Oh No.

But as I look back on it — and how I had to retrace my steps, backpedal, and make it right with my niece (first with an apology and then with some true correction), I see it more as a gift. As hard as it is to let go of the people we love, it is that easy to grab them right back. Control is like a tether ball. It may look like you've slapped it past the horizon, but then there it comes around and slams you upside the head.

What I've learned is that letting go of someone I love so that she may properly live her own life is an ongoing struggle — at least for people like me whose natural tendency is to fret. For others who are more like my husband, it is a grace, a way of walking and breathing in the world. So I went back to basics. As she talked about all the things she was going to do I went through the list I teach but forgot to practice:

1. BREATHE! I honestly forget to breathe more times than I care to admit. It's a wonder I'm not perpetually cyanotic.

2. CENTER! This word has a multiple meaning for me. In one, obvious sense it means to get centered physically in my own body, which is the only way to manage an unreasonable anxiety, even though everything about anxiety pushes us in the other direction… to leave our bodies. (If it's going to feel like this, I'm OUTTA here!)

The other thing it represents for me is a spiritual center. I have to remember, or to be more accurate, actively remind myself by reading something, praying, talking to someone who knows better than I do, who I really am, who she really is and what our ultimate destinations are. Even though I love her as if she were my own child, she is far, far more than that and has her own purpose in life. She is God's child, just as I am. She has never belonged to me (or anyone else for that matter) even though at times it may feel like that.

3. The ABC's of Verbal First Aid with children and adults. Even though this was not a "crisis" (at least not for anyone but myself), it was a good opportunity for me to remember what makes for truly therapeutic communication–Authority, Believability, Compassion. Usually these qualities are important to cultivate when someone is in shock or had a traumatic or frightening experience so that we can lead them towards health or healing. In our case, it was oddly reversed. I was the one who, with my fear, was creating a traumatic or frightening experience where none did or needed to exist. To reverse it, I had to go back to what was the essence of any good parent or healer relationship: the ability to be a leader (to help her to move forward without the unnecessary baggage of MY anxiety), to be believable in my assertions (not a fear-monger), and to be understanding. She was tired and desperately wanted a vacation. If she wanted to see Donald Duck and be a little girl for a week, who was I to judge? And where did I come off assuming that she didn't have enough sense to get out of the sun or find a chair in which to rest her weary legs? I had messed up on all counts.

4. Rapport. In this case, because I was such a worry wart, I had to re-establish what I once had but rapidly lost because my fear had begun to affect her. The more fear I had, the more I lost the rapport we had cultivated over so many years. Obviously it was not "lost" in the sense of "gone forever" but it was tenuous in the moment. With every "what if" she had to defend not only her status as an adult or her decisions, but her sense of well-being. The more afraid I was, the more she really had to resist me. I remember quite a while ago when I was undergoing these quick twists and turns with my parents and how their fear had more than annoyed me, it had angered me. As the years passed, I realized why: it resonated with me. If they were afraid (and if secretly I was, too), then there must have been something to be afraid of. I didn't want to be afraid. It made me feel helpless rather than empowered and alive. And being pervasively (as opposed to realistically) fearful never gave me a single useful tool in my life.

So, this time, I was lucky. Not too much water or wasted emotional energy had flowed under the bridge before I caught it. I was able to recapitulate in short order and she, gracefully, laughed at her aunt once again. When, inevitably, I imagine her walking across miles of parking lots and waiting on long lines in sweltering heat to get through the Pearly Gates of Disney, I will instead take a breath, sit back, remind myself of the basics and think of her as a brave and happy young woman with a baby on the way, running up to Cinderella and smiling from ear to ear.

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I know a woman struggling with having an affair. Not the actual "having", but the idea of it. She ruminates about the man in question day and night. Should she, shouldn't she. She is married, has a daughter and the man she is fantasizing about is also married, though apparently he has made it clear that he is more than interested in her. The attraction is mutual, and there are all sorts of innuendos and near-misses — a brush against the hand, a bump in the hallway — all day at work.

She tells me the only reason she has been struggling with turning the idea into reality is because she has been held back by her ethics. She had been raised to believe that her word was her honor and that commitments were to be held sacred. Her early home life was devout if not technically religious. She was torn between her desire to "let go" and have fun and an innate sense of right and wrong. She was also raised to be a perfectionist — which ultimately ruins a good sense of duty and honor — and made to feel that everything was her responsibility, even when it wasn't. As a result, she feels internally twisted, pressured, as if there were knots all along her circulatory system. In truth, she enjoys very little unless her mood is enhanced by drugs and alcohol.

She asked me in near anguish, "Why can't I just be selfish like everyone else? I just wanna have fun for one minute. I know I will feel awful later, but I need something now."

I noticed two things in her question:

One, was that she seemed to be equating enjoyment with selfishness — that in order to be happy one had to become selfish. It would not be hard to make that assumption in our culture. Additionally, she seemed to have an underlying belief that selfishness — literally putting the "self" first — was something to aspire to, or worse, that there would be something worthwhile to gain by being selfish when everything in my personal and professional experience has taught me precisely the opposite. To my understanding, she was confusing self-care with self-centeredness.

The other thing I put in the form of a question:

"Do you know anything about addiction?"

She tilted her head, wondering why I asked something so seemingly irrelevant.

I said what she was saying reminded me so much of what addicts say when they need a fix. There is a moment in every addict's life in which this very profound turmoil becomes a conscious battle: Do I do what I know is right — it coincides with my values, it reflects long-term gain and health — or do I do what I feel like doing for short-term gain even though I know it will go against my beliefs, cause me and others pain, and otherwise complicate my life emotionally, mentally and fiscally?

Do I choose a full course meal that requires some forethought and preparation, or do I pop open the emotional Twinkie? It may look like food, it may even taste like food for a moment, but it's little more than an intra-psychic shot of dope that leaves us still hungry, empty and wondering what just happened. It makes me think of the first (and last) time I ate cotton candy. I remember so vividly the anticipation of all that pink sweetness only to find out that once I put it in my mouth it disappeared and made my teeth hurt.

This twinkie phenomenon has occurred more and more often in my office, so much so that I'm noticing a trend. I don't know why, and I have no studies that indicate anything notable. I do know that heroin is making a monstrous comeback, though. Perhaps they are both indications of something more profound and pervasive.

A Fast-Food/Fast-Feel Culture

As usual, when I am presented with a situation like this in people I look to both the internal motivations and the cultural supports for those motivations. Without the supports, many of these fancies would remain nothing but fancies or whims. They would not have the social buttressing to stay in place or to so smoothly and easily perpetuate the imagined behavior, like having an affair as opposed to having a moment of fantasy.

The internal motivation is simple to identify in most cases. A person might need relief, sex, food, support, love or belonging.

What does our culture do with these basic needs?

Still reeling from the "if it feels good, do it" ethos of the '60s, our social milieu says go get what you need — whatever it is, however you must. Who cares if you destroy your own life so long as you don't really hurt anyone else? One problem here is that more often than not, hurting oneself does actually hurt others in so many ways, both hidden and obvious — the emotional toll on those who care about us, the societal cost required to pick up hospital bills, the price of divorce and custody battles, insurance, police involvement, etc. This has bred a self-indulgent, self-involved couple of generations that is hard for me to fathom.

I was raised to work and to value not only the result of that work, but also the effort and process itself. I loathed dependency. I liked having my own. So I started working as soon as I could. When I was thirteen I started with filing in an office where my mother worked. Throughout school, I took on what I could find for the summers or after classes: secretarial, camp counselor, cashier, bra salesperson at Macy's 34th Street, waitress or whatever it took to pay my bills, get through school and have some cash to go to a movie. It was expected of me, both by my parents and by myself. And before I went to that movie or spent that cash, my own responsibilities were attended to. Period. Please understand, I was never deprived and had many blessings in my life, for which I'm eternally grateful. But there were no free rides.

A case in counterpoint:

Someone else I know whose judgment is usually fairly good forgot to use birth control, got his girlfriend pregnant, then got married before either of them had a job or career path. After the wedding he decided he needed a new car and a new home. Why not? That's what people do when they start families, right? That's what the people on TV do.

Would he be paying for it? Nope.

Did he want it? You bet. His plan? Get family members to take care of it. If I had gotten pregnant out of wedlock I would have had my head handed to me on a platter, not a spacious condo.

Worse, he is so good at making the situation look dire, it seems like the family is going to do exactly what he wants. So he will have his short-term needs — more space, sweeter transportation — met, while his more serious and long-term needs — individuation, maturity, responsibility and self-respect — are allowed to atrophy. He has substituted twinkies for food, quick satisfaction for nourishment, entitlement for autonomy.

My thoughts? Only one: Ye gads.

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I welcome comments on his story. It begs a discussion.

I took my 5-year old son out to play soccer, 1 on 1, father and son. After letting him score a few times I thought, 'Shall I let him win for his self-esteem? No, too easy, and would ruin his Oedipal drive,' I concluded. So I scored the winning goal, upon which he threw a massive fit. Rolled on the ground, cried hysterical­ly, screamed, etc. Parents watching, me incredulou­s, slightly guilt-ridd­en.

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Do You Substitute Praise for Parenting?

Now in Huffington Post…

I was at the dog park recently and watched as a middle-aged man played with his young son and their dog. They were throwing around a ball and running back and forth. The dog and the kid returned back to dad, each with the same expression, awaiting the same response: "Great job!" And they got it every time no matter what they did.

It was pretty sweet, really, and I couldn't help but smile when the boy and the dog both got patted on their heads at the same time, but it made me wonder a bit about how we praise our kids and how we confuse unconditional love and unconditional approval.

A while back (in the early '80s) when I was just starting out, there was a group for women on the West Coast that was dedicated to the fostering of self-esteem and empowerment. These are good things… up to a point. But those were the times we were living in, and the terms were being thrown around like rice at weddings. Anyway, the women were told to use the word "yeasting" to imagine themselves growing full of their true "selves." Given what we know about the power of imagery and how words translate into physiologic responses, can you guess what happened?

Take a moment.

Are you laughing yet?

They developed yeast infections. I kid you not. Whether they had any real improvement in their self-worth, I can't tell you. No studies were done and no further reports were given.

Can We Praise Too Much?

Parents struggle with this issue all the time because somehow in our society we have transposed love and approval. We have been infused ("yeasted?") with the notion that if we don't praise and empower our children at every turn we are somehow failing them or burdening them with battered egos, poor economic futures and a long life of traumatic relationships.

Praising, which is a marvelous thing when it is merited and sincerely given, has become as freely distributed in the schools and playgrounds as cake at a birthday party. "You're so wonderful!" has become not just common, but culturally "requisite." Chic Hollywood moms show the world their baby bumps, or parade their infants as they breast feed for the paparazzi. It would seem that what we do has become less important than who sees us doing it and the image it creates for us. And the media surely perpetuates this.

Is this the same as love or as parenting? To answer that for myself, I had to backtrack for a moment and recall who we all are at the most elemental levels.

We are, first of all, sentient and aware from day one. Studies have indicated that babies are not only aware but have preference recall from while they were in utero.

In a study at the University of North Carolina, pregnant women read aloud "The Cat in the Hat" twice a day to their unborn children. A few days after birth, the newborns were outfitted with special nipples that let them signal their approval of what they were hearing. (This is based on the data that sucking behavior is a reflection and direct measure of interest.)

The newborns were then given the opportunity to hear a different story than they one they'd heard in utero. They quickly realized they could change the story by changing the speed of their suckling. They vastly preferred what they heard in utero. Not only that, but they preferred it the exact way they heard it: by their mothers as opposed to other females, read forward rather than backward.

Translation: Children are listening and watching and interpreting what we do, what we say and how we do or say it, even when we think they're just dribbling.

Secondly, we are all pack animals. We need to know we belong. That includes love, but requires more. In order to truly belong, we must be able to participate. This entails that we also know and follow the general rules — what we can do, what we can't do, what we have to offer and where our place in the pack is.

Guidelines and standards, when used lovingly (and I can't overstate the importance of "lovingly"), are necessary for good character. It's the same as lifting weights for good bone density. If we never have to lift more than we think we can, we never will. We simply get weaker and weaker.

The third and perhaps most important is that we are all — again, from our first breaths –hard-wired to seek safety. That is where parenting really comes in.

Safety is everything to a child. It allows him to grow, to question, to create, to make mistakes, to actually become empowered, to learn and finally to understand the workings of the world so he can function and build new relationships outside the family.

Unconditional praise or approval is, by definition, the absence of limits, standards and expectations. And if there are no limits for a child, there can be no safety.

The problem is that, like poor Ali McGraw in "Love Story," we think love means never having to say, "I'm sorry," or, "Please don't do that," or, "That was wrong." Love often means precisely the opposite.

Children who are raised to think it's all "okay" and that they're "just wonderful," no matter what they do, are given a message that is actually contrary to our best intentions and their deeper needs — that they are limitless, constantly central to whatever is going on and always right. All of this breeds the very thing we don't want: narcissism.

For more intuitive children, it also resonates as a lie. I remember one young girl when I worked at an elementary school. Her mother wanted her in the school band. She bought her a brand new, expensive violin. She hired a private tutor. She became her daughter's greatest cheerleader. But the child had no interest and no pitch. She used to come crying to me in my office that she wanted to quit, that she couldn't do it. But her mother insisted that she could be anything she wanted to be, that she was terrific, that she only need apply herself a little bit more.

"I know I can't play. I can hear myself," the child told me. "Why can't she?"

Are Standards Punitive?

Standards of behavior don't negate love. They may very well help express it. The reality is we are not all created equal. We have equal rights under the law, but I know without a doubt that I can't play basketball. I can't fly a plane. I can't do neurosurgery. I'm not the same as you. You're not the same as me. We each have gifts. We each have deficits. That is what we all share. That is the true nature of our equality — that we are not the same.

Children know this until they are taught otherwise. They see it from their first birthday party, their first foray into a playground, their first afternoon at daycare. Some kids run faster than others. Some speak earlier, some speak later. Some kids sing like angels from the time they can breathe. Other kids can see deep into the netherworld of mathematics, as if they were reading a milk carton. Some kids are born with the gift of compassion.

Whatever their gift, they usually know the difference between a brilliant performance and a lousy one. It's not just because we say so. They can feel it.

The issue is, how we walk them through the reality that already exists?

I remember one teacher from fifth grade. His name was Mr. Sperber. He was the strictest teacher in the school and he taught grammar. We all loathed it, all the diagrams and conjunctions, but we learned it. And we behaved. Granted, this was not the most creative or expressive episode of my life, but because of him, it was one of the most disciplined and important. I learned what I was capable of doing, even when I didn't "feel" like it. I learned respect and diligence. And I knew the pleasure of well-earned praise. When he said, "good job," he meant it. There were no effortless "atta-boy's" in that class. But when praise was given, it felt awfully good.

Just the fact that I remember him when I can't recall one of the other teachers in all those years of school is evidence enough for me of his impact.

Suzanne Brown, an economist and the mother of two grown boys (aged 20 and 25), felt that her kids needed her approval, and she gave it unstintingly when they accomplished something: "When Ben was little, and did something well — be it put a puzzle together or kick a ball — I would say, 'You must feel really great about that!,' or, 'Wow, how does it feel to get a 100 on your spelling test?'"

She added:

I think people become confident because they build on success … It seems to me that parents often fail to recognize that parenting is about raising a self-sufficient, value-centered individual. It is not about how they look to the outside world, it is about how the children function in the outside world. As parents, we tend to think our kids need to make us look good, rather than we need to look good to our kids, and set examples for them to live by. I tell each of my boys that I am so very lucky that, of all the little boys in the world, I got to be the mom of the very best ones.

Approval and encouragement and praise are cause for joy. I love giving it. I love receiving it. And occasionally, I really need it. But it's not the same as the deeper need for love, which can be given unconditionally, wholeheartedly and needs no approval at all.

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The archetype of the black widow seizing on the hapless victim has been in literature for thousands of years, but perhaps one of the most famous manipulators is Lady Macbeth, who tricks the irresolute Macbeth into killing Duncan. Convincing Macbeth that she is a victim and that he would in fact be doing something important, righteous and courageous, her implied promise is that he would also be bonding himself to her forever and protecting their monarchy.

Macbeth started out as a supposedly "good" man. If Lady Macbeth had not been so irresistibly manipulative, he would have lived his life and died as a good, if not terribly impassioned, man.

What happened? Can we really be so changed by the arguments or cajoling of another? Can we be persuaded to things we don't want to do, that are truly against our natures?

It seems that to some extent, the answer is "yes." We have all seen variations on this theme in which good people can indeed get convinced to do very bad, destructive or foolish things….

For the whole article, please click Huffington Post.

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The reason I've done this is because of what I've seen in my psychotherapy practice–people who are afraid, truly afraid, and look to all sorts of products to make them feel better: breast implants (so they feel younger and aren't so afraid of losing their luster or facing their mortality), viagra (so they feel more virile and aren't so afraid of the normal aging process), more and more insurance (so they're supposedly protected against everything the insurance companies can make them afraid of).

I will be releasing a host of new articles on this topic–how the culture and particularly the media perpetuate needless, pervasive and viral fear and, not only what this does to us, but what we can do about it!

As they say, stay tuned.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-acosta-lisw-cht/limit-setting-and-parenti_b_682565.html

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Everyone is different when it comes to their addictions.

There was one woman who needed surgery.

Se was in her 80's when he went to see a colleague of mine for an unrelated ailment. She had been beaten and cut by her husband for years. To deal with it, she took up drinking. She took it up so well, that she forgot about the abuse but became physically ill. She finally succumbed to the alcohol and had to go in for surgery for her gall bladder.

"They told me my liver was so soft, they almost couldn't do the surgery at all. So, I said to myself, 'Barbara Ann [name changed], you may not be very smart, but you ain't dumb enough to drink yourself to death neither.' So I just quit."

That was in 1981. She's been sober since.

Fear, as they say, can be a great motivator.

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