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Martha Rosenberg: Your 1987 Hazelden book “Codependent No More” has been compared to the “Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous” for articulating a malady that affected millions of people for the first time and pointing them toward recovery. Yet you stress in your new book, “Codependent No More Workbook,” that recovery in the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is very different from recovery from codependence in groups like Codependents Anonymous (CODA.)
Melody Beattie: Well alcoholics have usually led pretty self-centered lives and early in recovery they are told to start trying to be less selfish and help others, which of course is the Twelfth Step. But codependents have often been “giving” their whole lives — or so they think. In fact, the joke goes you can’t kill yourself if you’re codependent because too many people need you.
Martha Rosenberg: So “sponsorship” risks enacting the very codependent behaviors that brought you into recovery?
Melody Beattie: We can recreate our original families! Sponsors can help compulsively and for the wrong reasons and sponsees can accept help instead of finding their own inner voice they can

This week, I’ve come to Washington, D.C. from the Gulf Coast. Thirty-four days and 1,243 miles ago, I set off on foot from New Orleans, Louisiana. I’ve faced tornadoes, rainstorms, heat exhaustion and countless

Over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. Oceans, rivers, ponds, streams, lakes, falls, glaciers and seas run like veins through a living body, carrying refreshment and nutrients to all its parts. And we, children of this earth, mimic its makeup in our own bodies, of which water makes up nearly 80 percent. Deprived of adequate water, we quickly become dehydrated — a state that we can survive for only a very few days.
Despite the fact that our planet is composed of more than two-thirds water, usable water is not necessarily readily

A Reason to Believe: Lessons From An Improbable Life
By Deval Patrick
Broadway $21.99
“If you don’t understand something,” Harvard Dean Jeremy Knowles told his students, “the reason may be that you are simply standing in the wrong place.” It took a while for Deval Patrick to learn this lesson and force himself to try new perspectives. But he did.
Born in a basement apartment in the South Side of Chicago, abandoned by his father when he was four years old, Patrick overcame poverty and “the curse of being black” (always wondering “whether the things that go wrong in your life are on account of your race”) to become the first African-American governor of the state of Massachusetts, and one of only two black governors elected in the history of the United States.
In A Reason to Believe, Patrick provides an exquisitely-written and moving memoir of his “improbable life.” Although he is a Democrat, his message is traditional, one might even say Republican: when you learn to focus less on where you are than on who you are; on how to love and be loved; on taking personal responsibility for your choices; and on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, life’s journey “can be wondrous.” You will be able to find or form a community with those who share your values. “And that is reward enough.”
Less clear, alas, in A Reason to Believe, is Patrick’s sense of the role government — the collective “we” — can (and should) play in guaranteeing that everyone in America will have a chance, a genuine shot, to attain happiness, empowerment, and success.
Patrick writes compellingly about his journey. Neither his mom, who worked at the post office, nor his dad, a jazz musician, expressed their love to

Okay, let’s cut a deal here. If Britain can afford to spend tens of millions of pounds on the royal wedding next week, we have to spend an equal amount distributing anti-nausea pills across the land — to all of us who can’t bear to see our country embarrass itself in this way. Don’t let the Gawd-bless-you-ever-so-’umbly-yer-Majesty tone of the global media coverage blasted at America fool you. Most British people are benignly indifferent to the wedding of William Windsor and Kate

Rio is a fish-out-of-water animated comedy about birds – and, as those things go, it’s cute and entertaining – but not in an aggressive or annoying way.
Instead, Blue Sky Studios, who gave us the Ice Age films and several others, keep things cheerful, witty and energetic. There’s no time to stop and dissect the action when the action never stops.
Scored to an infectious samba beat, Rio is set, primarily, in Brazil where, in the prologue, a little blue macaw baby is grabbed by animal smugglers. He winds up in Minnesota – Moose Lake, Minn., an actual place whose name was chosen for its inherent silliness – rescued from a snow drift by a little girl when his crate bounces off a delivery truck.
The little girl’s name is Linda and, in short order, she’s a grown woman, running the only book store in Moose Lake (in other words, someone headed for an unemployment line) – a single gal (voiced by Leslie Mann) whose best friend is her now-15-year-old macaw, who she’s named Blu (Jesse Eisenberg).
One day, a Brazilian ornithologist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) wanders into their snowy realm and announces that Blu is one of the last two remaining members of his species – and that the other, a female, has been found and is being kept at Tulio’s bird sancuatry in Rio.
So Tulio convinces Linda and Blu to come to Rio, where Blu and this other bird, Jewel (Anne Hathaway), will mate and prolong the

At the same time, they were relying on a mass uprising in Cuba against the revolutionaries.
It could not have gone more wrong: when an advance frogman lit a beacon to show the exiles where to land, it also alerted the Cuban militia to their presence.
Local fisherman Gregorio Moreira, who still lives in the same house beside the beach, was one of the first to raise the alarm.
“I went out of the house and saw a flare, like a candle, in the sky. So I headed to the trench with my father and my brothers,” 74-year-old Mr Moreira

They say there are two types of people: those who can make the best of bad situations and those who fold under pressure. The same applies to companies. Dornbracht, a third-generation family-owned producer of high-end bathroom and kitchen fittings, was put to the test when a fire destroyed their production facility causing $160 million dollars and bringing all production to an utter halt. Dornbracht took this as an opportunity not just to re-build, but to develop a truly cutting-edge production center that would elevate production capacity and flexibility to unprecedented levels.
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Third generation brothers Matthias (left) and Andreas (right) with their father, Helmut

If America is the land of opportunity and optimism, you could be forgiven for wondering where it went as you watch contemporary social and political affairs. From one area to another, we seem driven not by the soaring rhetoric of hope and promise but by the sinking call to lower our expectations.
Education is a prime example. The drive for minimum standards of achievement, in recognition of the poor performance of American students matched against themselves and other nations, is a drive of diminished expectations where the phrase “race to the top” gets equated with an educated

It’s hard to believe that 150 years ago, white people owned black people in 23 states. Slavery ended with the surrender of General Lee in 1865. Chief Justice Roger Taney, on behalf of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote in 1857 that black people were “so far inferior

Multi-discipline design and innovation firm IDEO has announced the fall launch of a new nonprofit arm, IDEO.org. In a move to bring human-centered design to the social sector, IDEO will identify projects that can be addressed by design, and will have a lasting impact on low income communities around the globe. I spoke with co-leads and executive directors Jocelyn Wyatt and Patrice Martin about the initiative.
Jocelyn Wyatt and Patrice Martin, co-leads and creative directors of IDEO.org
What informed the decision to start IDEO.org?
Jocelyn: IDEO has been undertaking work in the social sector for the past ten years.
Over this time, what we’ve seen is an increasing interest among foundations, non-profits and social enterprises in using human-centered design as a way to solve their common challenges, especially those challenges related to poverty. At the same time, we’ve seen interest in designers focusing their skills and talents on a common good.
So we realized that the best way for us to increase the impact that we have and scale the social work that we wanted to

It’s finally spring. The kids are out playing ball — baseball, soccer, basketball, tennis — anything to have fun and move. How would you like to help your child feel as successful as an Olympic athlete? Your child’s love of a sport can motivate him to learn the same positive visualization techniques that Olympic athletes have used for decades.
Sometimes however, anxiety can stop kids from enjoying activities they used to adore. Desire to succeed can also create unrealistic expectations and negative attitudes: “I’ll never be perfect,” or, “I’m afraid I’ll let my teammates down.” Olympic athletes provide a good role model for kids to emulate, because they’ve learned to handle the pressure and still have fun.
If you want to support your child to reach for the gold yet celebrate the bonze — or if your once-happy child that used to love skating or basketball no longer wants to participate — here are nine imagination tools that can help.
Deal With Doubt
1) Find fear and summon confidence.
After your child takes a few deep breaths from his belly, ask him to picture any fear that creates hesitancy to play his sport, but also to concentrate on the feeling that could help him the most:

I really thought it would last. Three years ago I surrendered my plain old cell phone and my clunky Palm Pilot for a shiny pink Blackberry. We went everywhere together. I scheduled my life on it, I got more organized because all my emails, Facebook and Twitter came to one place, and things got

On April 1, 2011, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (IOM) released a report called “The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding.” The report addresses “health” in a multidimensional way, including physical health, emotional health and social well-being. It identifies gaps and opportunities in health care for LGBT people.
As a group with minority status, LGBT people are subjected to prejudice and discrimination in health care. In the mid-1980s, I had just left my wife and daughters to begin the process of coming out. I had taken a new position as medical director of psychiatry at a large health care system in

Source:Associated Press
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CHICAGO — The Chicago Bulls had just wrapped up their best regular season since Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen collected their final championship, and Derrick Rose was in no mood to celebrate.He’ll save it for later.Kyle Korver came up big down the stretch to finish with 19 points, Rose scored 15 and the Bulls won their ninth straight, beating the New Jersey Nets 97-92 in the final playoff tuneup on Wednesday.
ESPNChicago.com Bulls blog
The latest news from Bulls reporter Nick Friedell. Blog
“I’m happy, I’m definitely happy,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t like to be on a losing team, but what’s the point of celebrating now when you can get knocked out in the playoffs?”The Bulls earned home-court advantage throughout the playoffs later Wednesday with San Antonio’s 106-103 loss to Phoenix. Had the Bulls and Spurs tied for the best record, a random drawing would have decided the overall No. 1 seed because all the tiebreakers were even.The Bulls led by as much as 13 in the second quarter and were up seven at the half, but found themselves trailing 68-58 after the Nets scored 15 straight midway through the third. They responded by running off 10 in a row to close the period and pulled this one out in the end, with Korver scoring seven in the final four minutes.Rasual Butler scored 10, including the go-ahead 3-pointer in the final minute, and the Bulls got 50 points from their bench on a night when the starters spent much of the fourth quarter on the bench.Rose was just 5-of-13 from the field. Luol Deng scored 11. Joakim Noah finished with 10 points and 10 rebounds as the Bulls finished 62-20, equaling their best showing since the 1997-98 championship season. That also put Tom Thibodeau in a tie with Paul Westphal of the 1992-93 Phoenix Suns for the most wins by a first-year coach.”I’m happy for our team,” he said. “I think they made a serious commitment. They played hard, and they played for each other.”The Nets got 21 points and 12 assists from Jordan Farmar. Brook Lopez added 17 points after scoring at least 30 in four of the previous five games, and New Jersey finished the season with its 11th loss in 12 games.”Everybody is excited about next year,” Lopez said. “We’ll get to know each other better.”The Bulls can now focus on their first-round matchup with Indiana that starts Saturday after a wild finish to the regular season.They were trailing 84-81 after C.J. Watson hit a 3-pointer with 5:46 left, and Korver tied it when he nailed one from the right side about 1:15 later.Lopez gave New Jersey its last lead at 90-89 when he hit a 10-footer with just over a minute left, but Butler brought the crowd to its feet when he buried a corner 3 in front of the New Jersey bench, putting the Bulls back on top 92-90 with 46 seconds remaining.Kurt Thomas then blocked a driving Lopez, and Watson hit the second of two free throws with 22.8 seconds left to make it a three-point game.Farmar missed a 3, and Gibson hit both free throws to make it 95-90 with 17.3 seconds left. Farmar immediately drove past Rose to pull the Nets within three with 11.8 seconds left, but Korver hit two free throws to preserve the win.”We didn’t execute when we needed to,” Farmar said. “They turned up the defense.”Now, things really are about to get interesting for the Bulls. They are favorites this time after winning 41 games and bowing out in the first round each of the past two seasons.Their offseason makeover paid off in a big way, and now they’re looking to cash in.”It’s a whole different environment,” Noah said. “You’re playing for something big. That’s what it’s all about, something you dream about playing in. Big stage. It doesn’t get much better than that playing in the NBA playoffs for the Chicago Bulls. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”Game notes Chicago’s Ronnie Brewer missed his first game of the season because of a sprained left thumb but is expected to be ready for the playoffs. … Besides Thibodeau and Westphal, the only other rookie coach with 60 wins was Bill Russell.
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In two weeks, we’re going to face our dream — or our nightmare. That’s when we’re going to actually start living part-time in our Canadian farmhouse.
The house lies in the far eastern corner of Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes, about a dozen hours northeast of our house in Massachusetts. We drove past it one day in August — back when there was grass on the ground instead of two feet of snow — and decided to buy it on the

There was a small and rugged stationery store in the 1960s on East 84th Street, where I sometimes went with Mom when she ordered Crane note cards on heavy cream stock engraved with her initials. I remember it well because it was the first time I saw an adult with Down Syndrome walking with his mother. Mom explained the disorder to me, and the statistics surrounding the probability of Down Syndrome for a child of an older mother. Mom was always perfunctory in her explanations, a straight shooter with no silver linings even when explaining genetic injustice to a child.
In the 1990s I interviewed a woman named Elizabeth Goodwin, who is the co-founder of the National Down Syndrome