About the Author

My name is Kathy Berman and I live in Margate, Florida. My birthdate is Oct. 26, 1940 and my recovery date is 11/24/1976. Having grownup in a home controlled by alcoholism, I was able to see my addiction very early. Thanksgiving, 1976, I told my family that I thought I was an alcoholic. I fully expected everyone to disagree with me.

But, my mother said that she had been afraid of that. So I was stuck with the admission and being the “perfect daughter”, I never drank again and went to AA. I had no idea that I wouldn’t discover until 33 years later than I had experienced PTSD in that home which would continue to shape and direct me.

My third month into recovery, I had a radical conversion as described by William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. It was instant and I call it ‘”the moment that changed my life.” So I have been trying since 1977 to hear what God’s will is for my life. Many days I have followed my will and called it His. But there has been progress, too.

I have loved the world of blogs since 2000. I never thought of having one until I thought of all the things I’d love to share. In November, 2004, I decided to write about my recovery.

I prefer to call it a journey back to that joyful, playful child that God created. I have pictures of her and she loved life and everything in it. Each day, I am becoming her more and more.

Erik Erickson in explaining the stages of life lists the stage I am as generativity, and I want to share all I’ve been given and learned with the hope that it will also bless someone else. I feel the clock ticking as much as when I wanted to be a mother. In many ways, this is like giving birth.

The purpose of my blogs is for me to share my experience, strength and hope to anyone who would like to help others to better understand themselves. My dream is that others will have the courage to help others by sharing their experience, strength and hope

After writing for 10-12 hours for over six years, I believed that the blog had too much information. So I began reorganizing my thoughts and ideas into separate, one-main-theme blogs.

I realized that we live in a world that loves sound bites. The information highway of yesterday is bumper to bumper traffic. I have created link directories of subjects with links easy to use. I also decided to create content to help simplify and/or organize content.

I skim over 200 blogs in my RSS readers and have identified many great blogs about my subjects. Because my subjects deal with ongoing changes and attitudes about mental, emotional, and physical health, I have preferred to position myself as an overviewer of all the changes taking place. So I have become a researcher of mental and emotional health discoveries. Physical health changes are covered very well in the medical sites such as WebMD.