May 2012
3 posts
The Naked Truth About Dating dips a toe into the...
It Ain't Me, Babe
I am in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (yeah, life sucks….) with friends, one who has known me for decades. She reads this blog and says it shocked her. Not the outrageous behavior; she’s used to that. No, she says “I just can’t imagine you ever curled up in the fetal position over some guy.” It just goes to show how good some of us are at covering up our...
How Do You Mend a Broken Heart
http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/avoid-ex-crack-16-other-ways-over-breakup-135236062.html
Actual research went into this article at iVillage. I am now officially an expert on lovelorn-ness. Just what I always wanted!
April 2012
4 posts
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Happy Endings (and other bad ideas)
Imagine for a moment that you went to a movie. The movie was about an alcoholic who wanted a bottle of whiskey.
That’s it. That’s the whole plot.
He gets close to his scotch, becomes thirsty, mishaps keep him from it, and he hurts other humans, damages them in his obsessive need to get to his scotch. He encounters huge obstacles. But through wit, charm, and deceit, he at last secures it, and...
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You're The Air That I (Don't) Breathe
The well-meaning health professionals over at NPR are shocked — shocked, I tell you! — at the latest terrifying “trend” among young people they are calling The Choking Game. The grown-ups have just discovered that kids too young to buy booze are getting a buzz off temporary oxygen deprivation. I don’t know what Amish farm these folks live on; my friends and I were hyperventilating...
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My So-Called Love Life
Publicly exposing yourself the way I have — the unvarnished truth way, that is, as opposed to the Chat Roulette way — also exposes a gal to certain risks. When my blog posts get picked up by AOL, for instance, six or seven hundred strangers leave angry comments accusing me of being an immoral, selfish slut. And calling me “selfish” really wounds me.
I just remind myself that these...
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If You Happen to be in Los Angeles....
American Cinematheque film screening of
“Shame” on April 17th, 7:30pm at the Aero Theater
followed by a 1-hour panel discussion with:
Alex Katehakis, MFT, CST, CSAT, Clinical Director of Center for Healthy Sex, author of “Erotic Intelligence.”
Chris Donahue, MSW, Host of Logo TV’s “Bad Sex.”
Ethlie Ann Vare, Author of “Love Addict: Sex,...
March 2012
5 posts
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Baby I Love You
Therapist and author Rob Weiss, who does some cutting-edge thinking about the intersection of technology and (mostly sex) addiction, tweeted an article from the NY Times today called The Brain on Love An interesting piece. It depressed the hell out of me.
Now, author Diane Ackerman didn’t mean for the article to be depressing. In fact, as someone who recently helped her husband recover from...
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Love Addict Goes to Vegas: Part Two
Las Vegas is a counterintuitive place to hold a conference of substance abuse counselors in the first place. Choosing St. Patrick’s Day weekend to do it is total cognitive dissonance. Still, if it weren’t for the lingering pall of cigarette smoke — the entire state smells like a stale ashtray — and the lingering sting of nasty comments directed toward me on the Huffington Post, I’d...
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Vegas, Baby, Vegas
This weekend, March 15-17, I present two workshops on sex and love addiction at the Counseling Advances Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. It seems an odd location for a conference of addiction professionals: Las Vegas, ground zero for all manner of behavioral and substance abuse. Maybe they want easy access to field research.
My MacBook and I will give a slideshow on THE TOXIC TRIO:...
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LOVE ADDICTION, FREECELL, AND TEMPLE GRANDIN PORN
Here’s why I love 30 Rock: Amid the show’s caricatures, cartoons and buffoons, they still manage to slip in a Temple Grandin porno pun. They did go with the “rammed in” wordplay, and I would have riffed off “gangbang”… but each to their own poor taste.
The point is, it served to remind me of HBO’s The Temple Grandin Story, about the austic animal behaviorist, and also of a fascinating blog I...
February 2012
6 posts
Confidential to WellsFargoHomePage: LAA is a very small program; you may find more compatible SLAA or even Alanon meetings locally. Or group therapy. Keep looking. It’s worth the effort it takes to heal love addiction. This disease hurts like hell; sometimes, it kills.
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Big Ol' Can of Love Addict Worms
Well, this has been interesting. As you may know, I’ve been blogging on the subject of love addiction for the Huffington Post recently. Usually, my columns are ghettoed in the Women’s Section, garner 40 or 50 comments apiece, and sink into happy obscurity. Last week, I wrote a piece I called “Portrait of the Love Addict as a Young Woman,” detailing some colorful behavior dating back to my...
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Dear Love Addict: You Aren't Going to Like This
“I don’t care how long you’ve been clean and sober. Drug addicts and alcoholics should not have handguns in the house.” That advice was given to a roomful of clean and sober addicts and alcoholics, me among them, twentysomething years ago. The advice-giver went on to say that addicts and alcoholics are by nature over-sensitive and over-reactive, and can’t trust ourselves not to make a lethal...
BTW, Did I Mention...?
I’m now blogging for the Huffington Post. Most of my entries can be found in the Women’s Section or on the HuffPo Sex & Love page.
Say nice things about them so Arianna will invite me back :-)
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Will I Always Love You?
You’re expecting me to say that love addiction killed Whitney Houston, aren’t you? When all you have is a hammer, after all, every problem looks like a nail. My hammer is the addictive model of romantic fantasy. I’m the one who said Amy Winehouse died of love addiction, that drug and alcohol dependence were her coping mechanism for an underlying problem. I said that Etta James — who...
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Love Addict: Do You Believe In Magic?
Here’s an old AA story for you: A man falls in a well (I told you it was old; who gets water from a well any more?). He’s trapped down there in the cold and dark. He calls out for help. A priest passes by, hears his cries, leans over into the well and asks, “What’s the matter, son?” Imagine a dramatic boomy echo on the dialog. “I’m stuck in this damn well!” yells the man. “That’s...
January 2012
11 posts
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Etta James: Poster Girl for Love Addiction
I used to made a living writing record and concert reviews and bios for rock bands. It wasn’t much of a living, which is why I stopped doing it. But when the Hollywood Reporter asked me to review Etta James at the House of Blues in 2001, I couldn’t say no. I’d been watching Etta incinerate the Sunset Strip HOB since the place opened. And when RCA Records asked me to write her bio for...
vefmm asked: "...just because a man wants you, does not mean he loves you." Ouch. Got it. VM, New York
For a Love Addict, Two Outta Three Ain't Bad
The publicity department of HCI Books read my manuscript for LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS — 288 pages on the history, science and treatment of sex and (mostly) love addiction — and this is what they came away with: “Ethlie has her first sexual experience at 18 and by age 22, had slept with 75 men.” I don’t know if the writer of press releases was shocked,...
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The Center for the Study of the Blindingly Obvious...
A new study at the University of California at San Francisco uses PET scan technology to prove what pretty much everyone has known forever: Drinking feels better to heavy drinkers than to casual drinkers. Since the study was done at the I-kid-you-not Ernest Gallo Clinic, no mention was made of alcoholism, just “heavy drinking.” In a clinic funded by a winery, the a-word is spoken in hushed...
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A Love Addict on the Radio
Ethlie Ann Vare will be taking questions live on the air this Sunday, January 15 at 8-9 pm (Pacific Time) on KLEAN Radio, KFWB News Radio 980 in Los Angeles and KFMB 760 in San Diego, streaming live web-wide at http://www.kleanradio.com/live-stream/
A lively debate is always welcome. Please call and give her a hard time.
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To Dr. David Ley, re: the "Myth" of Sex Addiction
My long response to the good doctor will be up on The Fix, or HuffPo, or maybe the Studio City Patch. Journalism has become a crazy party game of late, something between Pin the Tail on the Donkey and throwing copy into a large fan and waiting to see where it lands.
Anyhow, David Ley is the psychologist who makes his living denying that there is such a thing as sex addiction. His new book is...
vefmm asked: Just want to say your book is my unofficial manual on Love Addiction. I've shared it with my online recovery group, my face-to-face support group,and my therapist. I've read, re-read, underlined, high-lighted, marked up the book in every which way, gasped, laughed, and sometimes panicked during the reading of it. In fact, I re-read certain sections again during the sermon at church...
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I Just Called To Say I Love You
I let two calls go to voicemail this evening. The first was from Minnesota, so it was probably Senator Al Franken’s campaign office asking for money (dude, you already got elected; let it go) and the other was from one of those fake numbers that’s probably someone calling via Skype to sell me prescription drugs from India, which is a mean thing to do to a recovering drug addict.
The point of...
December 2011
10 posts
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Read It and Weep, Love Addict
If he weren’t so obviously an ass, I’d feel terribly sorry for Mike, the thirtysomething New Yorker whose email to Lauren, a woman who spurned him, went viral on the web. You may have read it — or at least skimmed it, as the poor sod wrote 1600 words trying to explain to Lauren why she should not be avoiding his phone calls and text messages. I’ve written magazine stories that were...
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Booksigning in Nashville
Wednesday December 28, 2011 at 4pm, Ethlie will be at the famous PARNASSUS bookstore in Nashville, TN signing copies of LOVE ADDICT. Ya’ll come!
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ADD At The Movies
Diablo Cody and I have much in common. We are both writers, although she won an Oscar for Juno and and Emmy for The United States of Tara, where I won a Maggie for ROCK Magazine and a Remi for Swamp Devil. We both worked as strippers in our youth, although I’m sure she did it more ironically than I did. We both had musician boyfriends named John Hunt, although hers was spelled “Jon,”...
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Mamma Mia
This is my mom. Yes, we did look alike. When I was a kid, she boasted that she could walk into any parent-teacher conference and immediately be told “You’re Ethlie’s mother.” That this was a point of pride for her is a result of either my grade point average (generally high) or her narcissism (equally high).
Shirley Marder Berman Herman Riley Kelley married four...
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Oops They Did It Again
I was forwarded an article from the New Zealand Herald headlined “Nature’s love drug offers hope to addicts.” People are always forwarding me articles with buzzwords like “love drug” in them. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate it. Keep ‘em coming. But I frequently get frustrated at the content of said articles.
Here’s what’s going on Down Under (cough cough). “Nature’s love drug,...
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L’Inconsolable
I may have mentioned WNYC’s RadioLab before. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, exploring the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, art, history and spirituality – yes, really – in ways that intrigue me. (See earlier column on ADHD for background on why such a busy intersection intrigues me.)
Anyhow, their latest podcast was about the irony of L’Inconnue – The Unknown Woman. L’Inconnue was...
November 2011
8 posts
The Art of Love podcast w/Ethlie Ann Vare
http://theartoflove.podomatic.com/entry/2011-11-14T09_54_30-08_00
Here’s 45 minutes of why I might not be the perfect guest to put on a “how to find a man” radio show. It does, however, make for a fun interview.
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ADD, Meet ADHD
It turns out that I don’t just have Affection Deficit Disorder. I actually have the thing I was punning on in the first place: Attention Deficit Disorder. Or, as the professionals usually label it, adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder… which makes a lousy pun, so screw ‘em.
Here’s a thumbnail description of adult ADHD from the book Driven to Distraction by psychiatrists Edward...
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God is an Iron
Dr. Nora Volkow is the Director of NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She’s also the granddaughter of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, which is weird. Plus, when she talks she sounds like an outtake from a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon (“Boris, Natasha and Nora”), which is not what you usually find at websites ending in dot-gov.
Anyhow, Dr. Volkow has been making...
Video Killed the Radio Star? Not Gonna Happen. →
The lovely Lucia interviews Ethlie Ann Vare on L.A. Talk Radio’s “The Art of Love” show, and discovers to her surprise that she herself may be… well, you listen and you decide!
Just click on the headline to hear the podcast. The interview runs about 50 fascinating minutes.
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Love Addict on the Radio
Lucia interviews Ethlie this Sunday 11/6/2011 on The Art of Love — live at www.latalkradio.com on channel 1 3pm PT/6pm ET. You can hear the show in real time by clicking on: Click to Listen Live or catch up later in the archives. It gets podcast via iTunes, too.
I think we’ll be talking about Cougars and Cubs. Sounds like fun to me!
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I Want Candy. Or Cigarettes. Or Sex. Whatever.
I had emergency root canal surgery yesterday. I tell you that, first, to make you go “awwww, poor baby” and feel sorry for me and, second, to explain why I had a wackadoodle Harlequin Romance dream last night
Here’s the connection: As a former drug addict, I avoid all mind-altering substances when humanly possible. As a root canal patient, I will take a painkiller as prescribed. The endodontist...
October 2011
6 posts
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Forbidden Love and Other Illusions
My longtime friend Carrie White just published a memoir called Upper Cut, about her years as a Hollywood hairdresser and her recovery from drugs and alcohol. We crisscross one another on our trek from bookstore to radio station, hopefully presenting our labors of literary love to an oversaturated reading public.
It was Carrie who, a couple of decades ago, gave me an excellent piece of advice. It...
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