One fun thing I like to do on the Google search engine is to type in the start of a phrase and watch it fill the rest in for you. I learn so much about what interests people in real time on the internet this way. If major influencers and entrepreneurs and corporations do it, why shouldn’t all of us, the insatiably curious, do it too? This morning I came across a term I had not heard: (hashtag)GirlDad. “Oh, this should be good,” I thought. As an advocate for dad’s rights, and for equality (not only to men as co-parents, but for everyone as humans), my curiosity got the best of me. I stood up with my back straight, bent my knees slightly, then leapt into the rabbit hole. I am working on an essay titled, “Fight Like A Girl.” It’s a play on words. This old saying was used to poke fun at boys who couldn’t do something well, or at least as well as a boy should. The old world shaming phrase of boys, by males, is by default demeaning toward girls. As young males, we had hoops to jump through to earn our way into that holy-grail construct called man-hood. Like all manipulation tactics, it was used wisely and misused widely. The effectiveness is a matter of perception. This is where my search begins. My search starts with finding stories of famous dads who are raising or have raised daughters. Honestly, I’m looking to smash the status quo by making an example of dads who raise their daughters to be dependent on a partner. My daughter is sitting next to me doing homework as I come across the term. So, I ask her what she thinks it means. “You.” She answers. “Aww. Thank you. But what does it mean?” I ask again. “That you’re a dad raising a daughter?” “Sure. I mean, I am. But this is a recent term used to describe a certain kind of dad.” I answer. For a second I feel like I’m actually hipper and more in-the-know than my teenage kid. “What does it mean, Dad?” “Let me look it up.” There is a small and not very fulfilling sense of pride when your kid asks you a question you don’t know the answer to so you have to look it up on the internet. Fleeting pride—A pleasing sense I’ll take any day of the week over the attitude I got in the preteen to mid-teen years for sure. I share two definitions with her. Being a #GirlDad means recognizing the worth of a daughter is equal to the worth of a son. And being a #GirlDad means contributing to the strides being made toward gender equality. The movement of #GirlDad demonstrates model examples of how fathers should value their daughters, and in turn, women. – Katie Winbauer. Bismark Tribune This article, which some say coined the phrase, was written to honor Kobe Bryant. “Wow!” I thought. “If the skeletons of his past in regard to treatment of women could be forgiven, anybody’s could, including my own.” I’m explaining my recollection of this to my daughter when she says, “Don’t you have an article to write GirlDad?” “Yes, honey.” I love my kid. Kathleen Odenthal, in an article titled “10 Reasons Why Fathers are so Important to their Daughters” (Holidappy magazine) writes: Being a father means being a role model and setting the standard for how their daughters will view other men. A father who shows love to the women in his life and is nurturing and compassionate can help his daughter avoid unhealthy relationships and friendships with men as she ages. In my ready-to-be-humbled experience, my truth is something of a mix of these two. Bear in mind, both are attempts to explain the importance of the dad/daughter relationship, as told by a woman. When I read the first definition I asked myself, “Don’t all men raise their daughters this way?” Personal Experience: When the sole responsibility of raising a daughter was placed on my shoulders, I had no education or experience or community (that I knew of nor could easily find) to show me how. I chose to ask for help, which is the same for men as asking directions, but there were and continue to be too few resources available. More than that, I had to trust in my almost non-existent intuitive sense. This is one hurdle dads are challenged to overcome. One which most of us haven’t been raised to overcome nor expected to succeed at. The premise of gender equality should be taken in the literal sense. We should want to self-correct when we find ourselves falling back on double-standards, or having it both ways. How do we know what is good for the goose unless we take a gander at honestly flipping scripts? In regard to equality and worth, I used to joke that expecting a girl to be as good as a boy is setting the bar too low for the girl! Perhaps my view is not the norm here. Before my daughter was born, I held no preference in regard to the sexual identification of my child. I still don’t. All I ask of her is that she makes the most of who and what she is. I don’t think the second definition correlates to the #GirlDad concept, but it came up on the Google search. There may be some truth in the idea that the way a dad treats his daughter will align in her mind with how she sees that she should be treated. Then again, there are so many exceptions to this. A dad who, out of love, is harsh and punitive with one daughter creates a confident, fearless warrior yet with a different daughter a broken, dependent, sensitive one. In reading the second definition, my overriding thought is, “No wonder there is so much angry vitriol toward men as fathers.” Where I feel called to advocate is for the many good dads who get lumped in with ALL dads, including those toward whom the dissatisfaction is directed. It is our responsibility to single these men out. I will never defend the men who are or have been abusive, negligent, belligerent, or ignorant of their children. Likewise, a man who does everything he can but falls short of societal expectations is not a loser, or idiot, or less-than parent. He’s a human. Without the hard-earned accolades of being an actual doctor or expert, I’ve only an opinion to lend. My non-certified schooling comes in the form of day to day responsibilities raising a daughter. If you value life experience, then you’ll like these. Nine Ways To Be A Better #GirlDad: 1) Tell your daughter how much you love her. 2) Nurture, encourage, and support her when it comes to ideas she has that are healthy for her, no matter what your opinion is on them. 3) Listen to her discuss her dreams. Watch her get wide-eyed and excited. Don’t shut it down by explaining the realities of why or why not. Share your wisdom, don’t preach it. Circle back another time for the ‘parentsplaining’ talk if you can see this turning out unhealthily for her. 4) Never compare her to other students, people’s kids, failures, successes, boys, or yourself. 5) Let her know she can do anything. 6) Applaud her strengths when she doesn’t expect it. 7) Spend time together on a project you know nothing about. 8) Listen to her. Have deep discussions where she knows she is being heard. Your wisdom is more useful when it is asked about. 9) Don’t Coddle. Enabling, and pedestal-ing are death to independence, confidence, and inner-strength. Do not lie to her to keep her from hurting. Every human thrives better with honesty than any other emotion.

I devote hours of my energy toward helping newcomers in different online platforms. This is my way of giving back. But it is also one of my protections against returning to the desolation of drug abuse. My personal path and story are actually not any more important or useful than anyone else’s. If you knew the humongous ego who was Paul Summers before I came to find a program of recovery that worked for me, you’d be surprised that I could ever be humble enough to type that last sentence. Growth. Growth is not just a word; it’s not some reward you earn for doing nothing. It’s not a concept you believe in and therefor you are granted. It’s a present that feels nothing like a gift. And it is reversible. On one of my social media accounts, it is clear in my bio that I am in recovery. Yet, I continue to get followers who are drug dealers. The most common are those peddling psychedelics and marijuana. Studies have shown that the latter has been proven to be addictive (and still illegal, federally). I found it appalling that dealers would friend or follow me. This made no sense, so I’ve dared to ask why. The responses I’m getting are defensive—the follower sounding dumbfounded that I am questioning their ‘good’ nature. Each one believes they have set up shop in order to ‘help’ alcoholics and addicts. How did they get this disinformation? Welcome to the era of what I call Recovery ‘Light.’ It’s not new. Hell, when I was steeped in active addiction, substituting one high for another was a path I believed would solve my slight issue–the addictive tendencies I denied. I tried many different times. I tried many different ways. I did not get clean until I … GOT CLEAN. My definition of Recovery ‘Light’ is when a person believes they don’t have a drug problem as long as they don’t do their DOC (drug of choice). This person has been convinced somehow that indulging in any mind-altering, addictive substance, as long as it won’t take them over and be a distracting obsession, is totally okay. Additionally, the idea is that as long as one isn’t creating wreckage and undermining self, it’s okay to use. These two assumptions are usually made without the clarity of being sober, nor with the help of a source outside themselves like the loved one, family member, or community most affected by their using. There are segments of the recovery community who are taking and being taken advantage of by this ideology. This does a great disservice to people in early recovery who have not yet committed to recovery. Those newcomers who are sensitive to being told the truth; those who dismiss concepts like abstinence and making amends as plots to bring guilt and shame-inducing patriarchal or religious disciplines; those who want to be in recovery and still get high—these are willing participants in Recovery ‘Light.’ I remember being in a meeting and hearing someone say, “I wish I could get loaded and keep my clean date.” Everyone in the room laughed. But it made me think … isn’t that the special secret wish we all have? Yes. Just like we wish we weren’t addicts and alcoholics. But we are if we say we are. I am. I don’t feel the least bit less-than by making this admission. It’s a testimonial I continue to make and feel safe doing so. What is dangerous is being suspicious that you might have a problem and being unwilling to admit that you are an addict or alcoholic. Personally, by admitting to having a disease, I gain the courage to work on beating the illness that all but destroyed a good twenty years of my life: the disease of addiction. I’ll never beat it, just like humans won’t ever entirely beat a virus out of existence. We can only work on building our personal strength a little bit at a time. A daily reprieve is a lot to be grateful for. The difference between those with the disease and those unlikely to have the disease is that those who can use casually and not obsess on their DOC to the point of hurting, stealing, undermining, and being enslaved by the compulsion to use more are not inflicted with the disease. Denial. Contained within this practice of Recovery ‘Light’ is a movement of non-addict/alcoholics pushing a ‘new’ concept called Harm Reduction. Just like Capitalism or Communism, Harm Reduction looks good on paper. Great keywords, too. Who wouldn’t want to be in a program whose ideology is reducing harm? Whose harm is getting reduced? My loose interpretation of this is that, by allowing a person addicted to drugs or alcohol some comfort as they withdraw from their drug of choice, the cycle of addiction will be broken. The notion is that, by eliminating the self-esteem breaking thoughts and feelings which come about when one is getting off of drugs, a person in recovery can heal faster and their transition off of chemical dependency will be smoother. That smooth metamorphosis, it is believed, aids the recovering person and increases the likelihood their recovery will be long term. I get in heated arguments over this. Partially because this is being pushed by the medical/medicinal community. I think that alone scares me enough to not give it a chance. If someone is making ongoing money off of people’s life changes and the possibilities they will become healthy, then they also potentially make money off you while you continue to be unhealthy. Studies are showing that, in the area of depression, many have been taken advantage of and over-medicated for decades. This is why and how I ended up in a twelve step program. I owed nobody anything. My success and/or failure was up to me. I came to realize I had the key to unlock the prison cell door I had locked myself into. I got out for free. There isn’t an easy way out, just as there was no easy way in. There is no quick fix. There is no participant trophy. You are either and addict/alcoholic or you are not. There’s no such thing as getting high on a drug you don’t care for when you are an addict. Any drug you can find is the drug you’ll abuse at some point. If you’re reading this and your experience so far is that you can’t stop drinking once you start, but then you try micro-dosing on mushrooms and you don’t want to drink anymore – well then, you’re probably not an alcoholic. But, if you start doing those mushrooms on weekends, then on Thursday through Sunday, then every day of the week, you are an addict/alcoholic. This current movement has come in many shapes and with many names over the past six decades. Social media is notorious for getting people convinced that the latest and greatest panacea is not another re-hashed snake oil from the Boomer Era. Eye candy distractions. Let’s look a little deeper. If you have a problem with meth, how can you stop? Meth addiction is weird. I was always able to stop for a few months, especially after a few weeks in a row of being up for more than three days at a time. I didn’t give a shit about losing a job or girlfriend or even the strain it put on my family. I didn’t feel much of anything while I was up. But when I came down, all those stinky feelings started oozing out of the pores in my brain. And when the body has had enough, you ride the discomfort out for a few days and start to feel human again. Then, you deal with the consequences and (usually) guilt of the neglecting of self. I probably vowed to stay off speed for three months about thirty times. I always came back to it. In the meantime, I was self-medicating. I was ‘reducing’ the harm in my head I had caused myself. I was using my best ideas to ease my worst thinking. The answer was inevitably to find a way to feel good. I’m no doctor. But a doctor or scientist will break it down to a brain cell level and tell you the biological reason we chase after that synapsis firing endorphin rush. Replacement therapy. If I can’t have my drug of choice, I’m going to have a melt-down. If I don’t have my drug of choice, I’m going to die. If I can’t have my drug of choice, people better get really afraid of what I might do. It’s no mistake that it is called our drug of choice. Nobody forces us to put it inside our bloodstream. We choose to. Therefore, we get to choose how we stop putting it in our body. We can titrate down. We can do replacement drugs like methadone or suboxone if you have an opiate addiction. For meth, it wouldn’t make sense to inject a person going through withdrawals with Ritalin. But if that became an actual practice, the idea would be the same. Make the coming down off of abused drugs comfortable and relaxing. This is a severe misunderstanding of addiction. The saying, “One is too many and a thousand never enough,” explains the disease. If I knew I could go to treatment (if I could afford it) and still get loaded, wouldn’t that, as a premise, undermine the very reason for going? Unless … Unless I didn’t really want to stop. But if I’m locked in a preferred state of mind for addicts … denial … and get some therapist or treatment center nurse with an Associate’s Degree telling me of an easy out, I’m going to go for the easy out. I’d gladly kick the can down the road. Because the nurse says it’s okay; that I’ll be okay if I’m on something while I get off something else. Good lord. That’s like saying, “I know I’m collecting better unemployment wages by staying home, but I really do want to work, but I don’t really have to, so I won’t.” That’s like saying, “I love and miss those little kids I lost custody of in the divorce so much, I’ll check in on them sometime in the next few weeks.” The most entertaining part of writing an essay like this is that it puts me at odds with educated martyrs of the medical profession. I ask you to take some time and look over their evidence, and the opposing evidence. Evaluate it all as best you can, but remember, you might just be an addict or an alcoholic. If you are, it means that you have a disease with is going to lie to you to keep you in a state of denial which will make you question anything which might potentially rob it from getting its next fix. If you try harm reduction and are still repeating the same behaviors which, in the first place, made you suspect you might have a problem – start questioning the validity of that medical practice. No one who wears a doctor’s office smock has ever resolved my obsession with drugs, including booze. After decades of overdosing, losing everything, destroying what I didn’t lose, hurting people physically and emotionally, moving a thousand miles away only to start using again within a month, losing jobs, and ultimately losing my daughter, I was ready to admit I had a problem and that no pill, powder, or liquid was going to solve it. I found the twelve steps (or they found me). I found a Higher Power I call God (or He led me) The program I work does not cosign any check I might be wanting to cash from the bank of bullshit. Today I’m accountable to the truth. But as an addict, that truth is often hidden from me. I can more easily see when someone is denying themselves their own truth, but I have a hard time seeing mine when I look for it. That is why the program is so useful, especially interaction with the others in it. The lies in our head are exposed. The program is simple, but not easy. It certainly isn’t as easy getting loaded on wine because you have a problem with heroin. I wrote this essay to share my experience that I’ve tried every combination and substitute that was available. Just because there are new drugs since I chose to stop fifteen years ago, doesn’t mean the truth isn’t still self-evident. The truth and promise of the program works because I work it. This means I get to take an active part in being okay, if not better than ever, but at the very least better than I was before. I had to work for it. Not one day of the over 6,000 days were given to me. Not one. I chose to see (finally) that my experience with harm was that I harmed myself, then anyone close. The only way that harm got reduced was when I chose to stop getting loaded.