When I was actively involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was invited into a group of folks who would email each member of the group. Usually, somebody, sometimes a lot of folks would be writing a group email daily. It's main focus was "gratitude" e.g. what big or little thing am I grateful for today. It was also used to share about sobriety issues/challenges along the way.

I've not been a part of that group for awhile now and I miss getting emails from people who knew me and were sharing a common stuggle toward healthy living. It was especially nice to get positive feedback if I wrote about having a bad day and it was great to hear about other folks little things in their daily lives that they appreciated or were thankful for. I could sometimes recognize what was being shared as something also true in my life, one of those 'oh yea' moments, this applies to me too.

I know for me it's real easy get caught up in the intensity of my recovery work and dwell on the negative (wallow in the pig pen of pity as they can say in AA). I need a lot of reminders that this SA recovery "work" does get easier over time and even in my darkest moments of feeling down, if I try I can find something good going on in my life or about myself.

It was also good to get positice feedback and suggestions, given sometimes gently, sometimes rather forcefully, pointing out things I could be doing, or ways I could change my thinking, or a topic/chapter to read in the AA Big Book.

Any thoughts about doing something like this here with the readership-at-large of MaleSurvivor? Be it formally (ack more work for someone) or informally... it just gets started by someone sharing an email address, it grows by people asking to join in (and of course, in my former AA group, ppl could and did ask to be taken off the group list at any time).

Lots of free web based email providers out there and using one of them does provide a modicom of anonymidtity.

pax (peace)
-jer

Jer
It's a good feeling to have a lot of support and this is a great way of doing it without the hassle of going through the site, although if you have the 'my profile' settings set to send you a regular email every time you have a PM it's nearly the same.

The only word of caution I would add is that I would recommend setting up another email address seperate to your regular one.
That way you could walk away from it if any problems arose without the job of telling everyone "I've changed my email address - sorry"

Dave

In the first recovery site I was active in, the email list was the first thing I got into and was active in a few of them. I'm in one now tho its not very active. Jer, I agree these can be one good forum for recovery.

As Dave says the PMs can serve a similar purpose except they aren't read by everyone on the list like an email list. And of course it is important at least to me to use a separate email address. Only the administration here has my "home" email address.

Later

Victor

I really like this idea, though ideally the private message forum would be best. I wonder if the adminsitration could create an option to send PM's to groups of people? Just a thought.
mike

Good point about using a different email addy. I removed mine from the post.

Maybe forget about the email chain idea. How about using one of the forums here (or creating a new one, which I don't like, got enuf now)? Which forum should be used? Should a special prefix be used in the title, e.g. "Gratitude: Today I .... " ?

-jer

Why not, Jer? If we can have a forum for trigger issues, why not one for "thanks issues"?

Poetry, Music or Survivor Stories might be good forums in which to post expressions of gratitude, or even right on Male Survivors.

One thing's for sure, a lot more gratitute & expressions of it would be beneficial to us all, wherever we post them.

Victor