It was my great pleasure this morning to appear via telephone on the Audrey Chapman show, broadcast in the Washington DC area on WHUR-FM at 96.3 and via the Internet at http://www.whur.com. Audrey is a relationship specialist who has written several books on love and its problems. She's active as a writer and speaker and also maintains a busy counseling practice. She talks with radio listeners every Saturday morning from 8 - 10 am (5 -7 a.m. my time), and her show is said to have a huge morning audience up and down the East Coast.
From the first words, you can see why Audrey has such a following. She's calm, she's clear, she's relaxed; she projects empathy without judgment. You immediately feel comfortable talking to her, telling her your problems. She also sees right to the heart of an issue. She couldn't have had much time to read my new book, but she clearly understood the main points. Her questions were relevant and moved the conversation forward.
Audrey thrives on the freshness and urgency of listener calls. And her callers didn't disappoint. In just a few conversations, much of the huge panorama of addiction problems in the society was laid out before us. A grown up woman was concerned with the drinking of the auntie who raised her. A mother was troubled by her teenage son's drinking. A father worried that his own drinking was leading his son into alcoholism. And so on. Addiction is an enormous problem, and there are people everywhere struggling with it.
We don't yet have LifeRing meetings in the D.C. area, but I had the opportunity to tell listeners about www.lifering.org, our website. I was pleased that Audrey asked me to stay on into the second hour of her show. There was still much more that could have been said, and I had to bite my tongue once or twice when callers pushed concepts and solutions that have very limited utility. But I loved the live interaction, and I could see myself engaged in a longer and very interesting conversation with Audrey on some other occasion. She's smart and she has an open mind and a great way with people.
Check out her website at audreychapman.com.
