Family Recovery

Have you recently walked away from a date or a conversation feeling uncomfortable or violated? Are you looking for ways to set limits with your spouse, kids, parents, or boss? This essential guide to setting and respecting boundaries is for anyone wanting to better understand themselves and others. Just as a cut in our skin causes pain and injury, a breach of any of our physical, emotional, or sexual boundaries can be very harmful to our bodies and minds.

Are you feeling overwhelming resentment toward your narcissistic mother? Do you feel frustrated because you can’t seem to find a way to heal and establish loving relationships with others? Award-winning author and narcissistic-abuse survivor Nanette Abigail knows a thing or two about this sensitive issue, laying out the crucial tools she used to create safe havens and find mental clarity for herself, and with her help, you can, too!

The true story of a wife and mother's descent into alcohol addiction. A harrowing and sometimes heartbreaking chronicle of habitual blackouts and unremembered nights, and her triumphant emergence into the light of recovery.

Exploring the process of recovery from addiction as it affects the entire family, this audiobook presents an innovative model for understanding and treating families navigating this difficult period. The authors draw upon extensive clinical and research experience to demonstrate how families can be helped to regroup after abstinence, weather periods of emotional upheaval, and find their way to establishing a more stable, yet flexible, family system.

On the surface, Cameron Douglas had everything: descended from Hollywood royalty (son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas), he was born into a life of wealth, privilege, and comfort. But by the age of thirty, he had become a drug addict, a thief, and—after a DEA drug bust—a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added while he was incarcerated.

Don't Let Your Kids Kill You is a landmark work that dares to focus on the plight of the confused, distressed parent and not the erring child. It sets aside any preconceived ideas that parents are to blame for what is essentially a full-blown global crisis. Drawing on interviews with parents who have survived the heartbreak of kids on drugs, combined with his own experience, Charles Rubin provides practical advice on how parents can help themselves and their families by first attending to their own needs.

Are we all a little crazy? Roughly fifteen percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other-stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are?

Those who have had a narcissistic parent can testify to how damaging it can be to one's psyche. Narcissistic parents lack empathy, show a severe sense of entitlement to micromanage the lives of their children, and often subject their children to neglect, as well as emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. From the unique challenges daughters of narcissistic fathers face to the ways in which adverse childhood experiences affect our brains, Shahida Arabi's insightful essays resonate deeply with those who have been raised by narcissistic parents.

In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf's inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife.

It is estimated that as many as 34 million people grew up in alcoholic homes. But what about the rest of us? What about families that had no alcoholism, but did have perfectionism, workaholism, compulsive overeating, intimacy problems, depression, problems in expressing feelings, plus all the other personality traits that can produce a family system much like an alcoholic one? Countless millions of us struggle with these kinds of dysfunctions every day, and until very recently we struggled alone.

From the creator of the blog Renegade Mothering, Janelle Hanchett's forthright, darkly funny, and ultimately empowering memoir chronicling her tumultuous journey from young motherhood to abysmal addiction and a recovery she never imagined possible. Pregnant at 21 by a man she'd known three months, Janelle Hanchett embraced motherhood with the determined optimism of the recklessly self-confident. After giving birth, she found herself bored, directionless, and seeking relief in wine, which she justified as sophisticated and going well with chicken.

Following deaths, divorces, or the confusion of major relocation, many adults tell their children “don’t feel bad”. In fact, say the authors of the highly praised The Grief Recovery Handbook, feeling bad or sad is precisely the appropriate emotion attached to sad events. Encouraging a child to bypass grief without completion can cause unseen long-term damage.

In an all too familiar scenario, played out in millions of homes every day, children who grow up in addictive families abide by certain rules: don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. The rigid survival roles and youthful coping behaviors they take on, such as the responsible child, the adjuster, the placater, and the acting-out child can eventually contribute to problems of depression, loneliness, and addiction in adulthood.

Are you ready to recover from toxic relationships, heal from past trauma, and reclaim your life? Drawing from personal experience and extensive research, author Cassandra McBride offers a transformative journey through four essential guides.

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans un­der the age of 50, claiming more lives than the AIDS epidemic did at its peak. Opioid abuse accounts for two-thirds of these overdoses, with over 100 Americans dying from opioid overdoses every day. Now Overcoming Opioid Addiction provides a comprehensive medical guide for opioid use disorder (OUD) sufferers, their loved ones, clinicians, and other professionals. Here is expertly presented, urgently needed in­formation and guidance

Josh Hamilton was the first player chosen in the first round of the 1999 baseball draft. He was destined to be one of those rare "high-character " superstars. But in 2001, working his way from the minors to the majors, all of the plans for Josh went off the rails in a moment of weakness. What followed was a 4-year nightmare of drugs and alcohol, estrangement from friends and family, and his eventual suspension from baseball.

Are you still carrying the weight of an emotionally abusive relationship long after it’s ended? Struggling to break free from the heavy chains of a trauma bond that keeps pulling you back? Jennifer Alushan, an experienced educator with several degrees in education and specialized training in trauma processing, guides you on this journey of recovery and self-empowerment.

We've been told that staying with a partner who struggles with addiction—whether it be with drugs, alcohol, or addictive behaviors—means that we're enabling their destructive behavior. That wanting to help them means we're codependent, and that the best thing for both of us is to walk away from the relationship entirely. But is that true?

Most of us are only starting to become aware of how our foundational years contribute to who we are today. Our childhood environment shapes the foundation for our sense of self, how we feel about the world, and how we relate to others. If we experienced trauma or dysfunction along the way, it likely disrupted the pathways to these fundamental structures. Understanding our trauma is not about blame, but about understanding, learning, and growing. In most cases, our caregivers did the best they could with the tools they had, often while dealing with external or internal stressors as well.

Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises and despair. In The Los Angeles Diaries, he reveals his struggle for survival, mining his past to present the inspiring story of his redemption. Beautifully written and limned with dark humor, these 12 deeply confessional, interconnected chapters address personal failure, heartbreak, the trials of writing for Hollywood, and the life-shattering events that finally convinced Brown that he must "change or die".