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.

Grief and loss affect almost every aspect of living—or having lived—with alcoholism. Members share how they have learned to acknowledge and accept these losses with the help of Al-Anon Family Groups. The stories shared here reflect the experience, strength, and hope of hundreds of members.

If you have a family member who suffers from mental illness, but refuses to seek treatment, you may feel like you're caught in a trap. If you try making life easier for your loved one, you wind up perpetuating dependency and entitlement. If you push for treatment, you are met with resistance or outright animosity. And when you reach out to professionals for help, you are told that nothing can be done unless your family member is ready to change. So, how can you escape the "family trap?"

Are you a highly sensitive person who feels drained by others' emotions, attracts toxic people, and has experienced the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse? You are not alone. Millions of empaths struggle in a world where their unique gifts are often exploited. But what if there was a way to break free, reclaim your power, and thrive? In the captivating audiobook "EMPATH VS NARCISSIST," Grace Miller's soothing voice guides you through her personal journey and extensive research.

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.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Addiction 101 and learn about addiction, mental health, recovery, and relapse.

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.

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?

This is the original study guide to the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. Filled with practical information for those first days of sober living, this little book offers newcomers advice about the program, how long it takes, and what to look for in a sponsor; provides in-depth discussions of each of the Twelve Steps and related character defects; poses common questions about AA and helping others, identifying where to find answers in the Big Book; and, features non-sexist language.

There’s a brighter road ahead than you can possibly imagine and you have everything you need to reach it. Ready to unlock the door? It’s estimated that almost 2% of the population has borderline personality disorder, so you’re certainly not alone, but it probably doesn’t feel that way, does it? Still, no challenge is insurmountable, not even the challenge of overcoming BPD. There’s hope on the other side of this, and there are realistic approaches you can take to transform your experience of daily life.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Acute trauma and addictive disorders are often a result of psychological injuries experienced as a child, while typically producing long-term and harmful generational consequences on loved ones and other family members. Claudia Black presents a portrait of a broken family system, exploring how addiction and trauma develop in families, their damaging repetition, and offers a roadmap for healing.

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.

As a companion to Love First, the classic guide to family intervention, It Takes a Family delivers a proven method for families and friends to step beyond the initial intervention and reinvent their relationships as part of a family recovery team. In straightforward, compassionate language, Debra Jay offers listeners a structured model that shows family members and friends how they can work together to overcome the obstacles many people with addiction face in their initial recovery.

In Talking to Children About Divorce, Jean McBride provides you with the tools and encouragement to effectively communicate with your child about divorce. McBride brings her more than 25 years of specializing in divorce to guide you through crucial but difficult conversations and cultivate an environment of love and support throughout the divorce process. You’ll learn how to have honest conversations about different situations and emotions that may arise during divorce - from breaking the news to understanding resistance.

3:47 a.m. That's when they come for Wren Clemmens. She's hustled out of her house and into a waiting car, then a plane, and then taken on a forced march into the desert. This is what happens to kids who've gone so far off the rails, their parents don't know what to do with them anymore. This is wilderness therapy camp. Eight weeks of survivalist camping in the desert. Eight weeks to turn your life around. Yeah, right.

If you choose to stay in your marriage, you have options other than punishing, tolerating, or ignoring your spouse; extraordinary growth awaits a woman willing to deal with the pain of her husband's struggles with sexual purity. Even if your spouse will not participate in a program for healing, you can change your own life in powerful and permanent ways. Shattered Vows is inspired by Debra Laaser's own journey through betrayal, her extensive work with hundreds of hurting women as a licensed marriage and family therapist, and her healed marriage after her husband's infidelity.