5 Must-Read Books About Addiction Recovery

Millions of Americans currently suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, yet many of those people feel alone or misunderstood. Although they are not a replacement for drug and alcohol treatment, books about addiction and recovery are a great reminder that you are not alone. Reading about the personal experiences of others who have struggled with addiction is a great way to encourage and inspire yourself throughout the recovery process. Recovery from a drug or alcohol addiction is a lifelong process that requires making healthy choices every day. Achieving lasting sobriety takes vigilance, commitment, and motivation.

This energy can become a powerful reservoir for future achievement. Regardless of how old you are, books like Mastery can show you how to awaken your creative passion and find mentors to help you reach the top of whatever field you dream of. A family friend gave me this book, telling me that it had kept him from drinking for the decades since he’d last had a drink. It is best read one page per day, since each page contains a short passage and explanation of its meaning. This reflective work can allow you to appreciate the value of the present moment, rather than attempting to live in the past or in the future.

It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, by Mark Wolynn

Dual diagnosis program, we address any addiction-related issues in tandem with mental health. This way, each disorder can be analyzed separately as well as together, and an understanding of their relationship can be determined. She thought the normal people who could drink casually were lucky. She wasn’t self-medicating and was able to truly feel her feelings and live honestly. We Are the Luckiest is a life-changing memoir about recovery—without any sugarcoating.

Finally, I sought out books that helped me to better understand the human condition, including my own. Napoleon Hill spent two decades studying the great industrialists, learning firsthand from the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and compiling information about the mental habits that lead to success in any arena. If your goal is to become unshakeable in your daily life, this book is a great place to start. It contains millennia of accumulated Eastern wisdom that has either been forgotten or repackaged as stunted cliches. I picked up this book because I knew that Tony Robbins was a mega-successful self-help guru, which led me to believe that he had to be a con man of sorts. The first 100 pages blew my mind and I found myself getting excited to read another chapter of this book every night before going to sleep. With intensity and repetition, I’ve also turned certain yoga poses into automatic initiators of a rush of feel-good chemicals.

The Easy Way for Women to Stop Drinking

Whether it is health, marital, or legal concerns, an intervention will always occur. The question is, why are you waiting for the substance user to get to the bottom and want help when the family is already there? Waiting for the substance user leads to inaction, usually resulting in interventions more likely to punish them than help them recover. As you re-feel the event, you become angrier with every passing thought. When a child cannot discuss what is going on at home, it has a profuse effect on their brain development and ability to form healthy relationships and bonds.

Addiction is a family disease, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. When a loved one enters recovery, the whole family enters recovery. Understanding the mechanics of addiction and recovery and how to best support a loved one in their quest for sobriety improves their chances of success. In this memoir, he talks about the car accident that killed his mother and baby sister when he was just two years old. Then about how he lost his beloved big brother to brain cancer… and all of the hardships that led to his years-long battle with addiction.

Ballad of a Sober Man: An ER Doctor’s Journey of Recovery by J.D. Remy

Before we dive into sobriety books, let’s address how alcohol use disorder relates to mental health in the first place. For more books about alcoholism and addiction, check out this list of 100 must-read books about addiction. She started sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses as a kid, and went through adolescence drinking more and more. By the time she was an adult in a big city, all she did was drink. Blackout is her poignant story of alcoholism and those many missing hours that disappeared when she had just enough to drink to wipe out her memory. Hepola gets through the darkest parts of her story with self-deprecating humor and a keen eye on what she was burying by drinking. This book isn’t about alcoholism exactly, but it’s an in-depth dive into how our parents, grandparents, and other influential figures in our lives affect our trauma.

If you know a child that could benefit from this book, we highly recommend that you have them go through it. Under the Influence,” authors James Robert Milam and Katherine Ketcham dispel this and other myths. They discuss recovery, how to help someone with alcoholism, how to increase the chances of a successful recovery, and how to tell if you or someone you love has alcoholism. The book has been in print for decades and remains an important resource. We’ve rounded up the best books for people with addiction and those that love them. Our Sober House holistic approach supports your physical, mental, and spiritual health through a range of evidence-based treatment modalities. Former Salon editor Sarah Hepola doesn’t hold back in this book. Her account of what she remembers is savage; her fear over what she won’t ever remember is terrifying. This is a book that digs deep, exploring some of the deeper issues of why people—and women in particular—drink. Allen’s powerful, uplifting tale was first published in 1978, and while the slang may belong to another era, the message is timeless.

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a happy, healthy, wealthy alcohol-free life, by Catherine Gray

These authors have shown incredible bravery and resilience as they share their most painful experiences and deepest vulnerabilities in public. You may have heard about Hunter Biden before and maybe even know that he published a memoir about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. There, Burroughs is finally able to truly examine himself, and something starts to click. This memoir is the story of his drinking, finding recovery, and getting sober while also finding love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power. From graduating cum laude from law school despite her excessive drinking to languishing in dive bars, King presents a clear-eyed look at her past and what brought her out of the haze of addiction. TheEmpathy books about alcohol recovery Examsauthor’s stunning book juxtaposes her own relationship to addiction with stories of literary legends like Raymond Carver, and imbues it with rich cultural history. The result is a definitive treatment of the American recovery movement — a memoir in the subgenre like no other. The writer of the comedy television show Alf, Stahl tells his story of heroin addiction and his journey to recovery. Stahl describes his out-of-control behavior to get drugs, such as driving at midnight from his luxury home in Los Angeles to the worst neighborhoods in the city with his daughter in her car seat. I added it to the list as a reminder of what can happen to a relatively“normal”person when addiction takes hold of their lives.

Once you are past alcohol withdrawal and post-acute withdrawal, you can optimize your life by conquering bad habits and negative thought patterns. This book can provide great value for the person who has quit drinking and still does not feel good on a daily basis. Anxiety, depression and cravings are not a sustainable way of a life, nor are they inevitable symptoms of a permanent disease. By the time I found this book, I already knew from experience that supplements can repair your brain after you quit drinking.

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour

Her confessional style of writing has left an indelible mark that remains influential today. Author Erica Garza grew up in a strict Mexican household in East Los Angeles. She writes with evocative prose about the anxiety that fueled her addiction to masturbation as a young girl, and eventually, her sex and pornography addiction as an adult. Through failed relationships, serial hook-ups, blackouts, and all of the shame that comes with these experiences, Garza writes a riveting memoir narrating a journey of exploration as she seeks therapy. Eventually, she begins a 12-Step program to find relief, if not salvation, from her addictions. Clare Pooley intertwines personal victories, research, and answers to FAQs about quitting alcohol in her memoir, The Sober Diaries. In a light-hearted manner, Pooley addresses the culture that supports alcohol abuse and describes her journey to sobriety. Readers appreciated her ability to intertwine humor into her accounts of recovery. In Alcohol and You, a professional therapist describes scientifically supported methods of reducing or eliminating alcohol intake.

Allen’s story of being a young woman in a teenage marriage that eventually runs away to Cincinnati, where she begins the destructive pattern of weekend partying and drinking, is a powerful tale. Eventually, she finds sobriety through a commitment to God and humanity to spend the rest of her life doing anything she can to help anybody suffering from alcoholism. Her timeless tale is a powerful one, and definitely one that needs to be read by all. Using her relatable voice, which is equal parts honest and witty, Holly tackles the ways that alcohol companies target women. At the end of the day, this memoir is a groundbreaking look into our current drinking culture while providing a road map to cut alcohol out of our lives so that we can truly live our best lives. Having been in recovery for many years, and working here at Shatterproof, I often get asked to recommend books about addiction. So here’s a list of my all-time favorite reads about substance use disorders.

In times of discouragement, it can feel especially helpful to hear the stories of others who are in recovery. To that end, we offer below a selection of books written about addiction and recovery that can be sources of inspiration. Every book listed so far is a good read for a family of alcoholics. People often forget that alcohol is a drug and, in our opinion, the worst and most devastating one.

The information on this website is not intended to be a substitute for, or to be relied upon as, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or qualified health provider with questions regarding a medical condition. Sign up to Unusual Suspects to receive news and recommendations for mystery/thriller readers. Laura founded The Luckiest Club in 2020 and it’s now home to thousands of members worldwide. Together, we’re getting free from alcohol and saying yes to a bigger life.

• In this dark but incredibly comedic memoir, Smith tells all about her story and the road she finally took to recover from her perpetual numbing.
• The other group is ACOA, which stands for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families.
• The 12 steps are also the cornerstone of many other treatment programs.
• In times of discouragement, it can feel especially helpful to hear the stories of others who are in recovery.
• I could not put this book down , talk about gut-wrenching honesty and not holding anything back.

We think as we’re getting sober, in spite of the fact that by the time we quit drinking, we’re not typically leading very glamorous lives. Rausing, the editor of Granta and heiress to a Swedish beverage-packaging fortune, writes beautifully of the idyllic seaside summers of her 1970s childhood and the heavy bonds of family. She does not recover in any straightforward way from worry, obsession, or attempts to control her brother or – obviously – the narrative, but she makes her way towards a kind of serenity. Admittedly, there are a lot of lists there about the best recovery memoirs, which is why ours is a little different. A big part of recovery includes exploring new ideas, perspectives, and perhaps getting some “experience, strength, and hope” from others who have fought addiction. Recovery books can be equally beneficial for families seeking to understand the addiction of a loved one. We’re often asked about some recovery books we would recommend, so today we decided to make a post about some inspiring books about addiction and recovery. Almost every substance user we have encountered has had some form of childhood trauma. This can range from emotional, sexual, and physical abuse to growing up in a one-parent home, being adopted, or not feeling your parents’ love, attention, or affection.

Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend are about taking control of your life, knowing when to say yes, and learning how to say no. An addict can penetrate the mental state of any family member and profoundly affect their ability to make effective decisions. Henry Cloud and John Townsend do a great job of helping the reader regain control of their thoughts and opinions. Learning how to set healthy boundaries and relearning the word no can be very helpful for any family member of an addict or alcoholic. Whenever a toxic person, place, or thing enters your life, you have the choice and ability to reject it or accept it. Families often increase the addiction problem and may or may not believe the help they provide will one day pay off. Addiction does not improve by providing the affected person with resources, housing, food, comfort, and other forms of counterproductive support. No substance user enters a rehab center or considers positive change unless they see and feel the need to do so. To this day, almost every addiction professional concedes to that; not all, and most do.