Family Resources

Book Recommendations

  • John Cates and Jennifer Cummings | 2003

    John Cates and Jennifer Cummings draw upon their education and experience to help parents recognize the evidence of a young person's abuse of chemicals, to help the parents and young person reach out to those who can help, and to help the parents and young person reclaim control of their lives. This book will serve as a valuable and encouraging tool for those who have reached the end of their rope

  • Annette Edens | 2016

    Anette Edens, PhD, shares her experience as a parent and psychologist helping families with children who have addictions. You’ll learn how to maneuver through the chaos to create a harmonious family life. Even if your teen is not ready or willing to change, there is help and hope.

  • Paula Becker | 2019

    Tells the story of one woman’s struggle to reclaim wholeness while mothering a son addicted to opioids. Paula Becker’s son Hunter was raised in a safe, nurturing home by his writer/historian mom and his physician father. He was a bright, curious child. And yet, addiction found him.

  • Jeffrey Foote, Carrie Wilkens, Nicole Kosanke, and Stephanie Higgs | 2014

    Offers a science-based guide to helping loved ones overcome addiction problems and compulsive behaviors. Beyond Addiction shows how family and friends can use kindness, positive reinforcement, and motivational and behavioral strategies to help their loved ones change. The authors present the practical advice to help families and loved ones learn how to tap the transformative power of relationships for positive change.

  • Anna Lembke | 2022

    In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist, explores why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check.

  • Susan Packard | 2022

    These 12 stories of hope from college students, graduates, and a mother of a child in addiction will illuminate the debate and help those struggling to find answers. Susan Packard shines a bright light on how our emotions are a critical contributor to substance use disorders, much like our genetics are. She shares how loneliness, disconnectedness, and despair lead millions of young adults to substance misuse - and many thousands to suicide.

  • Krissy Pozatek | 2010

    Just as your teenager is embarking on a journey of self-discovery, skill-development, and emotional maturation, parents too need to use this time to recognize that their own patterns may have contributed to their family's downward spiral. This is The Parallel Process. Using case studies garnered from her many years as an adolescent and family therapist, Krissy Pozatek shows parents how they can help their children by attuning to emotions, setting limits, not rushing to their rescue, and allowing them to take responsibility for their actions, while recognizing their own patterns of emotional withdrawal, workaholism, and of surrendering their lives and personalities to parenting. As such, The Parallel Process is an essential primer for all parents who are seeking to help the family stay and grow together as they negotiate the potentially difficult teenage years.

  • David Sheff | 2009

    What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first warning signs: the denial, the three a.m. phone calls—is it Nic? The police? The hospital? His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every treatment that might save his son. And he refused to give up on Nic.

  • Nic Sheff | 2009

    Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise. In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. As we watch Nic plunge into the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds with his past, with his family, with his substances, and with himself.

Personal Growth, Codependency and Boundaries

  • Melody Beattie’s compassionate and insightful look into codependency—the concept of losing oneself in the name of helping another—has guided millions of readers toward the understanding that they are powerless to change anyone but themselves and that caring for the self is where healing begins. If, like so many others, you’ve lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one’s self-destructive behavior, you may be codependent. With personal reflections, exercises, and instructive stories, Codependent No More helps you break old patterns and maintain healthy boundaries, and offers a clear and achievable path to healing, hope, freedom, and happiness. This revised edition includes an all-new chapter on trauma and anxiety—making it even more relevant today than it was when it first entered the national conversation over thirty-five years ago.

  • Melody Beattie integrates her own life experiences and fundamental recovery reflections in this unique daily meditation book written especially for those of us who struggle with the issue of codependency. Problems are made to be solved, Melody reminds us, and the best thing we can do is take responsibility for our own pain and self-care. In this daily inspirational book, Melody provides us with a thought to guide us through the day and she encourages us to remember that each day is an opportunity for growth and renewal.

  • A practical guide to better communication that will break the blackmail cycle for good.  Emotional blackmailers know how much we value our relationships with them. They know our vulnerabilities and our deepest secrets. They are our mothers, our partners, our bosses and coworkers, our friends and our lovers. And no matter how much they care about us, they use this intimate knowledge to give themselves the payoff they want: our compliance.  Susan Forward presents the anatomy of a relationship damaged by manipulation, and gives readers an arsenal of tools to fight back.

  • Dr. Ross Greene, a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the treatment of kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, has worked with thousands of explosive children, and he has good news: these kids aren’t attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents aren’t passive, permissive pushovers. Rather, explosive kids are lacking some crucial skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving, and they require a different approach to parenting. Throughout this compassionate, insightful, and practical book, Dr. Greene provides a new conceptual framework for understanding their difficulties. He explains why traditional parenting and treatment often don’t work with these children, and he describes what to do instead.

  • Co-dependency -- of which enabling is a major element -- can and does exist in families where there is no chemical dependency. Angelyn Miller's own experience is a dramatic example: neither she nor her husband drank, yet her family was floundering in that same dynamic. Despite her best efforts to fix everything (and everyone), the turmoil continued until she discovered that helping wasn't helping. Miller recounts how she learned to alter the way she responded to family crises and general neediness, forever breaking the cycle of co-dependency. Offering insights, practical techniques, and hope, she shows us how we can transform enabling relationships into healthy ones.

  • We are all addicted in some way. When we learn to identify our addiction, embrace our brokenness, and surrender to God, we begin to bring healing to ourselves and our world. In Breathing Under Water, Richard Rohr shows how the gospel principles in the Twelve Steps can free anyone from any addiction—from an obvious dependence on alcohol or drugs to the more common but less visible addiction that we all have to sin.

  • Presents simple-yet-powerful ways to establish healthy boundaries in all aspects of life. Rooted in the latest research and best practices used in cognitive behavioral therapy, these techniques help us identify and express our needs clearly and without apology--and unravel a root problem behind codependency, power struggles, anxiety, depression, burnout, and more.

Meditations

  • Great Al-Anon book showing how to take one day at a time for families of alcoholics.

  • Daily meditations, affirmations, and quotes to help families encourage their recovering alcoholic loved ones to help themselves.

  • Daily thoughts and meditations on living in a family with alcoholism.

  • These meditations continue the tradition of Hazelden’s beloved series of daily readings by providing moments of recognition, confession, and healing for those who are realizing that recovery rarely follows a neat or comfortable path. Along the way, we plant beautiful roses only to be injured by their thorns, and we pull up unwanted dandelions that, at times, are our only source of wishes. By sharing the realities we never expected our families to face, mothers of addicted children support each other through experiences that can only be feared and imagined by others. From our shared struggles emerge opportunities for personal growth. Tending Dandelions is a vital source of wisdom, support, and strength that helps us begin our own journey of recovery.

Videos

  • Generation Found: Generation Found (2016) - IMDb –

    GENERATION FOUND is a powerful story about one community coming together to ignite a youth addiction recovery revolution in their hometown. Devastated by an epidemic of addiction, Houston faced the reality of burying and locking up its young people at an alarming rate. And so in one of the largest cities in America, visionary counselors, law school dropouts, aspiring rock musicians, retired football players, oil industry executives, and church leaders came together to build the world's largest peer-driven youth and family recovery community. Independently filmed over the course of two years, GENERATION FOUND takes an unprecedented and intimate look at how a system of treatment centers, sober high schools, alternative peer groups, and collegiate recovery programs can exist in concert to intervene early and provide a real and tested long-term alternative to the "War on Drugs." It is not only a deeply personal story, but one with real-world utility for communities struggling with addiction worldwide.

  • The Wisdom of Trauma https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/

    The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.

    “So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.” — Gabor Maté 

    In The Wisdom of Trauma, Dr. Gabor Maté explores why our western society is facing such mental health and substance use epidemics. This is a journey with a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma and society.

    “Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.” — Gabor Maté

    Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which people seek to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring.

Websites

Podcasts on Addiction, Recovery, and Parenting

  • The Hopestream podcast, hosted by Brenda Zane, a parent who has been there, offers empathy and reliable information for parents of teens and young adults struggling with substance misuse, addiction, and mental health.

    https://hopestreamcommunity.org/hopestream-podcast/

  • “Keep Coming Back” is a series of inspiring and powerful conversations focused around the paths to sobriety and recovery. Each episode explores an individual’s unique story, their relationship with drugs and alcohol, and explains how each navigates life today without a drink, a powder, or a pill.

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keep-coming-back-real-stories-of-sobriety-recovery/id1483705218

  • Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour’s podcast brings her sane, informed, and practical perspective to timely and timeless parenting questions.

    https://drlisadamour.com/resource/series/ask-lisa-podcast/

  • Lots of good content, but be sure to check out the episodes with Dr. Gabor Maté (The Shocking Link Between ADHD, Addiction, Autoimmune Diseases, & Trauma and Stuart Albon.

    o   Gabor Mate episode (episode #235): Dr. Maté is a world-renowned trauma expert. This conversation covers ADHD, autoimmune diseases, anxiety, addiction, people pleasing, and trauma. Dr. Maté takes you on a deep dive into how your early life experiences can shape the way you feel and function today, both mentally and physically. This episode is about unlocking real healing and finding hope. Dr. Maté’s compassionate insights will show you how understanding your past can free you to make healthier choices right now. Shares powerful, science-backed ways to understand and care for yourself in ways you never have before.

    o   Dr. Stuart Ablon (episode #244) distills 30 years of behavior change research into one hour. After listening, you will have a new approach to dealing with difficult people, challenging kids, and family members. In this candid and relatable conversation, Mel Robbins and Dr. Ablon bust through the most common parenting myths and offer a simple 3 step approach for transforming even the most frustrating dynamics. This episode isn’t just about solving conflicts; it’s about creating a deeper understanding of others and fostering lasting change.

  • https://speakingofteens.com/

    Ann Coleman is the parent of a teen who dealt with anxiety, major depression, substance use, ADHD and learning issues. In the years since figuring things out and turning their lives around, she’s studied the science of adolescence and parenting adolescents. She was an attorney who shifted to a parent educator. Her episodes are well produced and full of great information about teens, addiction, relationships, the growing brain, and more.

Helplines & Websites