Straight Talk from Claudia Black or Sensing the Self

Straight Talk from Claudia Black: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids about Drugs and Alcohol

Author: Claudia Black

Available Late October 2003. Alcohol use, drug use, and addiction are challenging topics for parents to discuss with children. These subjects are even more complex, and more urgent, for recovering parents to discuss with their children. Best-selling recovery author Claudia Black introduces readers to five different families and reveals how each of the parents talked with their kids about recovery, relapse, and the childs own vulnerability to addiction. Discussion tips and clearly presented facts help parents focus on key issues. Age-appropriate strategies help reduce childrens experimentation with alcohol and other drugs.

Library Journal

Black, an addiction expert known for her work on the adult children of alcoholics (It Will Never Happen to Me), here shifts her focus to recovering parents, in turn addressing the needs of their children. Based on the sensible idea that parents struggling with addiction face unique challenges in fostering antidrug/alcohol attitudes, her latest book acknowledges the genetic component of addiction while stating that the process is not inevitable. Provided are useful tools for assessment (e.g., "the family tree") and remediation grounded in the 12-step program philosophy. Early chapters review current information on brain chemistry, generational vulnerability, and phenomena such as multiple addictions, tolerance levels, relapse, and blackouts. The emphasis then moves to straightforward and realistic advice about self-forgiveness, making amends for past behavior, and new ways of relating to loved ones. Personal stories drawn from five diverse families are used throughout; limited references are provided at the conclusion. This candid and hope-filled book merits strong consideration by large public libraries and specialized collections given the prevalence of some form of addictive behavior in families.-Antoinette Brinkman, M.L.S., Evansville, IN Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

New interesting textbook: Taming the Truffle or Cooking New American

Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia

Author: Sheila M Reindl

Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa, outsiders may wonder, "How could you ever start?" Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, "How can I ever stop?" How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery.

Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self—to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience.

Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.