Are you feeling exasperated and helpless about your family member's addiction? Are you at your wit's end, having tried everything you can think of to make them stop? If someone you love is engaging in addictive behaviors such as alcohol and drug misuse, eating disorders, smoking, gambling, Internet addiction, sex addiction, compulsive overspending, or relationship addiction, you are undoubtedly experiencing unpredictability in your relationship. Some of the most common emotions you will experience include: - Guilt and shame - Anger and anxiety - Confusion and powerlessness Whether the addict in your life is your spouse, partner, parent, child, friend, or colleague, the key to changing this reality for yourself lies in shifting your focus from your loved one's addiction to you own self-care. This book presents a dramatically fresh approach to help you get off the roller-coaster chaos of addiction, maintain your own sanity and serenity, and live your best life.

Recovering addicts are faced with many challenges, and these challenges can often extend to their romantic partners. During the recovery period, couples often struggle with overcoming feelings of betrayal and frustration, and may have a hard time rebuilding trust and closeness. While there are many resources available to recovering addicts, there are limited resources for the people who love them. In Loving Someone in Recovery, therapist Beverly Berg offers powerful tools for the partners of recovering addicts. Based in mindfulness, attachment theory, and neurobiology, this book will help readers sustain emotional stability in their relationships, increase effective communication, establish boundaries, and take real steps toward reigniting intimacy. The material in this book is drawn from the author’s successful Conscious Couples Recovery Workshop. With more than 25 years in the field, she has developed a unique set of exercises that address the issues faced by couples in recovery. This book addresses the roles that both partners play in recovery, and aims to help readers develop a new appreciation for one another and improve self-confidence and acceptance. The road to recovery is never an easy one, but by building a strong support system, the chances of success are exponentially greater. For more information on Berg’s work, visit consciouscouplesrecovery.com

Love addiction manifests in many forms, from Fatal Attraction-type obsessive lust to less extreme but nonetheless psychologically and emotionally harmful forms. The most common of these is staying in a bad relationship because of a fear of being alone-the "I hate you but don't leave me" relationship. In ADDICTION TO LOVE, recovering love addict Susan Peabody explains the variety of ways this disorder plays out, from the obsessively doting love addict to the addict who can't disentangle from an unfulfilling, dead-end relationship. Peabody provides an in-depth and easy-to-follow recovery program for those suffering from this unhealthy and often dangerous addiction and explains how to create a loving, safe, and fulfilling relationship. • A seminal work on unhealthy and obsessive behaviors in love, and how to change behavior to have a positive relationship. This third edition includes a new introduction and revisions to the text throughout. • Some symptoms of love addiction include love at first sight, excessive fantasizing, abnormal jealousy, nagging, and accepting dishonesty. • Even relationships with parents, children, siblings, or friends may be addictive-dependency is not always related to romantic love. • Previous editions have sold more than 40,000 copies. "Love addiction is a three-headed serpent that Susan Peabody adeptly slays. This is the quintessential book for any love addict or counselor needing to fully understand this highly prevalent and complex disorder. Susan detects and dissects aspects of this condition not comprehended in other books of its kind. Recovery is possible. This book makes it possible to take the succinct steps necessary toward a loving and reciprocal long-term intimate relationship." —Sudi Scull, M.F.T., C.N., psychotherapist and nutritionist

This workbook helps readers understand what will and won't work in their relationships with their addicted loved ones--and in their relationships with themselves. As people become familiar with the top 10 survival tips for loving someone with an addiction, they will learn how to offer healthier and more effective choices to the addicted loved one.

It's okay to love them. It's your right to help them. Addiction destroys people and can even end lives. When you know or suspect that someone you love is suffering from addiction you have two goals: getting your loved one into treatment and turning that treatment into full-fledged sobriety. Many addiction experts tell you that you have to disengage or risk being an enabler, a codependent bystander, in the wreckage of an addict's life; that you have to cut all ties or be taken advantage of financially and emotionally; that you have to protect yourself from your loved one, who isn't the person you used to know. But many friends and family members find it unnatural, even impossible, to turn away from a person they love who is at his lowest point, and refuse to believe that their addict is lost to addiction. Backed by his years of experience, Dr. Westreich guides you through the process of getting the addict you love on the road to treatment and recovery. He provides detailed scripts to lead you through pivotal conversations with the addict in your life, highlighting the words that he's found to be most effective and the words to avoid. With this book in hand, family and friends will know, for example, how to motivate their addict to recognize his problem based on the addict's own definition of what addiction looks like; how to "raise the bottom" that addicts so often must hit to a more acceptable level -- such as embarrassment, job loss, or ill health; and when to use gentle disagreement, quiet listening, or forceful confrontation to move the addict toward treatment, while managing and protecting their own emotions. Dr. Westreich also shows you how to engage a therapist in the process and provides methods for combating an addict's defense mechanisms. By outlining several treatment options, he helps you to weigh what each can and cannot accomplish, which is the most effective treatment for the kind of addiction you are dealing with, what each treatment requires of the recovering addict and the friend or family member, and how successful each is. Dr. Westreich also takes care to discuss the kinds of special situations you may face when the addict in your life, in addition to having a substance abuse problem, is a minor, is pregnant, has mental or medical diseases, or has other issues that are likely to affect recovery. Helping the Addict You Love is the guide that so many loved ones of addicts have desperately needed. Dr. Westreich supports you through the emotional process of helping the addict you love, tells you it's okay to want to help, and teaches you how to do so.

Addiction is an increasing problem in our society. While there are a variety of programs and “steps” that addicts can follow to work towards recovery, there is no rule book for us—the people who are in love with an addict. All of our journeys are different and yet, the same—filled with chaos, uncertainty, and confusion. This book may not hold any magical solutions to your challenges, but it just might provide you with the comfort and companionship that the author longe

In Love and Addiction, published 40 years ago and sold as a mass-market paperback on love, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky laid out every major issue confronting the addiction field today. This pioneering classic, which was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and spawned the codependence movement, is the first-and still the definitive-book on addictive love. But it is much more than that; it is the book that explains why addiction is not what we think it is. Love and Addiction focuses on dependent love relationships to explore what both love and addiction really are-psychologically, socially, and culturally. Addiction is an overgrown, dependent, destructive relationship. Love is the opposite, a sharing, growth-inspiring one. The authors' analysis makes clear that an addiction is an experience that takes on meaning and power in light of a person's needs, desires, beliefs, expectations, and fears. By showing how addiction grows out of ordinary human experience, Peele and Brodsky offer a liberating understanding of all addictions-to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, gambling, shopping, electronic media, sex, or love. In 1975, Love and Addiction boldly proposed ideas whose truth is only now being recognized: Addiction is not limited to drugs, and drugs are not necessarily addictive. AA's 12 steps are not the last word in addiction treatment. On the contrary, practically oriented addiction treatments are more effective. The goal of addiction treatment and recovery is not abstinence to the exclusion of all else, but to build a life that rules out addiction. Love is the opposite of the self-protective constriction of addiction; it is the expansion of your spirit with another human being. Remarkably, all of these issues-the widespread application of the addiction diagnosis, the limited value of AA and its disease theory, the possibility that people can continue using but still eliminate addiction (harm reduction)-are as hotly debated today as when Peele and Brodsky first analyzed addiction forty years ago. Most remarkably of all, the answers Peele and Brodsky arrived at in Love and Addiction are only now being embraced by progressive thinkers in the field. "Destined to become a classic " Psychology Today proclaimed in 1975. Rereading Love and Addiction 35 years later, addiction researcher Rowdy Yates wrote that the book "still reads absolutely true as an understanding of addictive behavior." Reading today this clairvoyant analysis of the most challenging issues we face in the twenty-first century-the meaning of love and the cure for addiction-you will recognize both the current relevance and enduring value of Love and Addiction, now reissued with a new (2015) Authors' Preface, the Authors' Preface written for the 1991 paperback reissue, and a brief new introduction to each chapter. Otherwise, nothing has been changed in the original book.