Recommended Family Resources

Doing What You Can Live With by Brandi Mac

What if the secret to surviving addiction isn’t tougher love, but braver love?

This book is about finding peace in the chaos and learning to love someone through active addiction without losing yourself in the process. Through raw honesty and hard-won wisdom, Brandi shares how she learned to show up for her daughter in ways that honored both love and boundaries. Her daughter has been sober for over a year not because Brandi followed a formula, but because she finally trusted her instincts and did what she could live with. You’ll discover:

• The Last Call Lens: a framework for decisions you can live with
• How to maintain connection without enabling destruction
• The difference between boundaries that protect and boundaries that punish
• How to find moments of peace even when nothing is resolved
• Why showing love, compassion, and empathy has never actually harmed anyone

This isn’t about fixing your loved one or finding the perfect program. It’s about finding your way back to yourself while keeping your heart open. It’s about choosing connection over control, presence over perfection, and hope over despair.

Because while love may not cure addiction, when has showing love, compassion, and empathy ever really done harm?

“The moment I stopped trying to save her and started just loving her, everything changed.”

Check out more information about this book →

The Complete Family Guide To Addiction by Thomas F. Harrison & Hilary S. Connery, MD, PhD

If you are struggling to help a loved one recover from addiction–and to cope with the devastating impact on the whole family–you are not alone. But until now, there has been no single book that gives the millions of families like yours the comprehensive, unbiased information you need. This expertly written guide addresses the painful questions that spouses, parents, and grown children face every day. Why do addicts make such bad choices? How can you find (and afford) treatment that works–and convince your loved one to try it? Can relapse be prevented? When does being supportive cross the line to enabling? Providing science-based answers and resources, the authors cover crucial emotional, financial, and legal issues that simply aren’t discussed in other books. The more your family knows about the myths and realities of addiction, the better equipped you will be to overcome it.

“Addiction is no ordinary problem. For both addicts and their families, it’s the world’s most bewildering, maddening, and frightening illness.”

Check out more information about this book →

How To Stop Enabling Your Adult Children by Melody Devonish

This book will start you on your journey to stop enabling. If you just can’t maintain boundaries with your adult child/children, and you find yourself constantly taken advantage of, then this book is for you. Discover the wealth of shared experience that can exist in a parent/adult child relationship that is not dominated by unrealistic expectations, manipulations and resentment. The goal is to empower you, as you understand the enabling cycle and then learn some very practical tools to help you stop. The enabling cycle can be challenged, and change will happen. Getting your power back in your life, and feeling the freedom of being in control of your decisions is an amazingly freeing process. It does however take work, and that is where this very practical book can get you started. You may find that your needs are constantly disregarded, while your adult child expects you to continually be there to pick up the pieces and rescue them again and again. It is time to learn HOW TO put firm boundaries in place in a calm and dignified manner. This book will help you see what lies are keeping you in your current stressful and unfulfilling situation. You will learn how to start the journey towards sharing a mutually fulfilling mature relationship with your adult child.

“By setting boundaries, I am protecting my empathy and stopping myself from ‘burning out’ and becoming resentful. Therefore, I am making sure I can continue to be a helpful, loving person for years to come.”

Check out more information about this book →

You’re Waiting On You: A Guide For Families Struggling With Addiction and Relapse by Brook McKenzie and Sam Davis

Are you living in the painful cycle of relapse—waiting for your loved one to change?

The waiting ends here. The change begins now.

You’re Waiting on You is a guide for families trapped in the exhausting cycle of addiction and relapse. Written by Brook McKenzie, a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and CEO of the nation’s only long-term treatment center for chronic relapse, this book offers what families rarely receive: clarity, honesty, and permission to stop waiting. Inside, you’ll learn how to:

• Set boundaries that build trust and consistency
• Interrupt old patterns that keep relapse alive
• Respond to crisis with a plan, not panic
• Disrupt behaviors that block real change
• Choose truth over fear—every single time

Built for families in crisis, this practical guide is quick to read and impossible to forget. You can’t force their recovery. But you can lead them toward it. This book shows you how.

Check out more information about this book →

Drama Free by Nedra Glover Tawwab

From the bestselling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a road map for understanding and moving past family struggles—and living your life, your way.

Every family has a story. For some of us, our family of origin is a solid foundation that feeds our confidence and helps us navigate life’s challenges. For others, it’s a source of pain, hurt, and conflict that can feel like a lifelong burden. In this empowering guide, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers clear advice for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to breaking the cycle and moving forward.

Covering topics ranging from the trauma of emotional neglect, to the legacy of addicted or absent parents, to mental health struggles in siblings and other relatives, and more, this clear and compassionate guide will help you take control of your own life—and honor the person you truly are.

Check out more information about this book →

Everything Changes: Help for Families of Newly Recovering Addicts

Our long time favorite! A compassionate, user-friendly handbook for family and friends navigating the many challenges that come with a loved one’s new-found sobriety.

A relative or friend has finally taken those tentative first steps toward sobriety. With the relief of this life-changing course of action comes a new and difficult set of challenges for recovering addicts and those who love them. Family members and friends often find themselves unsure of how to weather such a dramatic turn, as the rules and routines of their relationships no longer pertain.

Everything Changes assuages fears and uncertainty by teaching loved ones of newly recovering addicts how to navigate the often-tumultuous early months of recovery. Beverly Conyers, author of the acclaimed Addict in the Family, again shares the hope and knowledge that she gained as a parent of a recovering addict by focusing on the aftermath of addiction. She outlines the physical and psychological changes that recovering addicts go through, and offers practical tools to help family members and friends:

• Build a fresh, rewarding relationship with the addict
• Be supportive without setting themselves up for disappointment
• Avoid enabling destructive behavior
• Set and maintain boundaries
• Cope with relapse
• Deal with the practicalities of sober living, such as helping the addict find a job
• Deal with the stigma of addiction

Check out more information about this book →

I Hate You–Don’t Leave Me by Jerold J. Kreisman, MD, & Hal Straus

The revised and expanded third edition of the bestselling guide to understanding borderline personality disorder—with advice for communicating with and helping the borderline individuals in your life.

After more than three decades as the essential guide to borderline personality disorder (BPD), the third edition of I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me now reflects the most up-to-date research that has opened doors to the neurobiological, genetic, and developmental roots of the disorder, as well as connections between BPD and substance abuse, sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome, ADHD, and eating disorders. Both pharmacological and psychotherapeutic advancements point to real hope for success in the treatment and understanding of BPD.

This expanded and revised edition is an invaluable resource for those diagnosed with BPD and their family, friends, and colleagues, as well as professionals and students in the field, and the practical tools and advice are easy to understand and use in your day-to-day interactions with the borderline individuals in your life.

Check out more information about this book →

The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie

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.

This gentle and profound collection of 365 meditations reminds us that letting go is a daily practice that sets everything free, from the author of Codependent No More. This cherished work by Melody Beattie was written for those on a journey of recovery and healing, a companion to her classic, Codependent No More.

“It was the daily journey that I wanted to write about. Of the many healing behaviors I’ve learned to practice, letting go—in all its shapes and forms—is the most influential, profound, and life altering.”

Check out more information about this book →