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Growing up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional home
After I wrote about growing up in an alcoholic family, I got a lot of requests for additional reading suggestions. We are fortunate that there are many helpful books for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) on healing codependency, trauma, and relationship challenges. Below are some of my reading suggestions for adults who were impacted by their parent’s alcoholism.
Most of these books are also useful if you experienced other types of childhood trauma or family dysfunction such as witnessing domestic violence, a parent with a mental health problem or addiction (substances, gambling), child abuse, or childhood emotional neglect.
Books for Adult Children of Alcoholics
Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Woititz and Recovery: A Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics by Gravitz and Bowden are my go-to resources for understanding the family disease of alcoholism and specifically how it impacts children into adulthood. These books are affirming and eye-opening if you are just connecting the dots between your current struggles and your childhood experiences with an alcoholic parent.
While only some ACOAs experienced physical abuse or physical neglect as children, it’s likely that all ACOAs experienced at least some level of emotional neglect. In Running on Empty, Jonice Webb explains that emotional neglect refers to the lack of emotional attunement, connection, and responsiveness from parents resulting in feeling disconnected and flawed.
Another helpful book for adult children of alcoholics is Melody Beattie’s classic book Codependent No More. This is another book that I return to over and over again. It offers such an insightful and comprehensive look at understanding and changing our codependent behaviors that it has stood the test of time.
I also highly recommend Grandchildren of Alcoholics: Another Generation of Codependency by Ann W. Smith. Even if you aren’t the grandchild of an alcoholic or addict, this is an important look at the generational impact of codependency and addiction. I encourage you to read it if you notice codependency in yourself and your parents, if you’re not sure where your codependency originated, or you feel like something was off or never talked about in your family. Unfortunately, Grandchildren of Alcoholics is out of print, but as as of the writing of this article, used copies were available on Amazon.
Books about Trauma and PTSD
Unfortunately, ACOAs often experienced trauma in childhood. According to the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” And more than half of American adults have experienced at least one traumatic event.
Some helpful books for adult child of alcoholics who’ve experienced trauma are: The Body Keeps Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine, and Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker.
Marriage/Intimate Relationships
Do you feel like you’re stuck in the same relationship patterns – the same arguments, choosing the same kind of partners, or struggling to connect and trust?
Many of us intentionally set out to marry someone that we believe is different from our own parents. And yet we’re baffled years later to find that our partner seems to have all of our parents’ worst traits!
In Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix helps us understand how our childhood wounds impact our choice of partners and how our dysfunctional relationship patterns get repeated in our adult intimate relationships.
According to Hendrix, we recreate patterns from our childhood with our intimate partners until we learn to heal and get our needs met in healthy ways. I highly recommend this book if you’re feeling stuck in your marriage or have had a series of unfulfilling relationships.
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller looks at intimate relationships from an attachment perspective. The basic premise is that we attach to our parents as infants according to how our needs are met and in adulthood we interact with intimate partners using the same attachment style.
When you understand whether you have a secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment style, you can learn to create healthier relationships. This book can also help you shed new light on your relationship patterns and understand yourself and your own needs better.
Assertiveness
Many ACOAs have a hard time identifying what they want and need and have an even harder time asking for it. The Assertiveness Guide for Women by Julie Hanks is a practical guide to help women recognize that their feelings and needs are valid. We’re afraid that speaking up will make us seem difficult or needy, but communicating our needs and opinions actually improves relationships!
Boundaries
There tends to be a lack of boundaries in alcoholic families. This can include anything from inconsistent rules, to a lack of privacy, to unwanted physical touching. Many ACOAs became parentified, taking on caregiving roles to their parents or siblings at an early age. Caretaking and people-pleasing are ways we feel valued and needed, and we’re afraid to set boundaries because we think they’ll lead to conflict or being abandoned or rejected.
The Better Boundaries Workbook is a comprehensive tool for learning and practicing boundary-setting skills. It’s full of practical exercises to help you overcome feelings of guilt, use assertive communication, and set and maintain boundaries in all areas of your life.
Do you need help phrasing your boundaries so they’re clear and kind?
Get a complete set of boundary scripts to help you find just the right words.
Parenting
Just as we take our dysfunctional relationship patterns into our intimate relationships, we also take them into our parenting. As you’d expect, having a dysfunctional model of parenting, makes it hard to know what a healthy parent-child relationship looks like or what age-appropriate expectations are or how to handle an acting-out child without losing your sanity.
Parenting from the Inside Out by Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell will help you understand your own history, including attachment and brain development, so that you can be the parent you want to be. Siegel has written several other parenting books, all with excellent reviews, that are probably worth checking-out as well.
Self-Acceptance
I consider the next two books must-reads for almost everyone. Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection (or any of her subsequent books) get to the core of our struggles with worthiness, perfectionism, shame, and ultimately the courage to be our true selves. Brown’s books are a pleasure to read — full of real-life stories and humor, in addition to her research.
And Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff introduced me to the simple, yet revolutionary, concept of self-compassion. The ability to be kind to ourselves when we’re struggling is a fundamental piece of healing any emotional wound, in my opinion.
Self-compassion doesn’t come naturally to many of us, perhaps because no one modeled self-compassion or let us know that our feelings and needs matter. Neff provides a host of exercise that are helpful in developing the skills for self-compassion.
Despite being a therapist and a personal-development junkie, there are many more books that I have yet to read. If you’ve read something amazing that you’d like to recommend, please leave it in the comments so others can benefit.
©2017 Sharon Martin. All rights reserved.
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Dr. Sharon Martin
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW is a psychotherapist and writer specializing in codependency recovery. For the past 25 years, she’s been helping perfectionists and people-pleasers overcome self-doubt and shame, embrace their imperfections, and learn to set boundaries. Dr. Martin writes the popular blog Conquering Codependency for Psychology Today and is the author of The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism and The Better Boundaries Workbook.
My experience of emotional abuse came from the suicide of my parents my father when I was 8, my mother when I was 12. This was due to alcohol and bankruptcy. I am a psychiatric nurse therapist and have written a novel about a young woman who kills her alcoholic mother. I wrote it to try to convey the misery of alcoholism to children. My book is called ‘ PARADISE LOST ‘By Mollie Bach. I think your website is brilliant. I wish we could have a conversation.
Thanks a lot Sharon
Am a practicing psychiatrist in India. Yet I read all your articles as an individual. It benefits a lot to me and my clients. I dream that you and your team visit India and conduct some programs on relationships, ACOA.
Good day
Viru
I’m so glad it’s helpful and thank you for sharing it in India!
Hello Ms. Martin,
Thank you for sharing and caring about codependents. Over the years, I knew that something was wrong with me but did not know where to start, especially having been married 3 times to the same type of men(narcissists).
I am grateful for the information especially the notes on how to heal yourself. I look forward to reading more from you. I would purchase those suggested books too. Thanks again.
I, too, am grateful to have stumbled upon this blog while researching ACOAs- I had (we’re not alcoholic!) grandparents, too… my gran goes to dialysis 3X a week and drinks Manhattans every night- still at 86! I’ll never understand it… We buried my mom almost 2 years ago to the day due to booze. Eek, all i meant to post was that archive.org is a wonderful resource for out of print books(to name just one feature) and it has Ann Smith’s Grandchildren of Alcoholics. I have so many books to read… And so much healing to do. I also recommend postsscret.com….Good luck everyone.
your articles are very helpful to me. Thank you for your passion and sharing this. Namaste.