Well, I guess it’s obvious that abuse, addiction, and recovery is my favorite social issue. It sounds like three things, but it’s really all one smooth loop: being abused, acting that abuse out on ourselves, and learning to love ourselves and end that cycle.

This week’s Weekly Geeks topic is to pick our favorite social issue and list books that we’d like to read about it. So I thought I’d combine it with Thursday Thirteen and come up with thirteen of them.

I felt sort of resistant at first. I want to be done reading books about abuse and recovery. I want to know everything and be an authority and be the one writing stuff that blows people’s minds. And for some reason, I think that those are mutually exclusive. How silly is that?

I tend to feel resistance to reading books about abuse, no matter how interesting they sound, for what I think are pretty common reasons. They seem scary – another case of associating talking about trauma with the trauma itself. And another case of the common problem many abuse survivors have of being afraid of our feelings. Like if I read a book about abuse, instead of feeling fascinated and validated, I’ll be overwhelmed by all the feelings I experienced while being abused, and drown in it.

And then, too, I have more than five years of recovery under my belt and I feel frustrated and bored by some books, the ones that just go over the same basic ideas
about abuse and recovery (you are not alone, make a safe place for yourself, punch a pillow, blah blah blah) or worse, parrot the same misconceptions (falsities like it’s always men abusing girls, very few boys are sexually abused, you can’t trust recovered memories, blah blah crazypants).

But as I keep rejecting the idea of writing about abuse-related books I haven’t read this week, the universe has kept on throwing them at me. It seems like every website I go to or email I open is saying “Remember this book you set aside to look at? Remember this wish list you made at Powell’s?” So I might as well face it: there are still books that I can get delight and clarity from on this subject. Damnit.

In no particular order:

1. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

This one is a classic. Jennifer Freyd is an amazing psychologist, who took the even more amazing step of speaking out about her parents’ abuse and writing this book which for once and for all answers the question of “why would anyone forget such a huge traumatic memorable experience?” Even when her parents threw a fit and founded the idiotic False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

2. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment by Babette Rothschild

This came up when I searched for Betrayal Trauma. It looked interesting, so I clicked through and saw that readers have said it “thoroughly explains the importance of “body memories” in trauma processing and discusses many ways in which to help clients both elicit and integrate dysfunctionally stored cellular memories,” and that “After more than 20 years treating trauma survivors I all too rarely find a new book from which I really learn something that I can immediately apply to my work. This is such a book.” Sounds good to me!

3. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences by Peter Levine

I saw this book at Black Oak Books a while ago and really wanted to get it. (And Diesel Books too, come to think of it.) It looks very motivational and peppy, all about what awesome mad recovery skillz abuse survivors have to share with the world and what awesome things we can learn from animals about our own healing. Of course, I could be wrong, since I haven’t read it. It also looked like a fairly simple read, which is nice next to books with words like “psychophysiology” in the name.

4. A Young Person’s Guide to the 12 Steps by Stephen Roos

Actually I want to read this more for research because I am writing a guide to the 12 steps for kids. I suspect that mine is more for the 8-12 range, and I know that this one is aimed at teens because I’ve flipped through it in the store. But the steps have amazingly good structure and tools for dealing with the effects of abuse, and it’s always interesting to hear a new perspective on them. Plus, only 128 pages!

5. Clinician’s Guide to the 12 Step Principles by Marvin Seppala

One reviewer wrote, “The most interesting thing about this book is the unapologetic way in which the critical element of spirituality is addressed. For too long sprirituality has been a taboo subject in the cooly rational world of medical education. This book emphasizes that spirituality is the foundation upon which recovery from addictive illness is built one day at a time.” I’d love to see how they explain that to doctors and therapists.

Mainly, I think this sounds wicked interesting because I’ve worked in the recovery field for a while and I am constantly flabbergasted by how many people doing counseling for alcoholism, or running rehab centers or whatever, have no understanding of 12-step programs – even while they refer people out constantly to the few that they know about.It often seems to be more like “Well, I know you need this and these people will be able to explain why.” One of my goals is to educate people in the field about how they and their clients can benefit from the tools and information in 12-step programs, what the programs actually involve and how it all ties together holistically. So I guess I should read this book, huh!

6. The Mother I Carry: A Memoir of Healing from Emotional Abuse by Louise Wisechild

I read another book of hers, The Obsidian Mirror: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse, and really enjoyed her clarity about what was going on with her and her explanation of what she went through on this journey. Little did I know it was a sequel! (No, wait… it’s possible that THIS is the sequel. I guess I’ll have to read them to find out!) The Obsidian Mirror has a better first sentence: “Since it is inappropriate to discuss religion, I will begin there.” But both of them look funny, bold, and direct as hell, which are things I look for in personal writing about abuse.

7. Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Randi Kreger

I checked this out of the library and then stalled on reading it for pretty much all the self-faking-out reasons described above. Plus, I think that on some level, now that I have no one in my life with BPD, I want to avoid reading about it too – as if ignorance protects me! It is, in fact, exactly the opposite that is the case. The author has put together a lot of really helpful and clear information about borderline personality disorder and its effects at http://bpdcentral.com, which definitely makes me want to read the book more!

8. Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

My mother’s not borderline, but I still found this book helpful even simply when flipping through it in the store – especially in its descriptions of different “types” of borderlines like the Queen, the Waif, the Witch, and the Hermit. It really helped me identify when people in my life were undiagnosed (as far as I knew) borderlines, and make different choices around them. I’d like to read it all the way through!

(The link to abuse, for new readers, is that untreated BPD often leads people to become extremely abusive, and that borderline personality disorder is very much caused by abuse and neglect.)

9. I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold Kreisman

I want to read this because I have a copy and therefore I hope it will be good and useful… but I have my doubts. One review ended by remarking, out of nowhere, that “This clinically written primer leaves the reader with the impression that BPD syndrome is a catchall category.” Others commented on the fact that it leaves borderlines feeling hopeless because it was written before people knew about medication that could help – but surely by 1991 they knew about therapies that could help? and the book’s own description seems to claim that it will show people how to cope with and treat it. Sounds like it was groundbreaking at the time, when there were no other books on BPD, but hasn’t stood up well or been updated since. On the other hand, a lot of non-BPD readers said they found it very helpful in learning how to interact with borderline folks, and praised it to the heavens.

10. Sometimes I Act Crazy: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder, also by Jerold Kreisman

This is pitched as a follow-up book, published 15 years later. It got much better reviews; people who are borderline and people who love people who are borderline say that the anecdotes and personal stories in it really helped them identify with and understand the disease better. I’d like to read it because my main experience with BPD is as the victim of people who had it and had not begun healing from it, and it would be great to be able to understand the BPD experience from a compassionate place and have a better understanding of what helps with it.

11. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers

Another book I have and have not read. I love history, I love old-timey writing, and I love hearing about the history of the recovery movement; why have I not read this yet? Maybe because it was buried under a stack of magazines.

12. Bluebird : Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin Ross

I always think that the title totally plays into those FMSF lunatics who want us to believe that therapists are creating repressed memories and multiple systems. Specifically, that all cases of either are caused by therapists. Which is not true at all. Instead, Bluebird is an intensively researched book about government ritual abuse, using primary source documentation (that is, documents that come from the people who were doing this stuff, generally via the Freedom of Information Act) to expose and explain gruesome attempts at mind control by different governments. One reader adds that “Ross has an entire diagram of the MK-ULTRA projects and sub-projects, where they were, who ran them and where the funding came from,” which provides some idea of how detailed he is in his writing about these things and how much time he spends connecting the dots. I’ve read some of it; not nearly enough, but it inspired me to the level of research I used when writing about Project Monarch/MK-ULTRA myself.

13. The Addictive Organization: Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate Sick Organizations, by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel

I have this at home, borrowed from someone, and I have to say, I flipped through it and I was disappointed. It’s a follow-up to When Society Becomes an Addict,
which of course I’ve written about here and here, but it looks much drier – written in more academic language, and, in my edition at least, also in much smaller print! But it is supposed to talk about the same principles and how they play out in organizati ons, which is important for anyone who works anywhere or does activist work… so I’m hoping that giving it an honest try will pay off.

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