This is a reading/blogging challenge put on by Renay over at Bottle of Shine. Basically, people list ten books they love, and/or go pick out three books to read from other people’s lists, and then review the ones they read.

Like most blog challenges, the benefits are that we get to discover new blogs, meet new people, have our blogs discovered by new people, get some writing inspiration, and in this case, read some awesome new-to-us books.

So, after much thought I came up with ten books that I LOVE that are in some way connected to this blog’s theme: abuse, addiction, and recovery. I think this list reflects how that theme plays out in real life: they’re about learning how we work inside, how the abuse in the world and in most of our families affects us on a very practical and everyday level, and how to make our lives freaking AWESOME. That last part, pretty much, is the core, the essence, and the damn point. In fact, I guess if I thought there was a question about “why we are all here anyway,” that would be my answer: to understand and love ourselves and each other (but especially ourselves) in order to make our lives freaking AWESOME, heLLO.

I highly, highly recommend reading each of these anyway. Obviously, if you have I would love to hear about it, and if you have reviewed them somewhere (including in one disgruntled or excited sentence in your blog) I will be thrilled to link thereforunto.

1. Repressed Memories: A Journey To Recovery From Sexual Abuse, by Renee Fredrickson
I’ve written about this book before, and I will probably write about it again. The very nature of repressed memories means that we can’t just assume we don’t have any. Everyone should learn about what they are, how they work, why people repress things, what indicates that someone has repressed memories, how to distinguish between memories and fears, and (my favorite part, maybe) how dysfunctional families work and how people’s roles in them affect the rest of their lives. It’s just an incredibly well-informed and information-packed book for something that looks so tiny!

2. Sensual Living, by Claire Lloyd
Not about abuse, but a great help to me in my recovery. Sensual Living is about the tactile, beautiful, sensual delights of the objects around us, with a specific aim of showing readers how to make their surroundings more enjoyable to each of the five physical senses. It’s very calming and nurturing to read, and even more so to live. From a survivor standpoint, it’s a wonderful tool to use in overturning the deprivation we often bring to our living environments without realizing it.

3. Wishcraft: How To Get What You REALLY Want, by Barbara Sher and Annie Gottlieb
This book is fucking brilliant. It’s divided into two portions: the first part helps the reader explore what they always wanted to do, what their passions are, and especially what interests and talents they have smothered because of, basically, abuse, or for any reason at all. It explains very clearly that (and how) we are each born geniuses, and how that potential gets smooshed away inside many of us. The second and I think part is about getting what we want. She is incredibly creative in this. My favorite angle is that we often don’t have to wait to become rich or famous or work for years to become actors or pilots or whatever our dreams are; we can figure out what we actually want from that goal (to travel, to be admired, to perform, etc.) and see what ways there are of getting that sooner. And then she outlines how to do even that. She’s just merciless in breaking down exactly how to do it every step of the way, which is my favorite kind of writing.

4. Facing Codependency, by Pia Mellody, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller
I admit it: I haven’t read much of this. I’m familiar with it, though, and I love it from afar. I love, especially, the way that they explain very clearly how abuse causes codependency, and its relation to other addictions, and what it is. These are really important points that should be taught in the most basic psychology classes, which instead many therapists and other mental health professionals are absolutely clueless about. And I love books like this that break down a complicated subject into a series of often mind-blowing yet simple links.

5. At The Speed of Life: A New Approach to Personal Change Through Body-Centered Therapy, by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks
This book changed my life. How often do I get to say that? Well, every time I mention this book, anyway, so I guess as often as I want! It’s written by a husband-and-wife team of somatic therapists, aimed at other therapists but with plenty of tools and stories for lay readers – and I have to admit that I love learning about how professionals in any profession think and what they know that we aren’t supposed to. The basic subject matter here is how to recognize when memories and emotions are trapped in our bodies, and how to (safely) “get them out.” To that end, they’ve filled the book with fantastic breathing techniques, ways to explore the feelings in our bodies, detailed explanations of verbal and physical “flags” that signal repressed feelings and memories… it’s just crammed with helpful stuff that everyone can use.

6. Double Vision: A Travelogue of Recovery from Ritual Abuse, by Anna Richardson
I sort of think this should go at the very top, “no particular order” or not. This book is gorgeously written, magnificently clear and full of hope and beauty and recovery rising from the chaotic wreckage of addiction and ritual abuse. Abuse writing is one of those genres where books sometimes seem to get published more because there’s a need for books about abuse than because there’s a need for that particular book; Double Vision, I think uniquely, could fit on any list of well-crafted, luminous writing in or outside of its genre. It’s about humanity and pain and joy and growth, in a way that transcends any concern of whether a particular reader will identify with the specific subject matter.

7. Workaholics Anonymous Book of Recovery
This might be my favorite book-to-do-with-twelve-step-stuff. It has lots of personal stories, different experiences with and tools for working the steps around work issues (and just in general) and a TON of other helpful tools. Every time I open it I learn something new about having fun, about balancing work and the rest of life, about how work issues can play out in any area of my life, or just about myself personally. Do I have to point out that work issues are basically perfectionism, codependence, and shame, that those three things are basically the same anyway, and that that all comes from abuse? So information like this is vital. And who can resist an approach to it that often boils down to “recovery is about joy and fun”?

8. When Society Becomes an Addict, by Anne Wilson Schaef
Even though, as I’ve said, I think Schaef missed the crucial question of WHY addiction is the way it is (that is, that the signs of addiction are also the effects of abuse), she wrote some intense and explosive stuff about it twenty-plus years ago. If you want a dead-on look at how addicts (abuse survivors) behave, how that looks when it isn’t about drugs or alcohol, and how it looks when it’s on the huge group or governmental level, check this out. If you want a dead-on look at how abuse affects people’s lives and why it doesn’t really help in the long term to get to “it doesn’t bother me anymore that I was abused” and then sell yourself short by taking off (as many therapists suggest their clients should do), likewise, check this out. (Or, more felicitously: if you want to get a good idea of what the effects are that we all get to deal with and see a little bit of how great and unimaginably different life is without them, read this book.)

9. To Be Healed By The Earth, by Warren Grossman
I really like books on alternative healing – really far-out (for us now anyway), wacky, hippie-sounding, energy-work alternative healing – written by people with serious medical degrees and decades of mainstream medical practice. Not only is it refreshing, but it often means the information is studied more carefully because they’re used to thinking analytically and applying hardcore principles of science and logic to what they do. At least, that’s the case with this book. It’s extremely practical, it doesn’t expect the reader to believe a word of it unless it works for them, and it is super-clear at every point about where it is coming from and what to do to see if it works for you. The basic premise is that spending time with nature helps us heal and feel more grounded and energized; I suppose that doesn’t sound very radical, but having a simple system of meditations and ways of lying or sitting or standing with trees and the ground, and talking about how this brought him back from death’s door, is both radical and wildly helpful to anyone recovering from anything, whether it’s physical or psychological – and of course, almost everything is both.

10. One Day My Soul Just Opened Up: 40 Days and 40 Nights Toward Spiritual Strength and Personal Growth, by Iyanla Vanzant
Spirituality is a huge component of recovery from abuse. Particularly when we are little, our abusers often seem like the mainstream image of “God”: they’re these huge creatures who seem to end up around where the sky is, from whence all food and shelter and safety and love come – and anger and judgment and abandonment and tragedy. Maybe the most important part of recovery is learning to separate our abusers from a loving source of guidance, whether we think of that as a God or Goddess or our intuition or the universe or love or some other wild thing. Because until then, our decisions are all informed at least partly by the burden of shame from the abuse, the crazy voices in our heads telling us that we don’t know what we are doing or that we need to be perfect or that we always fuck up or that something terrible will happen if we get another job/relationship/whatever.

To Be Healed By The Earth is one way to explore that spiritual area; twelve-step programs offer another space in which people often explore how all this plays out for them; One Day My Soul Just Opened Up is a third option. It is laid out as a series of daily readings, meditations, and writing exercises that explore issues just like this and many more. It’s basically a deep exploration of our relationships with spirituality and ourselves and others, done in about 20-30 minutes a day for a couple of months. (Plus, afterwards you have all this writing and highlighting and wild inspired or angry scribbling to look back at and see how far you have come!)

I learned to read when I was two or three. There are family stories about this: that I taught myself to read. That when I was two – and a tiny child for two, at that – my mother brought me to the post office and I freaked everyone out by pointing at the door and reading, “Exit.” That by three, I was reading sentences (and after that there was no stopping me). I don’t think I taught myself to read exactly. I don’t know what happened; apparently I just sucked it in through my pores. I’ve met a lot of other people who had the same experience.

You know who had a different experience? My brother. I remember being totally baffled because he didn’t want to read. He didn’t like reading. He struggled with learning to read until he was seven or eight, and resisted it tremendously because of that struggle.

My son struggled too. It was obvious to me that he was struggling because he carried so much shame and fear around reading. He had suffered through a lot of emotional abuse from his birth family (and, for a while, from a simultaneously high-pressure and neglectful preschool with a lot of violent bullying) and he couldn’t bear the pressure of reading, the fear that if he couldn’t read a word it meant he was stupid. Imagine (if you’ve never experienced that) pushing through that fear anew with almost every word on the page: wanting to try it, thinking you can get it, and then the tidal wave of fear telling you every horrible thing you’ll prove if you “mess up,” and the drowning shame of not being able to try and feeling that you’ve proven each of those fears right. With each fucking word.

I don’t know if that’s anything like what my brother experienced. The terrible thing, of course, is that besides all the emotional and performance pressure I know both of them experienced, there stands the truth that they were perfectly fine where they were. Seven or eight is a totally reasonable, healthy age, developmentally, for children to learn to read. I could see that without all the intense emotional struggles from the abuse, my son could have learned to read many years before; he was nearly there when he was three, but each hop and leap forward resulted in tremendous fear for years. But there was nothing for him to fear; he was fine where he was. It’s just that he had already been taught the exact opposite of that truth.

Both of them are enthusiastic readers and incredible writers, now, one at 27 and one at 10 years old. Which is a huge relief to me, because when I was growing up, books were my salvation, and I wanted my son to be able to have that too.

She Reads Books wrote, last night, about the question of why we read. There are a million reasons, of course, for any reader. But I think there are also reasons particularly related to abuse.

When I was growing up, were my salvation. I read to escape, as one commenter over there said. It was easy dissociation. I didn’t have to be where I was, or who I was; I could dive into a book and immediately feel total peace being somewhere else. There’s even a snippet of home movie somewhere that shows me reading while watching TV. (What? It was commercials!)

I often got in trouble with my friends, in fifth grade or so, for reading during lunch. They would protest that if I didn’t want to hang out with them I shouldn’t be sitting with them. But as far as I was concerned, reading with my friends, maybe keeping half an ear on the discussion, was a social activity. I got in trouble with strangers, too; the brats from the other fifth grade class would follow me around during recess and tease me as I strolled through the playground, reading a book. They were more than entertainment, relaxation, friends, and transportation; they were my oxygen mask.

But of course, it wasn’t just a matter of escape for escape’s sake. Books might have been portable escape hatches, but they also gave me a place to escape to. They taught me about ways of living and acting that I could never have imagined, and reassured me that I wasn’t alone. I checked out books like The Saturdays a million times over, and The Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch: books that told me about kids with more power and more peace in their lives. (Triad_Serpent’s entry about the witch book cracks me up because I had the same experience: that book had a lot to do in drawing me to Paganism later, or maybe I was just drawn to it for the same reasons I was drawn to Paganism.)

And I went back over and over to another one, Don’t Hurt Laurie!, about a kid whose mother screams at her and physically abuses her. It’s a terrifyingly real story, even if it has a kind of happy ending. I felt compelled to reread it, even though it scared me and had – I told myself – no bearing on my life. It’s interesting that I even felt a need to argue that. I didn’t pick up books about castles and dragons and say “Of course, this has no bearing on my life, but I might like it anyway.” But Don’t Hurt Laurie! struck so close to home that it ruffled my denial a little, made me put up my defenses and argue with it a bit before rereading.

The truth was, it fed me more deeply than the other books could. It told me that I wasn’t alone, and that someday it would be okay to acknowledge the kind of rage and violence that bubbled beneath the surface of our family and occasionally burst out. I wasn’t willing to acknowledge my memories or feelings yet; this book could hold them for me in a way, serve as a reassuring marker while I went on with my life. Plus, it let me tell myself that somebody had things worse than I did – a hilarious myth that a lot of abuse survivors tell ourselves because we don’t want to fully acknowledge what it was like to experience our own abuse. We can always find someone else who we think had worse experiences, so that we can “comfortably” minimize our own.

So, I read for escape, but mainly for support. Books supported me by telling me my own scary and happy stories and showing me healthy relationships, healthy behavior, healthy choices. They provided reassuring consistency: they would always be the same, and anything I missed the first time or wanted to reexperience would always be there again. Plus, it seemed like they could teach me just about anything I wanted to know, if I looked for the right book. They offered me everything, even a space for self-expression when I grew older and found that now some of the books I wanted to read hadn’t been written yet. Which brings us to this blog.

I guess that I still read for similar reasons, except that I no longer have to escape in a bad way – now I can read just to relax and have fun. I read to learn, to taste exciting new possibilities, to laugh, to enjoy myself, and sometimes, to revisit who I was.

What about you? Why do you read?

FlyLady is Marla Cilley, the founder of a website – or the center of a movement – that helps people all over the world release the chaos in their lives.

FlyLady began as her username on another website for “Sidetracked Home Executives.” SHEs In Touch began in 1977 with two sisters, Pam Young and Peggy Jones, who created a system using index cards and the philosophy that they had to change their thinking before they could organize their lives. They wrote books about it and taught others, and with the advent of the Internet began a community space where people could share what worked for them.

“The mind has no power without the heart. You can decide to do something, but if your heart doesn’t agree, you will not do what you decided to do…. Your heart will be in it when you can shift your perception from ‘I have to get organized,’ to ‘I get to be organized.’” – Pam and Peggy

Marla chose the name FlyLady because of her love for fly fishing. She learned and grew on Pam and Peggy’s discussion forums, and in 1999 she started an email discussion list for a few people who liked what she had to say and wanted her to mentor them. FlyLadyMentors@yahoogroups.com grew into a website – flylady.net – and, like the original SHEs website, gave birth to a variety of books and tools that people could use to organize their everyday lives.

Without talking directly about abuse, FlyLady and SHEs In Touch draw many of us who experience chaos and struggle with self-care as a result of abuse. What makes FlyLady particularly different from the scores of other organizational systems, and particularly useful to survivors, is that her writing is still geared to the needs of survivors. The more than 400,000 members (at this writing) of FlyLady’s email list get daily emails with one household chore to do for no more than fifteen minutes, in a different room each week. They get information about how to work gently and sanely, a little bit at a time, to get a clean house. They learn how to create plans for each day and how to pass their new skills down to their children. But they also learn to release resentment of partners and children who don’t do their share, to be gentle with themselves, to put their own needs first in life instead of trying to fix everything and everyone around them, to slowly create structure in their lives and to work toward, as FlyLady puts it, “Finally Loving Yourself.” Moreover, many “FlyBabies” begin to understand the roots of their dysfunction as they share and read about the parents who neglected their children’s needs or who were hypercritical, demanding impossible perfection and denying their children emotional support.

Besides FlyLady’s extensive website, funny and informative emails, and entertaining challenges, and the guidance from the SHEs bulletin board and website, these women have expanded even more in recent years. Pam created a website, The Brat Factor, for getting the inner child involved in our adult work. She realized that her neglected younger self was sabotaging her rational intellectual goals and reasoned that “If it’s not fun, it won’t get done!”

Certified nutritionist Leanne Ely, author of several syndicated columns about menu planning and health, began working with FlyLady to educate her members about food. Her own website, Saving Dinner, sells subscriptions to weekly mailings with dinner menus and grocery lists. Leanne and Marla co-wrote Body Clutter, which applied their collective wisdom about gentle self-care, self-love, and health to help readers examine their own relationships with food and their bodies. FlyLady’s email list often includes encouragement to develop a new healthy habit each month such as drinking more water or trying new fun ways of moving each day.

There are very few resources out there that manage to fight codependency and the cycle of abuse without challenging people by calling them that. FlyLady’s writings incorporate a lot of basic principles of recovery in very accessible ways. No matter what state our homes and lives are in, just about everyone can learn something from these folks.

“It doesn’t really matter what kind of a mess you are in at this moment, there is way out of it and there is something within you that knows that is true. What’s interesting about the messes we get ourselves into is that there are as many ways to get out of them as the unique ways we get into them. Each mess is completely individual to the one in it. Right now you could have gotten yourself into a difficult marriage or you’re scared spitless of your mail, because your finances are dangling by the available credit on one last piece of plastic. Your home could be a mess from one end to the other and you don’t know whether to start with cleaning out the garage or the master bathroom. You might be overweight, out of shape or unemployed. Maybe you are a victim of all of the above. Whatever your mess it is ultimately going to be up to you to climb out, but we can help.”
- Pam and Peggy

“You are the heart of your home. You create a climate in your home whether it’s one of love or hate, peace or chaos, joy or sorrow, beauty or ugliness, and the choices and combinations go on into infinity.” It seems as if we’ve used the term “heart of your home” forever. Now we want you to consider this thought: What if, instead of you being the heart of your home, your home was the symbol for your heart? If your home is a symbol for your heart, how is your heart doing? Is it broken? Is it in need of repair? Are the arteries (hallways and staircases) clogged? Are the chambers able to serve the functions they were created to serve so that you and your family can thrive? Is the kitchen clean and stocked with healthy food? Is your living room a place where family and friends can mingle and feel your love?” – FlyLady

Thirteen ways to help children who are being abused

1. Explore any and all abuse you have experienced, how it has affected you, and how to deal with it, so that you can share what has worked for you. There are great books, therapists, and 12-step programs that help with this, mentioned all over this site.
2. Learn as much as you can about the effects of abuse so that you can recognize abuse and help them understand how abuse works. There are also a lot of articles here about that!
3. Learn as much as you can about how to heal the effects of abuse so that you can guide them to helpful resources and new coping skills. Another specialty of this website.
4. Get support for yourself in dealing with the emotions and logistics of supporting kids. It can be a very confusing and triggering process. You may have to deal with friends or co-workers who don’t think you should be reporting abuse or talking to children about abuse, or parents who are angry that their abuse has been exposed. Or you may experience fear (warranted or unwarranted) that this will happen, or fear that just talking to the child about abuse will traumatize them. Getting support from a therapist, wise friends, or people who have been through this themselves, can help you deal with these issues and stay balanced.
5. Learn about your local department of CPS (child protective services, or whatever agency is supposed to intervene in abuse cases in your area) so that you know how they are likely to respond to reports: overreact, provide helpful resources, ignore all reports about children who aren’t actually tied to a pile of lit dynamite at the time, et cetera. Even if they are likely to ignore you because they are understaffed, you are not a mandatory reporter, or your reports seem too vague, making a report to CPS will at least start (or continue) a paper trail that will make later reports more believable – or give the child some “proof” to investigate when they are an adult questioning how they were treated.
6. Find out who is a mandatory reporter where you live. Some places have no mandatory reporting laws; in others (like Maryland), every adult is required to report any abuse that they suspect is happening. It’s good to know whether you are, what kind of abuse people are required to report (for example, only sexual abuse, or only if they know the name of the abuser), and what the process is. Because even if you are not a mandatory reporter, you can find out what happens when a report is made – and you can hold mandatory reporters accountable if you think they are not reporting abuse. (Many teachers and other staff members of schools, for example, don’t make reports for a number of reasons: they don’t get any training in what to report and how, they are actively (and illegally) dissuaded from reporting parents for fear the school will lose money, they are afraid of getting in trouble, they don’t recognize abuse, they are afraid of accidentally getting the child in trouble….)
7. Go through foster parent training so that you can learn about how abuse specifically affects children and what local resources they recommend. (For example, it can interrupt the cognitive process of learning how to read and delay it quite a bit – but then again, it may not.) In many places, the county foster agencies are woefully underfunded and dysfunctional, and the slack is taken up by private agencies; it’s a good idea to call around and ask different agencies what kind of training they provide, what it involves, how long it takes, and whether you can do it if you are not certain you want to foster a child.
8. Go through foster parent training, get certified, and provide short- or long-term care for children who are removed from their abusive homes. This can be tremendously rewarding. If you are interested in adopting children, I think that foster-to-adopt is in many ways the best option: you get good training in supporting the child, you have access to great resources for the kid, and you and the child get financial support (and, ideally, a community of support as well).
9. Talk to children about what abuse is, some of the things that qualify as abuse, and particularly, that it is not okay to yell at them, hit them, et cetera. I find it helpful to define abuse as things people do to you that are Not Okay, and give examples like hitting, biting, and bullying – if possible, examples that include both “normal” things that happen to kids at school and things that you know or think are happening to them at home.
10. Ask them about abuse that you suspect is occurring. Let them know that it’s okay not to tell you about it, and that you will be there if they want to talk about it later. If they deny abuse that you know or are pretty sure is happening to them, it’s okay to let them know that you still believe it’s happening, or to tell them that it’s okay to say it’s not happening and that you’ll keep asking. I know it sounds weird and pushy, but for many survivors I know it’s some of the best support they got when they were growing up.
11. Volunteer for, or donate money or wish list items to, organizations that help children. All child-related organizations are good for this (with possible individual exceptions). I mean, you could support a library and be helping children who use books to escape their abuse. You could even donate books which help children deal with abuse. There are also more abuse-specific organizations, such as Court-Appointed Special Advocates for children (warning: that website talks!) and the United Nations Children’s Fund.
12. Speak up when you see someone being abused. Of course, we’ve already talked a little about this recently. There are a wide range of ways to do this: you can say something to the child afterward; you can say something to the parent at the time; you can ask if they need help or offer some kind of support to a parent in meltdown; you can call the police and/or CPS; if it’s in a store, you can talk to store management, security, or customer service. Learning to do this is a process; we’ll talk about that here soon. For the moment, know that it is also okay to feel unable to do anything. You are not that child’s savior, and this is not the only time you or someone else will be able to do something that helps them.
13. Learn about the laws in your area – what they say about abuse, where they need to be changed or expanded, who is working on that, what upcoming bills you might have that are related to child abuse…. For example, in California (and plenty of other places) the penalties for sexually abusing your own child are much lighter than for sexually abusing an unrelated child, and the definition of sexual abuse is extremely narrow.

thursday thirteen