Self-Help

Now in paperback—the definitive history of how the"Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous was written, edited, and finally brought to press.

It has been over forty years since Ernie Kurtz wrote Not-God, the last truly professional treatment of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. While many books dealing with A.A. history have been written since then, Writing the Big Book is the first to bring that same kind of exhaustive research, scholarly discipline, and informed insight to the subject.

Schaberg’s book—telling a detailed story that begins in October of 1937 (when a book was first proposed) and ends in April of 1939 (when Alcoholics Anonymous was published)—is based primarily on the wealth of 1930s documents currently preserved in several A.A. archives. Woven together into an exciting narrative, these real-time documents provide an almost week-by-week account of how the book was slowly put together. It is a story that unfolds with many unexpected turns and more than a few revealing departures from the hallowed stories so widely circulated by A.A. members in the past.

Writing the Big Book presents a robust and vivid picture of how Alcoholics Anonymous operated and grew in its earliest days along with a vast amount of previously unreported details about the cast of colorful characters who made that group so successful. Most surprising is the emergence of Bill Wilson’s right-hand man, Hank Parkhurst, as the unsung hero in this story. Without Hank there would have been no book, but his unfortunate slip back into drinking just months after it was published resulted in him being almost completely written out of the supposedly factual stories told later.

Fast paced, engaging, and contrary, Writing the Big Book will decisively change whatever you think you know about early A.A. history and the ways in which this book—so central to the worldwide growth of this important twentieth century movement of spiritual recovery—actually came into being.

An essential guide to the challenges men face in creating healthy and engaged relationships in all areas of their lives. 

"For every man who has wandered through the entanglements of love, unwilling to ask for directions, and secretly hoping for a guide, Dan Griffin offers a clear and comprehensive road map."—Terrence Real, bestselling author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression.

Every idea is presented through the lens of the "Man Rules"—the often unconscious ideas men carry with them into every relationship they have—that affect their ability to find true connection. A Man's Way through Relationships offers practical advice and inspiration for men to define, with their partners, their own sense of masculinity, and thus heighten their potential to love and be loved.

Dan Griffin excerpts interviews with men who share their innermost lives and experiences with relationships. He draws from his own life with over two decades of recovery and ten years of marriage. Readers will learn to recognize how their ideas about masculinity have shaped who they are and how they approach there relationships. 

Chances are someone you know is a sex addict (or is living with one).

Sex addiction is a growing menace that threatens all strata of our society, destroying millions of marriages, damaging reputations, contributing to suicides and in some cases prison sentences, and wasting mind-boggling amounts of money. But there is hope.

Sex addiction is treatable. Through the rigorous recovery program detailed in these pages, it is possible for sex addicts to stop all of their destructive behaviors—forever. The recovery road is long and difficult, but also very rewarding. Marriages have not only been restored, but enriched. By following the steps described in Stop Sex Addiction, addicts and their partners have found the path to freedom from sex addiction. You have taken the first steps along that path by picking up this book. The wisdom it contains will lead to real hope and true freedom. 

Milton Magness, D. Min., MA, LPC, CSAT, is the founder and director of Hope & Freedom Counseling Services in Houston, Texas. He is a licensed professional counselor and a certified sex addiction therapist.

Claudia Black's seminal relapse prevention workbook has been revised and updated!

People in recovery from addiction need to be award of the potential for setback and the range of challenges that can, and often do, lead to relapse. To assume or simply hope it will not occur is denial. A Hole in the Sidewalk supports the necessary work required for relapse prevention from all forms of addiction: alcohol and other drugs, nicotine, sex, work, spending, screen, gambling, food, and relationships.

Dr. Black provides robust tools for those who take their recovery seriously and want to maximize there knowledge and take actions to minimize the possibility of a return to active addiction. Whether or not someone has a history of relapse or wants to be proactive in their effort of avoiding potential stumbling blocks, this newly updated workbook is a major asset in their sustained recovery.

Experience the benefits of recovery through the practice of yoga.

Recovery from active addiction is a lifelong journey that can take many paths. By aligning yoga philosophy and poses with each of the Twelve Steps, Kyczy Hawk presents a physical and spiritual guide that complements and augments any twelve-step practice.

Highlighting her own yogic journey through the steps, Hawk provides an enlightened way of thinking that allows readers to investigate how they think, feel, and believe by using a new vocabulary to process traditional recovery principles.

• Current findings increasingly support yoga and mindfulness as promising complementary therapies for addictive behaviors (Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 2013).

• Provides clear and concise instructions requiring no prior knowledge and enabling people to experience the benefits of this ancient practice in the comfort and privacy of their own home.

• Key yoga terms are explained clearly and all poses are accompanied by illustrations.

• Consistent practice will lead to a more positive outlook on life and help eliminate harmful attitudes and behaviors. It can also create a balanced lifestyle, bringing greater harmony, stability, and enjoyment.

• Anyone can benefit from yoga, regardless of ability, age, belief system, or life circumstance.

Kyczy Hawk is a certified yoga instructor. She lectures on yoga and recovery throughout the Bay Area and has been a presenter at the Art of Yoga Project and Niroga Institute's Yoga Therapy teacher training. As the Success Over Addiction and Relapse (SOAR) yoga teacher specialty-training founder, she has taught yoga instruction workshops throughout the United States. She hosts a weekly yoga recovery meeting on In The Rooms and manages the Willow Glen Yoga Studio in San Jose, CA.

An active and personalized way for people in recovery to extend and strengthen their yogic investigation of the Twelve Steps.

Designed for use as a companion to Yogic Tools for Recovery, this workbook allows a person from any fellowship to document his or her progress through the Twelve Steps. In the introduction of each step, yogini Kyczy Hawk focuses on a recovery concept and breaks down its healing message, utilizing the wisdom of the yoga sutras. Then, she leads readers through a self-exploration of the yogic principles aligned with the step, providing introspective questions along with activities such as poses, visualizations, breath practices, and meditations.

By working the steps in this manner, both men and women, regardless of age and physical ability, will learn how to synthesize the artifacts and memories of addiction in a new, holistic way, leading to contentment as they find their true path.

A groundbreaking patient workbook with an emphasis on healing the whole person

An excellent tool for treatment professionals, patients, and families that provides education and exercises to help individuals navigate the process of recovery, setting the stage for deep healing and providing actionable tips for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. Those working through this resource will find the encouragement, expertise, and pragmatism they need to rediscover their true selves and find stability in a recovery-focused life.

The powerful practice of yoga, with all its diverse approaches and time-honored traditions, meets twelve-step recovery.

Those in recovery who yearn to connect more fully in the suggested "prayer and meditation" of Step Eleven will welcome this delightful book from a fresh voice in recovery literature. Kyczy Hawk's experiences of addiction and recovery make her a relatable, compassionate guide to an integrative practice that addresses the threefold aspects of addiction―body, mind, and spirit―for a new experience of recovery and of physical and spiritual health.

Finally, there is hope for millions of Americans in recovery from chronic pain and addiction who want healing without the risks posed by opioid painkillers.

With its revolutionary approach to living fully with chronic pain rather than attempting to obliterate all pain by using ever-increasing doses of addictive drugs, this revised and updated edition of Dr. Mel Pohl's award-winning book is filled with evidence-based suggestions for healing from chronic pain as a whole person, not a collection of symptoms. 

The revised and updated A Day without Pain also includes: 

• A new foreword by Claudia Black, PhD.
• New expanded discussion of the brain and how it is affected by pain and suffering 
• New vignettes to illustrate the principles of pain recovery (or pain treatment)
• New information on working with the emotional aspects of chronic pain
• Updated and most current data from LVRC chronic pain recovery program

The definitive guide to all things related to addiction and its treatments—newly revised.

Living mindfully, people in recovery can learn skills that allow them to recognize and know their own worthiness and value, empowering them to fully engage with life on life's terms in ways that are productive and meaningful to them. Former Buddhist monk John Bruna outlines the seven skills of living mindfully in recovery: values, attention, wisdom, equanimity, compassion, loving-kindness, and action.

The Essential Guidebook to Mindfulness in Recovery is a self-paced curriculum that can be integrated into any recovery program. Whether people are new to recovery or in long-term recovery, they will be able to use the mindfulness practices in this guidebook to consciously create healthy habits that support their recovery and the lives they want to live.

The single book therapists everywhere will recommend to all of their patients, because at some point or another, we all behave like dicks.

Why this book? Because you might be a dick: a mean-spirited, self-focused individual who thinks and acts as though everyone else in the world can only be understood—and whose only importance is defined—in terms of their relationship to you. Being a dick might feel powerful in the short term, but it is not helping you in the long term because this flawed character trait is exactly what’s keeping you from attaining what you may want most: personal fulfillment, satisfying work, a loving committed relationship, and lifelong friendships.

Anyone, at any time, can be a dick. Yet Don’t Be a Dick is especially for people who have noticed how their own behavior tends to backfire, leaving them feeling isolated and unsure why their seemingly justified actions consistently yield such poor results. If you’re constantly using the refrain, It’s not me, it’s them whenever something goes wrong, Mark Borg is here to tell you that it is, in fact, you. The good news is there is something you can do to reverse these behaviors and live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Successful health? Healthy success? You can have both with Success Starts Within, your guide to science-backed strategies rooted in the principle that outward success begins with inner wealth.

Drawing from the latest research in neuroscience and positive psychology, mindset and resilience expert Chazz Scott shares practical strategies for what he refers to as radical self-care—an approach to living that helps us transcend negative thinking, gain inner confidence, improve focus, and develop meaningful relationships—so that we may achieve true fulfillment in our personal and professional lives. 

Success Starts Within addresses the urgent need for regular, continual self-care and personal growth. It provides proven techniques to alleviate stress and anxiety, boost life satisfaction, and improve whole-body health. At a time when the health-care industry is overwhelmed, this book offers practical, science-based solutions anyone can integrate into their daily routine. Some of the science-backed strategies that will help readers learn numerous skills, include how to

• Counter burnout and accelerate success in both professional and personal domains
  
• “Slow down to speed up” productivity, achieve wellness, and improve fulfillment
  
• Prioritize daily self-care, without it feeling burdensome
  
• Make wise decisions and choose intelligent actions for growth, based on a clearer understanding of how the mind and body operate
  
• Tune into their own thoughts, emotions, and feelings to discover what serves them and what doesn’t—and then how to use that information to achieve what is desired
  
• Explore their purpose in life and align their values with their goals
  
• Build better relationships with themselves, others, and their communities
  

Packed with tips and step-by-step exercises, this book empowers readers to establish a firm foundation of whole-body health so that success can follow naturally. 

In this delightfully funny book, Dr. Hollis shares her path to permanent weight loss and demonstrates how little it has to do with what you are eating or what's eating you. It will teach you to start eating to nurture your true inner being to know when enough is enough. By changing how you behave, how you interact with others, how you face your own dark side, and by accepting life on life's terms, losing your fat and keeping it off is finally within your reach.

Judi Hollis, PhD is a licensed family therapist who is maintaining her own seventy-pound weight loss. She opened the nation's first eating disorders unit and has been featured on CNN, Inside Edition, and Oprah. She is the author of Fat Is a Family Affair,Fat & Furious, and Hot & Heavy.

What are the keys to genuine happiness?

In contrast to stimulus-driven pleasure, genuine contentment comes from living a life of meaning that aligns with one's values. John Bruna provides readers with the practical wisdom and methods to cultivate deeper satisfaction and contentment in everyday experiences. He identifies common traps people fall into looking for happiness that actually create stress, worry, and fear, offering authentic mindfulness-based solutions to counteract them.

The increasing popularity of secular mindfulness in the United States mainstream has unfortunately produced a wide variety of teachings that water down and sometimes misrepresent this important philosophy and approach to living. In direct contrast, this invaluable book maintains the substance of the entire teaching as a program that is accessible to people of all spiritual traditions or no spiritual tradition.

John Bruna is a counselor, educator, and mindfulness and spiritual teacher. In 2005, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition through the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India. In 2012, he became a Certified Cultivating Emotional Balance Mindfulness Teacher via the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. Currently, John is the director of the Way of Compassion Foundation and cofounder of the Mindful Life Program.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) occurs commonly in both men and women, but is frequently misdiagnosed in men, resulting in either no treatment (or worse, jail time) or the wrong treatment. Dr. Nowinski lays out the origins of BPD in men and helps a man determine if BPD describes the problems in living he's experienced, and if so, how to fix them.

Joseph Nowinski, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the author of numerous books. His most recent books include Saying Goodbye: A Guide to Coping with a Loved One's Terminal Illness and Almost Alcoholic: Is My (Or My Loved One's) Drinking a Problem?

Robyn Cruze, a mental health advocate who found recovery from an eating disorder, has teamed up with therapist and friend Espra Andrus to provide expert guidance for those seeking eating disorder recovery, their loved ones, and treatment professionals.

This revised edition offers new insights and stories, updated approaches to nutrition, and answers to such pressing questions within the eating disorder community as: Does the word "recovered" have a place in the recovery process? What about notions of "good," "bad," "health," and "unhealthy" foods? How does soothing the self rather than fighting the eating disorder fit into recovery?

Making Peace with Your Plate helps unshackle us from our fears, anxiety, and the need to control by providing proven strategies for recovery and taking back our power from the illness.

A go-to guide on how to confront, heal from, and ultimately thrive after the devastation of betrayal by a partner's compulsive sexual or other addictive behavior

The first book specifically for partners affected by addictive behavior that addresses, in detail, how to identify, create, and maintain boundaries as a vital component of self-care and an indispensable tool for healing and growth. Through working the 5-Step Boundary Solution partners will

Ending compulsive sexual behavior is just the beginning.

Drawing on personal and professional experience, psychotherapist Andrew Susskind examines issues such as shame, grief, narcissism, and codependency to demonstrate how people use out-of-control sexual behavior to cope with brokenheartedness and trauma. He offers strategies to cultivate sustainable sexual sobriety, sharing his own healing narrative, as well as those of others who’ve chosen to bare their truths. No one is ever too hurt or isolated to achieve reliable relationships and emotional intimacy. This is a guidebook for every person seeking long-term healing from sex addiction.

Claudia Black's updated bestselling primer for women whose partners are acting out sexually.

Multiple affairs, compulsive pornography, prostitutes, and voyeurism—no matter their “drug” of choice, men who act out sexually leave their partners reeling in fear, rage, shame, and isolation. But there is hope. Bestselling author Claudia Black’s revised edition of her classic work Deceived offers women in relationships plagued by sexual betrayal the validation and guidance to create a new path of clarity, direction, and confidence.

Dr. Black uses stories of women who have been through a wide variety of experiences to help readers develop the understanding and skills to confront the trauma of the betrayal. She offers them the opportunity to shift from their overwhelming emotions to action derived from self-esteem and integrity. Deceived encourages women to proactively emerge from traumatic stress and emotional isolation and discover their power to facilitate their own healing, allowing them to move forward in their lives.

A revised edition of the best-selling solution-oriented guide to identifying and healing over-involvement or "entanglement" in relationships. 

Anyone who has struggled with balancing his or her own needs and desires with those of another person will benefit from Nancy Johnston's sensible, easy-to-follow method for changing the course of relationships. Disentangle combines psychoeducation, personal anecdotes, clinical case vignettes, and skills-building exercises.

Johnston describes how to turn this cycle around with self-assessments and experiential exercises designed to address essential aspects of self-awareness, distortions in thinking, communication style and tools, and spirituality. 

Disentangling is the process of creating enough emotional space between oneself and the other person in order to better see the reality of the relationship and make healthier conscious decisions about it.

Claudia Black's bestselling classic on the experience and legacy of being raised in an addictive household.

In an all too familiar scenario, played out in millions of homes every day, children who grow up in addictive families abide by certain rules: don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. The rigid survival roles and youthful coping behaviors they take on, such as the responsible child, the adjuster, the placater, and the acting-out child can eventually contribute to problems of depression, loneliness, and addiction in adulthood.

Using poignant personal stories, thoughtful explanations, and helpful exercises, Black helps readers gain personal insights and develop new skills that lead to a healthier, happier, more fulfilling life.

While continuing to recognize alcohol as the primary addiction within families, this newly revised edition of It Will Never Happen to Me, which has sold more than two million copies, broadens concepts to include addictive disorders involving other drugs, money, food, sex, and work.

A unique narrative on a unique time, offering solace to people nearing retirement and also for those who are retired.

Poised for Retirement is not your parents’ retirement guide, nor is it a financial planning guide; rather, it’s the relatable story of an ordinary working woman reflecting on her life and career.

Written with humor, compassion, and poignancy, Nayer’s poetic prose is also inspirational. Easy to implement visualizations and breathing and sleep techniques are offered at the end of each chapter. Readers will gain insight and wisdom as the author learns to create a new and healthier life during this important transition.

• A timely topic for Baby Boomers (born between 1946 – 1962), representing twenty percent of the US population by 2029.
• Every month more than a quarter-million Americans turn sixty-five.
• Includes interviews with a diverse group of experts and laypeople who share their experiences as they face the same decision point in their lives.

Louise Nayer, is a writer and educator. She was a professor of English and creative writing for over twenty-seven years at City College of San Francisco. Presently, she is part of the San Francisco Grotto Writer’s Collective and teaches workshops at OLLI UC Berkeley. Her book Burned: A Memoir was an Oprah Great Read and won the 2011 Wisconsin Library Association Award. She lives in San Francisco, California.