Read an Excerpt
Can This Book Help You?
If you live with or love someone who drinks or drugs too much, this book can help you. This book offers you a program that has been proven to help people whose lives are affected by a problem drinker, a drug user, or someone who does both. If you feel stuck in a hopeless, substance-ruled life, this book can help you. If you have ever called, or wanted to call, a crisis line, clinic, or hospital and said, "Help, my husband is drinking himself to death" or "Help, my kid stays out all night getting high, and I'm scared to death," this book can help. You will also find help here if alcohol or drugs are destroying your marriage or scaring your children. Whether you are the wife, husband, lover, parent, son, daughter, or friend of an alcoholic or drug user, this book offers you the tools both to help you help your loved one find the path to sobriety and to improve your own life.
Throughout the book you will notice that we primarily illustrate our points with alcohol abusers. The program, however, has been proven to be effective with loved ones who abuse a wide variety of substances ranging from alcohol and marijuana to heroin and crack. Thus, you can effectively apply the program to your loved one regardless of the substance of abuse.
If you have "tried everything" and nothing has worked, but you are not ready to give up, then you are in the right place. The scientifically validated program on which this book is based has been designed specifically for people who feel they have "tried it all." They have scolded, nagged, begged, bribed, detached, and tried a few tricks not fit to print. Just like you, they love their drinkers enough to keep trying and trying. What they have not done (and what we will teach you to do) is use that love to change the way they and their drinkers interact so that they spend less time feeling miserable and their loved ones discover the pleasure in being sober. From where we sit, that's an awfully good deal. We are confident that you will also find it to be so.
Of course, we cannot guarantee that every single problem will be solved. What we can promise is that we will teach you skills to regain control of your life and to offer your drinker the best help available. In some cases, applying these skills does not result in complete abstinence and happily-ever-after--but in most cases, it does result in a better life for you and in sobriety for your drinker. The happily-ever-after is up to you and your loved one to create.
