I started a book last night. I'm not too far into it, but so far it's raised some pretty good stuff. It's geared toward women in recovery, "A Place Called Self: Women, Sobriety, and Radical Transformation."
As I said, I'm just starting, but I'm connecting with it right off the bat. Thought I'd share a couple of things that struck me.
The book begins with talking about sobriety as a developmental process, a journey into our authentic selves, just as addiction is a developmental process into a false self. We develop a false sense of self through various ways of coping with things like trauma and stress that shut us off from growth and development (behavioral, cognitive, emotional, etc). Those various ways of coping include substance abuse/addiction as well as other ways. I know I was engaged in maladaptive ways of coping with my childhood trauma and family stress through avoidance and numbing any way I could. That was years before turning to alcohol - but alcohol was much more effective in that regard.
The following struck me in particular: "The addicted woman is most often working to do her best, trying to be a good person, a good wife, mother, friend, and worker. Yet she feels bad. She believes herself to be a bad person. If she thinks she was bad because she was an active addict, then somehow she believes that recovery should make her good... She believes that recovery will make her a good person, but she still doesn't feel like she is a good person.... Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real."
This is all within the first 25 pages. Seriously eerie connections for me.