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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
I was excited to read this book, as an addiction counselor, to see if it was a good one to recommend to clients. I was honestly disappointed. I feel like this book is one part obliviously optimistic, one part extremely nihilistic, and about 100 pages too long. It felt extremely repetitive, with narratives almost perfectly repeated, and multiple chapters that seem to state the same thing. It carries both a message of "you will turn out like this as a COA, it's just the way things are, you are doomed to repeat the cycle" and one of "just do these things and it'll be fine!" There were typos, and run ons, and I almost feel like this could have been a concise booklet rather than a full length novel.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This was very helpful when it came to reflecting on things I do now and where those habits may have stemmed from. There are a few points I disagreed with; Black made some statements that I felt were a bit too blanketed that I didn't necessarily think should be blanket statements. Overall I'm very glad I read this.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism
Very useful for anyone dealing with any addiction issues, not just alcoholism.
Coming from a household of at least one alcoholic I found this book interesting.
The author's conclusions seem like they would be just as applicable to any type of dysfunctional household. Beyond emphasis on the cycle of disease/heredity and a list of things a non-alcoholic parent (if you have one) can help with children who aren't already fucked over (an implication she pushes quite hard), there isn't a lot of ACoA specific messaging. And while I agree some stress was needed about the problem of generational drinking, she painted quite a hopeless picture for the children that fell short of inspiring the empathy she wanted.
I think the biggest problem I had with the book was the extremism/stereotyping (a problem I have found often in the self-help genre). While I find it likely that those are the individuals with which she is more aquainted, not every alcoholic mother is passed out drunk under the Christmas tree and not every alcoholic father is an angry drunk. While she admits this in her opening chapters, I feel like all her subsequent examples are all fairly extreme. I suspect, like most things, more people fall in the light gray range.
I also feel like this book reinforces a survivor/victim identity while railing against it. While adult children of alcoholics are often survivors/victims of neglect and abuse, adopting that as an identity (::cough:: ACoA ::cough::) leads to many more issues, including alcoholism themselves. It's a fine line to discuss and not one I felt like she successfully navigated.
The author's conclusions seem like they would be just as applicable to any type of dysfunctional household. Beyond emphasis on the cycle of disease/heredity and a list of things a non-alcoholic parent (if you have one) can help with children who aren't already fucked over (an implication she pushes quite hard), there isn't a lot of ACoA specific messaging. And while I agree some stress was needed about the problem of generational drinking, she painted quite a hopeless picture for the children that fell short of inspiring the empathy she wanted.
I think the biggest problem I had with the book was the extremism/stereotyping (a problem I have found often in the self-help genre). While I find it likely that those are the individuals with which she is more aquainted, not every alcoholic mother is passed out drunk under the Christmas tree and not every alcoholic father is an angry drunk. While she admits this in her opening chapters, I feel like all her subsequent examples are all fairly extreme. I suspect, like most things, more people fall in the light gray range.
I also feel like this book reinforces a survivor/victim identity while railing against it. While adult children of alcoholics are often survivors/victims of neglect and abuse, adopting that as an identity (::cough:: ACoA ::cough::) leads to many more issues, including alcoholism themselves. It's a fine line to discuss and not one I felt like she successfully navigated.