The author reveals how, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a spiritual awakening led her to sobriety.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; 1 in 5 Americans has been molested; 1 in 4 grew up with alcoholics; 1 in 3 couples have engaged in physical violence. The author has spent over 30 years working with survivors. This book offers recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control,...

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....

Joey, who is still taking medication to keep him from getting too wired, goes to spend the summer with the hard-drinking father he has never known and tries to help the baseball team he coaches win the championship.

In September 1973, as the school year begins in his depressed Ohio town, high-school senior Kurt Shoemaker determines to be "normal," despite his chaotic home life with his volatile, alcoholic mother and the deep loyalty and affection he has for his friends in the therapy group dubbed the Madman Underground.

A bass guitar player in a teen rock band deals with alcoholism, his best friend's death, and first love.

"Craig Beck was a successful and functioning professional man in spite of a 'two bottles of wine a night' drinking habit. For 20 years, he struggled with problem drinking, all the time refusing to label himself an alcoholic because he did not think he met the stereotypical image that the word portrayed. All these 'willpower' based attempts to stop drinking failed. Slowly, he discovered the truth about alcohol addiction and one by one, all the lies...