Addictions Books

The Responsibility Trap lets the reader understand such seemingly puzzzling questions as why do some men have such rage towards women? And why are so many successful "together" women so desperately attracted to one dangerous loser after another?

The Responsibility Trap is an engrossing description of how alcoholism effects the psychology of entire families. Although the book is very readable and uses a minimum of jargon, it is not a pop-pschology book, but a serious and thorough treatment of the subject. It endorses AA without rehashing the AA program. The serious focus of the book is shown by the short chapter directed towards counsellors about professional ethics.

This book is only partly about addiction. It is mainly about the intergenerational patterns of alcoholism, power, and loss that drive people to SEEK alcoholic marriages. It also treats the alcoholic as part of a family unit that had usually had problems that led to alcoholism, and these problems remain after the drinking stops. A major focus of the book is the challenges that face families that remain after drinking stops, especially the "coalcoholic" (codependent) spouse that can't accept a sober partner.

Because the book explains the alcoholic family's obsesssion with power and control ("overfunctioning" or "overresponsibility"), the transmission of poisonous attitudes from parent to child, and the unresolved problems that remain after sobriety, readers will also begin to see startlingly clear examples of alocholic behaviors in families where the problem drinking ended years earlier.

The book also describes way children are molded by the alcoholic family to be overreponsible (calm, efficient, but lonely and filled with self doubt) or underresponsible (filled with rage, demanding constant care and praise, but filled with violent resentment towards anyone that helps them).As adults, overfunctioning and underfunctioning people feel an instant chemistry, but their relationship becomes an abusive dance with death that the seemingly "healthy" partner can't walk away from. A friend described this book as a frighteningly accurate account of their experiences, and the book provided more clear insights than they had obtained from years of counselling.

I have just lost a job that I "loved", it was my "home away from home" (I actually used to say that...); my boss was my "best friend", I would do virtually ANYTHING to support and help him in the work place and in his failing personal life. I was terminated because his wife felt we were "too close" after two years of blind loyalty. Terminated ! No notice ! No severance ! Lost my job, my best friend, my source of income, my entire world/life.

READ THIS BOOK IF YOU ARE AN ADULT CHILD !!! I wish I had read it before. I will not be the 'enabler' and the 'fall guy' the next time.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that is an ADULT CHILD and find themselves without a job/sense of self/reason to live/purpose in life because the "job" and "your life" ARE NOT intertwined unless you allow them to be. I did not establish correct "boundries", and coincidentally, my previous "boss/best-friend" is an Adult Child also.

I just ordered the book to be delivered to my previous boss/best friend. Hopefully he will learn from this book as well, and not follow the same patterns.

It is always a shame when a really great book is badly marketed and consequently does not reach as many professionals and citizens as it should. This is such a book.

What the blurbs don't tell you, such as they are, is that the author was one of the true pioneers in the world of open source intelligence (creating useful actionable intelligence using only legal and ethical sources and methods). His brilliant efforts in the early 1990's were easily a decade ahead of where the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) is today--using a wide variety of Latin American newspapers and lots of brainpower, he was able to create tactical intelligence that contributed significantly to the success of operational missions by the U.S. Southern Command and the Drug Enforcement Administration, leading the destruction of cocaine laboratories, the interdiction of aircraft, and the arrest of key people in the transnational criminal structure.

This book is an essential reference for any agency or command library concerned with asymmetric warfare, unconventional threats, and non-traditional methods of providing intelligence support to those responsible for dealing with anything other than traditional war. The sources and methods that the author discusses are especially pertinent to the study of terrorism, proliferation, transnational crime, cross-national toxic dumping, and other sub-state and non-state threats.