If you’re searching for a book to curl up with while you’re in recovery or hoping to recommend a resource to a loved one supporting you, you’ve found the right article. Below are a few books about recovery that can educate, comfort, and clarify your situation.
Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story
Recovering from substance use isn’t a straight line in time—that’s the message of Impossible People. Julia Wertz published this refreshing memoir in her raw, witty voice, flipping the traditional clinical narrative around substance use treatment on its head. The goal of Impossible People isn’t to sugarcoat the intense realities of recovery. This graphic novel focuses on messiness, relapse, and the everyday absurdities that come with constantly trying to break free from substance use disorder (SUD).
Impossible People helps because:
- It is a realistic portrayal of recovery, which isn’t linear.
- The tone is empathetic but not overly preachy.
- The story is relatable, even if you’re not into graphic novels.
This book could be perfect for any reader who wants an honest, humorous, and artistic take on recovery (or feels things must get worse before they get better) as they battle SUD.
A Comprehensive Guide to Addiction Theory and Counseling Techniques
There is science and strategy behind healing, and Margaret Smith and Alan Cavaiola wrote a textbook to explain each. This resource for recovery education delivers exactly what the title promises—a deep dive into counseling techniques and psychological theories used in treating substance use disorders.
This textbook helps because it covers multiple techniques. It helps illuminate the connection between theory and real-world, evidence-based applications.
While it might be a bit dense for the casual reader, this book could be perfect for anyone training to become a counselor or therapist. It may also be helpful for curious family members or friends who want to involve themselves more deeply in your recovery. If your support network is analytical and scientifically minded, this text can help them understand how treatment works from a clinical point of view.
Overcoming Addiction: Seven Imperfect Solutions
No one recovery journey is the same, just like no one treatment fits everyone, and Gregory Pence explores those ideas in his book, Overcoming Addiction. Pence is a bioethicist, someone who researches social, legal, and ethical issues. He focuses on the seven central approaches to recovery treatment, ranging from 12-Step programs to neuroscientific models, to see what works best.
Overcoming Addiction gives readers a balanced perspective of several recovery methods. It helps empower readers by helping them customize their next steps and treatment options in recovery.
This book might be an awesome recommendation for anyone who wants to explore different treatment approaches or families who want a greater insight into why their loved one has chosen a specific recovery method.
The Essential Guidebook to Mindfulness in Recovery
Inner peace can fuse with practice in recovery. Former Buddhist monk John Bruna shows us how in Essential Guidebook to Mindfulness in Recovery, offering readers a calming framework to find the sweet spot where mindfulness meets progress in recovery. Bruna outlines key mindful living skills to make your recovery more resilient and deepen your self-awareness.
The Essential Guidebook may provide more tools to anyone in recovery who is looking for spiritual grounding and inner stability. It’s a good read for deepening your understanding of mindfulness, even if you’re not in recovery or suffer from substance use.
Bruna’s seven core practices span from values, attention, and wisdom to equanimity, compassion, loving-kindness, and action. Anyone interested in developing those areas may like the book.
Never Enough
SUD has both external and internal factors and triggers, so it may be helpful to understand the inner and outer workings of the disease. Never Enough might help with that, as neuroscientist Judith Grisel explains the way substances hijack the brain. Her book gives scientific explanations for the emotional chaos that many individuals face in both inpatient and intensive outpatient care in Wexford, making it an important read for understanding the “why” behind SUD.
How Never Enough helps clarify how different substances affect the brain. Grisel explains why SUD is so difficult to overcome.
Whether you’re a family member, friend, or an individual in a Port Matilda, PA, treatment program, this book can help you understand the brain in recovery and how to make sense of your behaviors.
Get Help For Substances in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania
St. Joseph Institute is here to provide support, so don’t hesitate to read about the services we offer for SUD treatment. Contact us today to learn which programs, treatments, and support groups are right for you.
