This Girl's Life--Literature Can Heal You

I have long believed that literature has healing properties. And in recovery I’ve discovered that we need a lot of books, the “conference-approved” ones and the self-help experts and the classics including the dead white guys. 

A great book that I have returned to recently is “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff, who, in telling his family story, offers not advice or platitudes but the power of his story resonated so deeply in me that I felt seismic shifts –shifts in the strata where the

wounds live.

Here is a short excerpt from Wolfe:

“I missed my father…He had the advantage always enjoyed by the inconstant parent, of not being there to be found imperfect. I could imagine good reasons, even romantic reasons why he had taken no interest, why he had never written to me, why he seemed to have forgotten I existed……

This way of thinking worked pretty well until my first child was born. The first time I saw him in the hospital a nurse was trying to take a blood sample. She couldn’t find a vein. She kept jabbing him, and every time the needle went in I felt it myself…When I finally got my hands on him I felt as if I had snatched him from a pack of wolves, and as I held him something hard broke in me, and I knew I was more alive than I had been before. 

But at the same time I felt a shadow, a coldness at the edges.  It came upon me again that night, so sharply I wanted to cry out. It was about my father ten years dead by then. It was grief and rage, mostly rage and for days I shook with it when I was not shaking with joy for my son.”

Many times over the years in therapy and recovery groups I’ve listened as another adult has described how they too sat at the top of the stairs in their childhood home listening to parents who were drinking and fighting and hurting each other. I recognized the tense scene and the slumped, scared posture of the one clinging to the banister.

That recognition and recall was so easy and so visceral that I began to count these recovering adults as my psychic siblings. “Oh another one from my house,” I’d think, in a meeting. We, group members, might even say to each other and of ourselves, “We grew up in the same house.”

It was shorthand to acknowledge that we knew at the heart and soul and scar level what that person was describing. When I read Tobias Wolff’s paragraph above I thought, “Oh, he is one of us too.”

What moved and impressed me was his ability to tell this story without pointing out the psychological dynamics. “Show don’t tell”, writers are told. He shows.

My father also was the absent and perfect one in my family. He was at work, on the road, in West Virginia or New Jersey when the rest of our lives were being torn apart at home. I needed my father to be good so that I could believe that I had at least one good parent.

To do that I had, I realize now, to do some incredible emotional and mental gymnastics to absolve my father of leaving two children alone with a dangerous and mentally ill mother. I had to decide that he didn’t know. I had to decide that he would have helped if he had known, and I had to decide that he could be, at once, intelligent and competent enough to be a good father and incompetent and blind enough to not notice the craziness in his wife and the terror in his children’s eyes when he came home on weekends.

Almost ten years after my fathers death I married a man with children, two young teen sons who lived with us. I saw this man love me AND also care for his children and it nearly drove me mad.

I experienced the same shaking rage that Wolff describes: That a man could protect his children in a loving and decent way was almost too much to bear because it forced me to see what was possible. I was shattered by being that close to a caring father and it brought out feelings of grief and hatred and finally shame because I still was not ready to admit that my father had let me down. I did not know why watching Danny and Matt being loved by their father drove me out of my skin and finally out of their lives.

It took more years and more losses and hearing others in recovery describe this phenomenon, and it took good books like “This Boy’s Life” to understand what my pain was about.

The Big Debate About Books in AA

For years we were admonished to not talk about “non Conference-approved literature” in meetings. We were cautioned to not quote from our self-help books or psychology texts and certainly never from the sacred text of any organized religion.

And so, being the contrary and mostly irreverent recovering people that we are, we do mention those books we are fond of but with a caveat or preface that goes like this, “I know we’re not supposed to talk about non-conference approved literature but…” and then we quote from our favorite self-help books, psychology texts or The Bible.

I’ve done that too, sometimes apologetically and sometimes boldly and often just to give credit where credit is due. My intervention, the resource that saved my life was Robin Norwood’s book, “Women Who Love Too Much”---that book directed me to AA and OA and Alanon and ACOA. I owe her and, I think, we owe all the other writers of self-help and spiritual literature that help people to find recovery.

But there is another reason why we need to keep the bookshelves open and our discussion of literature a bit more user friendly and that is because the people we quote most often—the founders of AA and the early members who created our organization—all depended on “non-conference approved” literature. Think about it—there was no conference, and there was no “recovery literature” for most of their years.

Go back and take a look at what kinds of things those early members were reading. Most of it would be pretty cringe-worthy today. They read the Christian Bible, a lot of William James psychology texts; especially his, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” and they read a lot of motivational literature—what today we call “self-help.”  And perhaps the most important book that early AA’s read was written by a rabbi.

“Peace of Mind” written by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman was the book that Bill Wilson and Bob Smith leaned on in their early years of creating AA. Bill and Bob gave copies of Rabbi Liebman’s book to their AA members, buying 20 copies at a time and handing them out at the “house meetings” where AA’s worked the steps.

For many years, “Peace of Mind” was America’s best-selling nonfiction book. You can still purchase  “Peace of Mind”. Try your local used book store or Amazon. If you love the Big Book you’ll be fascinated by the ideas and the familiar suggestions in Liebman’s bestseller.

An example is Chapter Five, which is titled, “Fear Wears Many Masks” where we are cautioned about “economic insecurity” and the neurotic “fear of people”. You will also feel the echo of that period’s cultural climate –post-Depression and the rise of the industrial in the Liebman’s language, and you’ll recognize the rhythms and tones that we know today in our Big Book and the step book, “The Twelve & Twelve”.

It is a luxury and a pleasure in later recovery to open our minds to many and all sources of help—those of current medicine, psychology and addiction studies, and also to the resources from years ago that led to the programs of recovery that we cherish today.

Five Great But Unexpected Books for Your Library

Recently Renew Magazine asked me to write about my five favorite books. When I looked at the shelves and shelves of recovery literature lining my office I was, at first, stumped. Just five? But then I thought, “What has really stuck to me or changed me?” Yes, the Big Book is on the first list, but Renew readers are recovery folks…they know about The Big Book and the Twelve & Twelve, but what are the great—but less obvious—recovery books that I love?

Here’s what I wrote:

Years ago a wise therapist helped me understand reading this way: “Books won’t save you and books won’t change you, but books will help you to build a cognitive life raft.” So here are five books I love that have helped me survive the roiling waters of recovery.

“Women Who Love Too Much”, by Robin Norwood is the book I owe my life to.  “WWL2M” was my intervention. I saw myself in that book when I couldn’t recognize myself in a mirror. Norwood’s stories gently coaxed me into 12-step rooms and into a belief in my own recovery. Almost 30 years later I cherish my original copy and I read it once a year.

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. This may be the first and the funniest “self-help” books. It was written in 1668 and it is one of the great narratives in the English language, and it feels as contemporary and relevant as last night’s sitcom. The language takes a few minutes to adjust to but then you blink and laugh, and laugh again, and recognize yourself, and people you know as Pilgrim trudges the road to happiness.

“Lit—A Memoir” by Mary Karr-- A smart woman learns from her mistakes; a wise woman learns from other people’s mistakes. So I love stories about what you did and then what happened. Mary Karr is the author of “The Lair’s Club” and also a poet. “Lit” –about parenthood, recovery and learning to write –and is perhaps one of the most beautiful and insightful stories about a woman’s journey to save her life.

 “Anna Karenina”—by Leo Tolstoy. Yes, it’s a novel, but Anna K. is the best relationship book ever written. It can show you how to make a marriage work and how to how to ruin one from the start. This is the book that wrote the book on infidelity. Even Women Who Love Too Much, doesn’t come close to what Tolstoy writes about emotional dependency and the impact of addiction on a family. .

“Reinventing Your Life” by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko. This is cognitive therapy for the layperson. It is the most easily digestible, directly applicable and simply practical guide to changing beliefs and thoughts. This book helped me when mining my past no longer felt productive and I realized that it was my thinking, rather than my drinking that was the issue.