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for anyone recovering and doing inner child work. This was recommended to me by my therapist and I really loved this book for my recovery work. Still refer to it sometimes now.

Thank you Maise , I just ordered this.

You're welcome, Groot! How are you liking it so far?

Maise and Groot,
I ordered the book a few weeks ago and read it. I think it's a useful book.

The author's focus has been on the issues of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA). I'm old enough to remember the mid 1980's, when ACOA issues first started to be discussed. I remember reading a news article about ACOA issues, and thinking that these issues overlapped with my experience, even without the recent (at the time) betrayal. My parents were *not* alcoholics, but Whitfield discusses the idea that *any* kind of dysfunction can produce the same sort of issues that ACOA experience.

Whitfield does not focus on the dysfunction in families from betrayal trauma, so the reader does have to keep betrayal trauma in mind when he talks about generalized dysfunction.

A real "AHA!" moment from this book was Whitfield's discussion of High Tolerance for Inappropriate Behavior:
"Children from troubled or dysfunctional families grow up not knowing what is 'normal,' healthy or appropriate. Having no other reference point on which to test reality, they think their family and their life, with its inconsistency, its trauma and its pain, is 'the way it is.' "

Although my parents were not alcoholics, I learned (at age 42) that my maternal grandfather was an extremely active alcoholic. (Whitfield discusses that family secrets are another expression of dysfunction.) My mother accepted a fair amount of rude treatment from my father during my childhood, out of gratefulness that he was not behaving horribly like her father had. And throughout my life I have collected examples of my high tolerance for bad behavior from others! Now that I think about it, that's a pretty good prompt for journaling.

I do not participate in 12-step programs; I am not religious, and this state has been hard-fought from a strict religious upbringing. Whitfield recommends 12-step programs for the community guidance, but it strikes me that SI has also provided the same sort of effective community guidance.

This book nicely complements other books on healing I have found useful: Susan Anderson's The Journey from Abandonment to Healing and Gavin De Becker's The Gift of Fear.

I hope this helps!