In All Our Affairs: Making Crises Work for You

I'm buying a second copy to pass onto a friend because this book has helped me. I used to be so full of fear and was not a nice person. I've found that by reading the stories in this book, I identify and something good happens to my heart. I learn a lot about myself and somehow, that helps my life be better between my ears, where it all starts. Something poignant about this book - and the twelve steps - has helped me. If this book doesn't help you, feel free to try something else. We all deserve to recover in a way that works for us. But just maybe it will help you like it helped me. I recommend anyone interested in this book also attend a few meetings and get a daily reader to put these stories in context of the overall help from the program.

This book is about crisis, and the need for immediate help to one who is in the midst of it. As a long-time member of Al-Anon, I have the found its program to be exceedingly helpful in turning around my life. I've watched it help families and friends of alcholics about making better choices that originally started out with thoughts of violence--such as suicide. It's also helped those who had thoughts of physically turning on the alcoholic, or who were emotionally abusing their children (i.e., neglect) because they were too busy trying to figure out what the alcoholic's next move was. Those living in an active alcoholic situation often wake up in the morning thinking about what will today bring--and what will the alcoholic be doing that may ruin the day or the future--and their lives evolve around trying to prevent the next crisis. Sometimes that "prevention" compounds it like no one could imagine. This book is written by real people who have been in real-life situations, and the primary audience is real people who are in Al-Anon. They are very short stories of what it was like, what happened, and what it's like today. Anyone in crisis wants as quick a fix as possible, not a 250-page book with the suggestions hidden somewhere in the middle. Al-Anon members are taught tools for how to survive and recover from the effects of alcoholism, and thus this book focuses those in crisis on the particular tools that can assist them with the crisis. Al-Anon is a program of attaction, not advertisement. People are attracted to it because of the emotional pain they find themselves in from either growing up in or living in an environment effected by alcoholism. We have sayings for those who have very negative opinions about Al-Anon or who are unable to be honest enough to acknowledge the effects alcoholism has had on themselves: Keep coming back-it works if you work it; take what you like and leave the rest; try 6 meetings before you make a decision about Al-Anon; and you'll be ready for it when you're ready to admit your powerlessness over [the effects of] alcoholism and that your life has become unmanageable [with trying to control the effects]. It has been shown over and over again that those who come and leave wind up in one of two places: 1) back in the program when they're finally able to make that admission, or 2) lives that remain unmanageable.