Safe Passage: Recovery for Adult Children of Alcoholics

What is the Truth? Who are we? Huck Finn's father was a raging, violent alcoholic, who tried to kill Huck one night with a meat cleaver and shot gun. So he hid, ran away, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) like a Vietnam combat veteran. As most of us do. Stephanie Brown's book SAFE PASSAGE is truly light in the darkness of family alcoholism. I admire and respect her courage for writing a well organized, accurate, clinically brilliant, heartfelt book about the trauma and terror I and 25-30 million other American children experienced in an alcoholic family. It's all in there. And it's all true. An ACA (adult child of alcoholics) I grew up terrified, thinking I was alone, unworthy, that no one understood. And they didn't. Not until blessed therapists like Stephanie Brown (who taught T. Cermak, M.D.), Herbert L. Gravitz and Julie Bowden (RECOVERY: A Guide For ACAs), and Timmen Cermak (A TIME TO HEAL: Huck Finn as ACA with PTSD) came along in the 1980s. They helped me profoundly to understand myself better and what happend to me. It all started with the Gravitz/Bowden book. And it's all in Stephanie Brown's book. My father and two brothers died from alcoholism at 50, 45, and 58 respectively. A playwright and screenwriter, my new screenplay is about family alcoholism, identity, roles we play, and its affects for generations. As Stephanie Brown says in her wonderful book, "Once home, that is, once stabilized on the firm ground of a much healthier self, the ACA can tolerate seeing and feeling the whole of the past." Fear of abandonment and isolation challenge us as we become our true selves and rewrite our histories, Brown says. She's right. Divided into sections of Family Development, Individual Development, Consequences, Recovery, and Summing Up and Moving On, this book gives insight and understanding to the affects of family alcoholism on children and how to recover from it for the first time in recorded history. I highly recommend it. It's revolutionary. And healing.

because of her longitudinal research and well organized presentation this book takes readers further and more scientifically into the dynamics of adult children of alcholocs with a deepr understanidng of what happened to them and how to challenge their defenses. I want it for all my paitients and rarely can they find it now.