As a year winds down, I typically look back at the best books I read that year. This book will be on that list for 2011. Written by Sharon Hersh, a licensed counselor who struggles with an addiction to alchohol. She openly shares about her struggle including a painful relapse that resulted in her divorce from her husband.
The last addiction is an addiction to our own self efforts – thinking we can solve our problems. This is why Hersh is cautious when it comes to self help groups. In the end, it is easy for participants to believe that they overcame their problems themselves. Learning to be totally dependent on God, on the other hand results in a much more emotionally healthier life in the long run.
Hersh describes the gifts of addiction. One of those gifts is the gift of being found out. The reason she refers to this as a gift, is because for most addicts the road to real healing does not take place until they are found out. She also looks at the gift of surrender – a total admission of a lack of self sufficiency when it comes to dealing with an addiction.
This is a wonderful book for anyone struggling with an addiction or for those who have a friend of loved one struggling with an addiction. The last section is actually is written specifically to family and friends of the addicted person.
I underlined sections of this book on almost every page. It is filled with thought provoking, inspiring messages. Here is one of my favorites:
“It is not always the holy and devout or the emotionally well balanced who come to understand Love. In order to receive the gift of getting caught, we must be able to acknowledge, with the powerlessness and poverty of a little child that we can’t free ourselves. We must be set free by the love of the One whose names are liberty, mercy, freedom, release, grace, hope, and peace.”