In Choices, the author who changed forever how we experience our relationships once again revolutionizes how we see our lives. Don't do more, be better, or try harder, she says, but understand that all our actions have consequences and we must listen to our hearts and souls to gain a clear sense of how life, relationships, and love really work. We are not helpless; we have choices. We can choose our path and create meaningful lives.Melody Beattie shows us how even the smallest choices matter. By paying attention to everyday decisions and nurturing an intimate awareness of our lives, we build a strong foundation that can support us whenever the most difficult conditions loom large and require us to act. Beattie's compassionate wisdom shines light on the ways we sabotage ourselves from getting what we want and deserve, whether it's tangible -- good relationships, success in our career -- or the intangible benefits of grace, contentment, and peace. By clearly laying out situations in which we tend to give away our power or make decisions that compromise or diminish us, Beattie shows us the true range of choices we actually have.This book is about feeling again -- coming alive, not staying numb. It's about timeless values that we've walked away from, like service, caring about other people -- and ourselves. It's a new look at some great old ideas that will serve us well in our search for happiness, love, and making sense of the mystery of our lives. It's about reconciling the joy and the sadness, the failures and successes in life, and being willing to live comfortably with what we don't understand. It's about being willing to let go of guilt, and to live with pain.Filled with illuminating stories and offering the kind of practical yet inspirational guidance and comfort that have gained Beattie an audience measured in the millions, this book will move anyone who reads it to a new level of personal freedom, power, and wholeness.
Melody Beattie is one of America's most beloved self-help authors and a household name in addiction and recovery circles. Her international bestselling book, Codependent No More, introduced the world to the term "codependency" in 1986. Millions of readers have trusted Melody's words of wisdom and guidance because she knows firsthand what they're going through. In her lifetime, she has survived abandonment, kidnapping, sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, divorce, and the death of a child. "Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw bestselling lifelines to those still adrift," said Time Magazine.
Melody was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1948. Her father left home when she was a toddler, and she was raised by her mother. She was abducted by a stranger at age four. Although she was rescued the same day, the incident set the tone for a childhood of abuse, and she was sexually abused by a neighbor throughout her youth. Her mother turned a blind eye, just as she had denied the occurrence of abuse in her own past.
"My mother was a classic codependent," Melody recalls. "If she had a migraine, she wouldn't take an aspirin because she didn't do drugs. She believed in suffering." Unlike her mother, Melody was determined to self-medicate her emotional pain. Beattie began drinking at age 12, was a full-blown alcoholic by age 13, and a junkie by 18, even as she graduated from high school with honors. She ran with a crowd called "The Minnesota Mafia" who robbed pharmacies to get drugs. After several arrests, a judge mandated that she had to "go to treatment for as long as it takes or go to jail."
Melody continued to score drugs in treatment until a spiritual epiphany transformed her. "I was on the lawn smoking dope when the world turned this purplish color. Everything looked connected--like a Monet painting. It wasn't a hallucination; it was what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous calls 'a spiritual awakening.' Until then, I'd felt entitled to use drugs. I finally realized that if I put half as much energy into doing the right thing as I had into doing wrong, I could do anything," Beattie said.
After eight months of treatment, Melody left the hospital clean and sober, ready to take on new goals: helping others get sober, and getting married and having a family of her own. She married a former alcoholic who was also a prominent and respected counselor and had two children with him. Although she had stopped drinking and using drugs, she found herself sinking in despair. She discovered that her husband wasn't sober; he'd been drinking and lying about it since before their marriage.
During her work with the spouses of addicts at a treatment center, she realized the problems that had led to her alcoholism were still there. Her pain wasn't about her husband or his drinking; it was about her. There wasn't a word for codependency yet. While Melody didn't coin the term codependency, she became passionate about the subject. What was this thing we were doing to ourselves?
Driven into the ground financially by her husband's alcoholism, Melody turned a life-long passion for writing into a career in journalism, writing about the issues that had consumed her for years. Her 24-year writing career has produced fifteen books published in twenty languages and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. She has been a frequent guest on many national television shows, including Oprah. She and her books continue to be featured regularly in national publications including Time, People, and most major periodicals around the world.
Although it almost destroyed her when her twelve-year-old son Shane died in a ski accident in 1991, eventually Melody picked up the pieces of her life again. "I wanted to die, but I kept waking up alive," she says. She began skydiving, mountain-climbing, and teaching others what she'd learned about grief.
