Customer Reviews

Learning to Be You, It's an Inside Job: Recovery and Healing for the Loved Ones of the Substance-Addicted

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For the friends and family of addicts, LEARNING TO BE YOU, IT'S AN INSIDE JOB by Brenda Ehrler, throws a first-hand lifeline to those living with substance abuse. For over nine years, Brenda lived with a practicing substance abuser. Here she shares her experience, strength, and hope as one who has learned to live beyond her loved one's addictions.

Brenda offers comfort, not in a situational list of do's and don'ts, but in how to heal one's inside, which is the only way to truly affect change in one's life. Written with all the compassion and knowledge of one who not only survived an addict, but came out the other side in learning her own life lessons, Brenda shows how to use that experience to become a fulfilled, happy person.

Brenda shows how to go from reacting to the circumstances of one's life to taking responsibility for one's life, and manifesting the kind of life previously only dreamed of. She shows how happiness isn't created by external pleasures, contrary to our cultural belief. Instead, happiness in manifested from the inside out, beginning with finding each person's own spiritual center. Connecting to a Higher Power of one's individual understanding allows one to reach beyond self-imposed limitations. How? By learning to change our belief systems, and values. By substituting self love and self acceptance for self indulgence and control. By taking responsibility for one's actions and replacing negative self talk with positive affirmations.

A veteran of self-help books, I found LEARNING TO BE YOU, IT'S AN INSIDE JOB to be one of the healthiest approaches to family recovery I have encountered. Like Brenda, I've hung out in the halls of twelve-step programs for many years. Within these pages, I find many of the lessons I had to learn the hard way. My path certainly would have been smoothed had I found this book sixteen years ago.

I have a doctorate in psychology and have a lot of exposure to this topic area. I bought this book some time ago and it has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get a little spare time to read. Now that I've read it I wish I could go back in time and have read it earlier. There are a lot of books out there that deal with the topic of co-dependence and addiction, but I have yet to see such a deep and sensitive treatment of the subject. Even as someone who has read a lot in this area, I found new ideas and frames of reference which helped me personally. I would recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with the addiction of a love one. In fact I would probably recommend this book for pretty much anyone since we are all impacted, in various ways, by the addiction behaviors of others. This is a truly excellent book.