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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best daily reader I've found, April 8, 2004
By A Customer
This is the best daily reader I've found so far, even among the other Al-Anon books. I struggle with depression, tiredness, and having grown up the child of generations of alcoholics. Sometimes I don't feel that Al-Anon fits what I'm struggling with, and that leaves me feeling lonely - but this book almost always has something that soothes me in a deep way (which I'm despretely seeking when depression tears at me) and helps me feel stronger in that particular moment.I read a page a day (when I remember), but mostly I use the index. I look up whatever topic I feel fits at that time - acceptance, anxiety, detatchment, fear, gratitude, mistakes, self-acceptance, self-esteem, and so on - and read all the pages on that topic. If I still feel torn up inside I look up another topic and read those pages. By the end of reading, although my problems haven't been solved, I feel a more able to deal with the world. I've found there are a lot of useful quotes, not just the ones at the bottom of the pages but within the text. All of my copies are dog-eared and underlined, and I write a lot of quotes down to help later because often a simple phrase clicks within me whereas a torrent of wise words cannot. In summary, this book has helped more than the many self-help books I've bought, probably because I've made it a part of my life. No book can answer my problems and the fact that I inevitably have to deal with them - difficult when I feel I just don't know how. But that's why this book is perfect; it exists to help people survive, one day at a time. It's straight-forward simplicity, without the too-sweet, new-age feel other books can have, is why it is personally indispensible.
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