Strawberry writes for the first time about his tumultuous life and controversial career with the Yankees, telling how he and his family have overcome health issues and battled substance abuse through perseverance and faith.
The coronavirus pandemic has heightened awareness of how we're feeling, and what helps keep us healthy. Attending to physical, mental, and spiritual health is essential in times of crisis--especially for bodies in recovery. Just as recovery requires daily practice, so does physical fitness and a healthy lifestyle. In The Recovering Body, seasoned health writer, Jennifer Matesa ignites the recovery community with the first-ever guide to achieving physical recovery as part of your path to lifelong sobriety. In our former lives as practicing alcoholics and addicts, we likely punished our bodies as much as our minds. And yet, recovery programs often neglect the physical, focusing primarily on the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of staying sober.In The Recovering Body, popular health writer and Guinevere Gets Sober blogger Jennifer Matesa provides simple, effective ways for addicts to heal the damage caused by substance abuse, whatever our age, lifestyle, or temperament. Combining solid science and practical guidance, along with her own experience and that of other addicts, Matesa offers a roadmap to creating our own unique approach to physical recovery. Each chapter provides key summaries and helpful checklists, focused on: exercise and activitysleep and restnutrition and fuelsexuality and pleasuremeditation and awarenessMatesa’s holistic approach frames physical fitness as a living amends to self--a transformative gift analogous to the “spiritual fitness” practices worked on in recovery.
Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Despite what you may have been led to believe, most people with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder are able to completely restore their health and well-being. But how does this happen? Author Aimee Liu has woven together dozens of first-person accounts of recovery to create a break-through roadmap for healing from an eating disorder. Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives answers key questions including: How does healing begin? What does it feel like? What supports and accelerates it? Will I ever be free of worry about a relapse? Throughout the book are informative sidebars written by leading professionals in the field, addressing essential topics such as finding the right therapist, the use of medications, exploring complementary treatments, and how family members can help. Learn more at the author's website: www.aimeeliu.net.
Life is marked by a variety of losses, says certified trauma specialist H. Norman Wright. Some are life-changing, such as leaving home, the effects of natural disasters or war, the death of a loved one, or divorce. Others are subtle, such as changing jobs, moving, or a broken friendship. But whether readers encounter family, personal, or community disaster, there is always potential for change, growth, new insight, understanding, and refinement. Writing from his own experience, Wright covers such issues as the meaning of grief, blaming God, and learning how to express and share in times of loss. Now repackaged and updated with additional material, Recovering from Losses in Life will help readers find hope in difficult times. Study questions included.
Featuring a foreword by Will Self We’ll all experience recovery at some point in our lives, whether from addiction, physical illness, mental health issues or loss. Many of us heal, and we may discover ways to live with our changed selves, to reclaim a life. We may find a new voice, or unearth a voice that has been submerged. Vitally, recovery can mean community. This anthology – which grew out of a small creative writing class run by Lily Dunn at Hackney Recovery Service, and was later broadened into a nationwide call for submissions by Dunn and her teaching partner, Zoe Gilbert – represents a community of writers: new, unheard voices alongside emerging and established authors. Theirs are stories from the dark back alleys, the deep crevices of the mind, and from the wild, ecstatic heights of life before, during and after recovery. These are voices that urgently need to be heard, in all their variety.
This edited collection brings together research that focuses on historic figures who have been largely neglected by history or forgotten over time. The question of how to recover, reclaim or retell the histories and stories of those obscured by the passage of time is one of growing public and scholarly interest. The volume includes chapters on a diverse array of topics, including semi-biographical fiction, digital and visual biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, among others. Apart from the largely forgotten, the book provides fresh perspectives on historical figures whose biographies are distorted by their fame or limited by public perception. The subjects explored here include, among others, a child author, a Finnish grandmother, a cold war émigré, an Elizabethan era playwright, a castaway, a celebrated female artist, and the lauded personalities Mary Shelley, Judy Garland and J.R.R. Tolkien. Altogether, the chapters included in this collection offer a much-needed snapshot of new research on biography and its many variations and hybrids which will be of interest to academics and students of biography and life writing in general.
From New York Times bestselling author of Symptoms of Withdrawal and Moments of Clarity Christopher Kennedy Lawford comes a book that will save lives. For most of his early life, Christopher Kennedy Lawford battled life-threatening drug and alcohol addictions. Now in recovery for more than 25 years, he works to effect change and raise global awareness of addiction in nonprofit, private, and government circles, serving as the goodwill ambassador for drug dependence treatment and care for the United Nations. For the first time, Recover to Live brings together all of the most effective self-care treatments for the seven most toxic compulsions affecting every culture on the planet today—alcohol dependence, drug dependence, eating disorders, gambling, hoarding, smoking, sex, and porn. In Recover to Live, more than 100 of the world's top experts interviewed by Lawford share their research and wisdom on how to determine if your bad habit is becoming a dependency, what treatments will work best for you, how best to help yourself or a loved one recover from addiction, and how to lead a fulfilling and productive life in recovery.
An indispensable guide to the deeply philosophical concerns at the heart of every addict's struggle. Addiction and recovery are, at their core, about the meaning of life. Life on the Rocks is the first book to address addiction and recovery from a Western philosophical perspective, offering a powerful set of tools sharpened over millennia. It introduces some of the core concepts and vexing questions of philosophy to help addicts and those affected by their addiction examine and perhaps transform the meaning they make of their lives. Without assuming any familiarity with philosophy, Dr. O’Connor illuminates issues all addicts and their loved ones face: self-identity, moral responsibility, self-knowledge and self-deception, free will and determinism, fatalism, the nature of God, and their relations to others. Life on the Rocks is an indispensable guide to the deeply philosophical concerns at the heart of every addict’s struggle. Peg O’Connor, PhD, is professor of philosophy and gender, women, and sexuality studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. She is the author of the popular Psychology Today blog “Philosophy Stirred, Not Shaken” and contributor to the Pro Talk series at Rehabs.com.
Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.