Download PDF Surrender A love letter to my daughter edition by Lou Alpert Health Fitness Dieting eBooks
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Surrender A love letter to my daughter edition by Lou Alpert Health Fitness Dieting eBooks Reviews
- This book is especially for any family with someone facing the problem of addiction, but the heartfelt story can be read by anyone who wants to dispel the taboo associated with addiction. It is an addiction story of a daughter told from her mother’s eyes, and the arrangement of the different fragments of a 5-year struggle with heroin addiction is very organized in a way that makes you want to know what comes next.
The storyline is progressive, and despite the book being a recount of events, it is also quite informative as the author includes several aspects of addiction and the recovery process, which can help someone out there struggling with addiction. The substantial and unvarnished book is easy to relate to due to the verbatim account of the experiences of the author throughout the ordeal. The author makes no effort to direct the 214 pages to any unrealistic conclusion while taking the reader on a chilling journey through her daughter's addiction. - Surrender A Love Letter to my Daughter by Lou Alpert chronicles a mother's harrowing and heartbreaking journey to deal with and overcome her daughter Crystal's addiction to heroin. After seeing her daughter on the news, shooting up heroin, the author knew she had to do something. After all, as a mom, she is a fixer, the person who makes everything okay, and keeps everything under control. But this time, she had to relinquish control, give up any sense of power she might have over her daughter, and simply just be. The author tells of this sad journey, one which not only affects the addict themselves, but the family as well, as everyone involved in horrendously affected by drug addiction. This is an emotional and heartrending tale, one which opens up the world of codependency and how to break the chains that sometimes bind in very unhealthy ways. This is a story of survival and acceptance, and knowing you cannot control another person and their choices. Highly recommend for an inside look at the world of addiction and its collateral damage.
- For addicts and their families, one of the most profound experiences one can have as part of a process of recovery is to relate honestly with others about the challenges they have faced. Humor, despair, love, and rage become milder, more distant, more productive emotions when they are shared, given context, explored together. It’s trite to say but true, as trite as ‘it works if you work it,’ and ‘one day at a time,’ but the truth inherent in this power of relatability is the core of what makes group therapy and twelve-step programs work, much more so than the pseudo-religious claptrap that helps some, but drives many away. At one time I struggled mightily with a drinking problem, and hearing other people’s stories was my true breakthrough to gaining myself again. Every addiction is different, and it’s difficult to understand a disease where the symptoms and causes vary, the morphology is wildly divergent, but the cure always involves willpower, to varying degrees. As difficult as addiction is to understand in terms of its pathology, relating to others always, always helps with the recovery process.
Herein lies the value of Lou Alpert’s book. It’s a substantial, unvarnished, at many times verbatim account of a mother’s experience of her daughter’s descent into addiction, and the many cycles of failing to find recovery, with its glimmers of hope, and the many lies along the way disguised as hope. It is 214 pages which recite to the reader on each, ‘you are not unique in your problems,’ and makes no effort to steer the narrative towards unrealistically tidy conclusions. The end is ambiguous, fearful, tense, and cautiously positive, just as recovery is. The story is straightforward but unflinching, and one is struck by just how difficult it can be for a mother to see what is happening to her child, a child who sought refuge with her after being emotionally bludgeoned by her first adoptive parents and their dogmatic, shame-based approach to child rearing. In the entire story of Crystal’s capture by addiction, her earliest trauma seems to have been at the dictates of people who used bible verse drill as punishment, and who sought the guidance of a ‘church-based counselor’ and the monstrously-named ‘religious therapist’ to help justify discarding her. Lou Alpert’s home by contrast seemed to be one of love and encouragement and supportiveness, where Crystal found her ‘mamma,’ but the now brilliant high-school student was nonetheless troubled, and lost in demons perhaps unknown to most.
The most revealing parts of the story, and in many ways the most wrenching, are Ms. Alpert’s feelings of rage and helplessness after the CNN story breaks, after struggling for so many years to scrimp, save, and spend to provide the quotidian needs of a 21st-century addict; the motel rooms, plane tickets; the prepaid phones, the baby clothes; the logistical grind of paperwork, medical tests, jails, landlords. All this sacrifice, all this living full-time in the black shadow of fear and death that stalks an addict’s family, and ultimately all it took was for a three-minute CNN human interest story to go viral, sweep a single addict off the streets of Albuquerque, and deposit them in a wildly luxurious rehab experience, gratis. The first therapy with a shot of working, and not a product of the merciless clawing of living with addiction, but through the providence of cable news and social media. What it feels like to experience the theft of that effort, that sacrifice, and to then be thrust back into the tension of expecting the next blow in recovery, is perhaps the most surprising and revealing part of the book ‘As scared as I had been for the last two and a half years that Crystal would never get clean and die on the streets, I was now equally as scared of what it would mean if she did get clean.’ The infuriating unfairness of addiction becomes bitterly manifest; resignation is replaced with fury, and a loss of purpose on Ms. Alpert’s part emerges to some extent; a grieving of sorts. Most of all what comes across in the book is Ms. Alpert’s unconditional love, through all her mistakes and triumphs. She sometimes hesitates to give herself credit, even deprecating her efforts, and as she herself puts it, ‘Everything I did while Crystal was on her journey…was about me and my need to fix and save.’ This is a tremendously honest and heartbreaking thing to write, but regardless of the events leading to the final trip to first-class rehab, and its unfolding as a sort of deus ex machina, there is no doubt that Ms. Alpert and her family’s courage and steadfast love helped her remarkable daughter survive to that point, and to hopefully find the help she needs to live in recovery. If you need to relate, or need a story for someone else to relate to, and relate honestly, this is very much a book worth reading. - Surrender A Love Letter to my Daughter is a rollercoaster ride of emotions that will certainly cause an impact on the reader. It provides an insight on what addiction – any kind – can do to a person, to a family. The subject is a very delicate and personal one for the author, Lou Alpert, and she does an awesome job of presenting her story in such an overt and disclosed way. Her protective instincts as a mother and at the same time her fear for her daughter as so relatable, even if the reader has not experienced addiction firsthand. I’m pretty sure some of the passages of this book must have been heartbreaking to write and it must have taken so much courage. Seeing her daughter spiral down the world of addiction must have been incredibly painful for her. And as if that were not enough, the media, none other than CNN, exposes her story out to the world, twirling Alpert into a new myriad of emotions that must have been hard to overcome. But I think that’s exactly the crux of this book; overcoming. This is definitely an enlightening book that I believe can help other people struggling with the same situation the author did.
- The topic of addiction is always a hard one to talk about, especially if you are connected to it through a loved one in your life. This is a heartfelt story written by a mom who has been through it all, watching her daughter stumble down the path of heroin addiction. As much as it is about her daughter’s addiction, it is also about the painful experience from a mother watch her daughter go through it and the emotional effect that can have on a person. There is a lot of healing to be done on everyone involved in somehting like this. It is touching to read and very relatable as well
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