Recommended Reading
Some books give us information. Others change the way we understand ourselves, our relationships, and the lives we are trying to build.
These are books I have found meaningful in my own learning and in my work with people in recovery. They come from different traditions and perspectives, and I do not necessarily agree with every idea in every book. I recommend them because each offers something worth considering about recovery, growth, responsibility, relationships, spirituality, or living with greater intention.
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12-Step & Recovery Foundations
Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book)
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
Commonly known as the Big Book, this is much more than a book about not drinking. It offers a practical framework for self-examination, honesty, responsibility, spiritual growth, repairing relationships, and helping others.
Learn more or purchase at AA.orgPlain Language Big Book: A Tool for Reading Alcoholics Anonymous
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
A companion to the original Big Book written in more accessible, contemporary language. It can be especially helpful for readers who struggle with the style or language of the original text while still wanting to understand its core ideas and recovery framework.
Learn more or purchase at AA.orgThe Book That Started It All: The Original Working Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
A reproduction of the working manuscript that became the Big Book, including the edits and revisions made before publication. It offers a fascinating look at how the language, ideas, and structure of Alcoholics Anonymous evolved, and is especially useful for readers interested in the history and development of the program.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
A deeper exploration of the principles behind the Twelve Steps, especially humility, fear, resentment, relationships, responsibility, acceptance, and continued personal growth.
Learn more or purchase at AA.orgDrop the Rock: Removing Character Defects, Steps Six and Seven
Bill P., Todd W., and Sara S.
A practical Twelve-Step guide focused on Steps Six and Seven and the process of recognizing and letting go of character defects that interfere with recovery. It addresses patterns such as resentment, fear, self-pity, intolerance, and anger, using personal stories and practical guidance to help readers continue growing beyond simply stopping the substance use.
A New Pair of Glasses
Chuck C.
A collection of talks on recovery, spiritual growth, acceptance, and changing the way we see ourselves, other people, and life. It is especially useful for people working a 12-step program who want to go beyond simply staying sober and think more deeply about how recovery changes perspective, relationships, and daily living.
Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance
Tian Dayton
Explores what happens after the substance is removed and the work shifts toward emotional regulation, relationship patterns, trauma, expectations, dependency, and resilience.
How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics
Al-Anon Family Groups
Al-Anon’s basic text explores the effects another person’s drinking can have on family members and relationships. It introduces principles such as detachment, acceptance, boundaries, responsibility, and learning to focus on what is actually within our control.
Learn more or purchase at Al-Anon.orgAl-Anon’s Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions
Al-Anon Family Groups
Explores the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions from the perspective of people affected by another person’s alcoholism. Through essays, reflections, and member experiences, it applies principles such as acceptance, surrender, self-examination, humility, boundaries, and personal responsibility to family and relationship dynamics.
Learn more or purchase at Al-Anon.orgConscious Recovery
TJ Woodward
A recovery approach that looks beneath addictive behavior and explores the beliefs, wounds, disconnection, and patterns that can drive it. Particularly useful for thinking about recovery as something deeper than simply stopping a behavior.
Staying Sober Without God: The Practical 12 Steps to Long-Term Recovery from Alcoholism and Addictions
Jeffrey Munn
A secular, psychology-based interpretation of the Twelve Steps for people who may struggle with religious or supernatural language. It retains many underlying recovery principles while emphasizing responsibility, self-examination, connection, behavior change, meditation, and helping others.
Staying Sober Without God: The Workbook
Jeffrey Munn
A companion workbook that turns the Practical 12 Steps into structured written work. It provides exercises and reflection for people who want to engage more deeply with a secular recovery framework.
Addiction, Craving & the Brain
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life
Annie Grace
Examines cultural beliefs, conditioning, and assumptions about alcohol. Whether or not someone agrees with every conclusion, it offers an opportunity to question long-held ideas about drinking and our relationship with alcohol.
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Anna Lembke, M.D.
Examines pleasure, pain, craving, and compulsive behavior in a world of constant stimulation. It offers a useful framework for understanding why repeated pursuit of immediate pleasure can increase distress and why learning to tolerate discomfort can be an important part of recovery.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
A practical approach to behavior change that emphasizes environment, repetition, identity, and the cumulative effect of small decisions.
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
An accessible look at how habits develop, why they persist, and how understanding the habit loop can help create lasting behavioral change.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell
Explores rapid judgment, intuition, unconscious processing, and both the strengths and limitations of decisions made before deliberate thought catches up.
Trauma, Mental Health & Emotional Healing
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
A foundational exploration of how trauma affects the brain, body, relationships, and sense of self. It helps explain why insight alone is not always enough and why healing may also require attention to the body and nervous system.
No Bad Parts
Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
An accessible introduction to Internal Family Systems and the idea that even the parts of ourselves we dislike, fear, or try to eliminate often developed for understandable reasons. It offers a compassionate approach to internal conflict without avoiding responsibility for change.
Trauma and the 12 Steps: The Workbook
Jamie Marich, PhD, and Stephen Dansiger, PsyD, MFT
A trauma-sensitive workbook connecting addiction recovery, trauma processing, and Twelve Step work through practical exercises, reflection, and meditation.
I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus
An introduction to borderline personality disorder that explores emotional intensity, identity, fear of abandonment, and unstable patterns of closeness and distance. It can help readers better understand behaviors that may otherwise feel confusing or deeply personal.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
A useful framework for understanding how early family relationships can shape emotional needs, expectations, boundaries, and adult relationships.
Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
Gabor Maté, M.D.
Explores attention difficulties through development, emotional regulation, stress, relationships, and environment. It offers a compassionate framework for understanding ADHD-related patterns and how they can affect identity, behavior, relationships, and self-esteem. Some of Maté’s claims about the origins of ADHD are more controversial than the practical observations and strategies in the book.
Relationships, Boundaries & Codependency
Codependent No More
Melody Beattie
A classic exploration of over-functioning, control, boundaries, and becoming overly focused on another person’s behavior or wellbeing. It offers a practical framework for returning attention to personal responsibility, self-care, and healthier relationships.
Codependents’ Guide to the Twelve Steps
Melody Beattie
Applies the principles of Twelve Step recovery specifically to codependency, relationships, control, boundaries, surrender, and personal responsibility. It includes practical exercises for shifting attention away from trying to manage others and toward one’s own choices and growth.
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love
Amir Levine, M.D., and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A.
Introduces adult attachment styles and explores how patterns of closeness, distance, security, and anxiety can affect romantic relationships. It can provide useful language for recognizing recurring relationship dynamics.
Set Boundaries, Find Peace
Nedra Glover Tawwab
A practical introduction to identifying, communicating, and maintaining healthier boundaries in relationships.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman, PhD, and Nan Silver
Research-based guidance on communication, conflict, friendship, emotional connection, and the patterns that strengthen or weaken intimate relationships.
The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship
Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills
Explores the fear-based beliefs, expectations, control, and self-rejection that can interfere with healthy relationships. Ruiz emphasizes self-acceptance, freedom from attempts to control others, forgiveness, and approaching relationships with greater honesty and responsibility.
Mindset, Meaning & Personal Growth
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
A powerful exploration of meaning, suffering, freedom, and responsibility. Frankl’s central idea that we may not control every circumstance but retain responsibility for how we respond to it has enormous relevance to recovery.
The Road Less Traveled
M. Scott Peck, M.D.
A thoughtful examination of discipline, responsibility, love, emotional maturity, and spiritual development. Its opening premise that life is difficult sets the stage for a book about learning to face reality rather than continually trying to escape it.
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Eckhart Tolle
An exploration of presence and our tendency to become consumed by thought, regret, fear, and anticipation. It offers a different way of relating to the internal commentary that can keep us disconnected from the present.
The Surrender Experiment
Michael A. Singer
A memoir about what can happen when we stop trying to control every outcome and become more willing to respond to life as it unfolds. It explores surrender not as passivity, but as loosening our attachment to preference, fear, and control.
The Untethered Soul
Michael A. Singer
An exploration of thoughts, emotions, fear, and the inner voice we so easily mistake for ourselves. Particularly useful for examining our relationship with internal experience rather than automatically reacting to it.
Way of the Peaceful Warrior
Dan Millman
A story about awareness, discipline, humility, purpose, and learning to participate fully in life. Its lessons about attention and living in the present have enduring relevance.
The Four Purposes of Life: Finding Meaning and Direction in a Changing World
Dan Millman
Explores purpose through learning from life’s challenges, finding meaningful work and calling, understanding one’s individual path, and learning to fully inhabit the present moment. Particularly useful for people reevaluating who they are and how they want to live.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
A philosophical novel about purpose, fear, persistence, intuition, and the willingness to pursue a meaningful life even when the path is uncertain. Its themes fit naturally with recovery, growth, and learning to move toward something rather than simply away from discomfort.
The Four Agreements
Don Miguel Ruiz
A simple and accessible framework for examining assumptions, communication, personal responsibility, and the ways our beliefs shape our behavior and relationships.
The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace
Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills
Examines the stories and beliefs we develop about ourselves and the internal voice that judges, interprets, and often convinces us that its version of reality is true. It encourages greater awareness of self-deception, judgment, and the possibility of relating to ourselves and others with greater clarity.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Jordan B. Peterson
A wide-ranging exploration of responsibility, meaning, order, suffering, discipline, and the importance of taking ownership of one’s life.
The Five Things We Cannot Change... and the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them
David Richo
David Richo explores five unavoidable realities of life: everything changes and ends, things do not always go according to plan, life is not always fair, pain is part of life, and people are not always loving or loyal. The book focuses on how accepting these realities, rather than continually fighting them, can reduce suffering and support greater emotional freedom, resilience, and peace.
The Go-Giver
Bob Burg and John David Mann
A short parable built around generosity, value, authenticity, influence, and the idea that meaningful success often grows from what we contribute rather than what we extract.
It’s Not About You: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business
Bob Burg and John David Mann
A short parable about leadership, influence, humility, and shifting the focus from getting others to do what we want toward understanding, serving, and bringing value to others. Its principles have relevance well beyond business, particularly in relationships and learning to live with less self-centeredness.
The Spirituality of Imperfection
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
A particularly relevant book for recovery. It explores humility, imperfection, storytelling, acceptance, and the spiritual wisdom found in acknowledging our limitations.
When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chödrön
A thoughtful exploration of uncertainty, discomfort, acceptance, and learning to remain present rather than constantly trying to escape difficult experiences.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Reflections on responsibility, perspective, self-discipline, acceptance, character, and living according to principles rather than circumstances.
The Laws of Spirit: A Tale of Transformation
Dan Millman
A short teaching story built around an encounter with a wise guide in the natural world. Through a series of lessons, Millman explores principles including balance, presence, compassion, integrity, action, surrender, and unity, presenting spiritual principles as practical guides for everyday life.
Jeffs Reading Bookmark
A curated reference card to keep with you as you read. Print it out and tuck it into your next book.
These recommendations are offered for education, reflection, and personal growth. They represent a range of traditions and perspectives and are not a substitute for medical, psychiatric, or other professional care when that care is needed.
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