Operation Daughters Addicted : Positive Strategies to Overcome the Dual Addiction of Eating Disorders and Substance Abuse

Cathy and Sandy came upon their unique insight into the little understood phenomenon of dual dependency through years of professional practice and clinical work in their individual specialties: Cathy as a therapist treating chemical dependency and Sandy as an R.N. treating eating disorders. Puzzled by the failures of otherwise excellent programs, the two began comparing notes and observations and discovered that treatment of one addiction, while apparently successful, was in fact feeding the growth of another, hidden addiction. This collaboration is the result of their discoveries and the joint effort to treat their patients for more than one addiction simultaneously. In these pages, Cathy and Sandy tell the brutally honest personal stories of a number of dually addicted people who they have treated, then take the reader through the processes by which their patients achieved awareness of the presence and dangers of the hidden addiction, and describe paths taken by these people to total recovery. Operation Daughters Addicted is written as if spoken to the individual reader, in a conversational and non-technical style. The reader is drawn into forging a path to her (or his) own recovery through a series of clearly defined steps leading to increased self-awareness and commitment to succeed. Readers are invited and guided to write their own stories by way of simple exercises offered at the end of each chapter. Additional exercises provide a spiritual component, which, at the reader's option, provide guidelines to calming prayer or other beneficial meditations. - Naomi Judd