The Dictionary of Missing Time, by Susan Eileen, is a memoir of addiction, family, relationships, mental health, and recovery organized through a clever personal lexicon. Each chapter takes its title from an expression Eileen has coined or adopted, such as “A Reverse Kafka,” “Memory Burn,” “Irish Goodbye,” and “Confident Humility,” then uses that phrase as an entry point into a particular period of her life. The dictionary framework gives shape to a story that ranges from a financially strained childhood in Ohio through marriage, motherhood, teaching, substance abuse, difficult relationships, legal trouble, and sobriety. Early in the book, Eileen describes her life as “a series of rambunctious events,” an apt description of a memoir that moves through painful and comic experiences with considerable energy.
Eileen’s voice is the book’s defining strength. She writes with candor about behavior that could easily be softened in retrospect, including drinking, pill abuse, financial instability, people-pleasing, damaged relationships, and the ways addiction consumed both her time and her attention. Her humor gives the book accessibility without erasing the seriousness of what she describes. The invented expressions are often funny, but they also function as compact explanations for recurring patterns of behavior. As the memoir progresses, these terms become a way for Eileen to name experiences she once struggled to understand. That approach is particularly effective because language itself becomes part of the recovery process: defining an experience allows her to examine it, connect it to the past, and decide what role it should have in her future.
The book also succeeds in presenting sobriety as a continuing process of self-examination. Eileen traces improvements in her work habits, finances, home life, boundaries, relationships, and ability to tolerate difficult emotions, while also examining transfer addiction and the patterns she carried from childhood and marriage into later relationships. Some of the memoir’s most thoughtful passages concern time, particularly the years and mental energy absorbed by addiction. Her observation that “Time can never be retrieved” gives the title its deeper significance. Recovery, in this telling, involves recognizing that lost time while becoming more deliberate about the time that remains. The result is a narrative concerned as much with identity, habits, and emotional maturity as with abstinence itself.
By the end, The Dictionary of Missing Time has become a record of reconstruction. Eileen arrives at a life built around simplicity, creative work, family, healthier boundaries, volunteering, and a more measured sense of self. Her idea of “confident humility,” defined as keeping one’s ego in proper proportion, neatly captures the balance she spends much of the book trying to establish. The closing sentiment, “I’ve built a life I don’t need a vacation from,” gives the memoir an especially fitting conclusion because it measures recovery through ordinary contentment. Eileen has created a personal recovery memoir with an unusual organizing principle, a conversational voice, and a clear interest in how people can use language, reflection, and self-knowledge to make sense of a complicated life.
Dually Diagnosed, Dually Blessed is an intimate, wide-ranging look at the intersection of mental illness, addiction, trauma, recovery, and the search for a life that feels worth living. Coventina Waterhawk begins with her own story, recounting childhood suicidal thoughts, substance use, abusive relationships, psychiatric hospitalizations, lost custody, grief, eventual diagnoses, and long-term sobriety with striking openness. What gives the book its shape, though, is the way she turns those experiences toward service. Her story becomes the foundation for a larger conversation about how complicated recovery can be and how much it can depend on treatment, community, self-awareness, persistence, and compassion.
Waterhawk also makes the subject unusually accessible. Chapters explaining diagnoses and coping methods are written from lived experience, so ideas such as bipolar disorder, trauma responses, medication management, mindfulness, DBT skills, exercise, journaling, spirituality, and support groups are connected to recognizable moments in everyday life. She doesn’t present a single formula for getting well. Instead, the book gathers a toolbox and encourages readers to discover what works for them. That practical spirit runs throughout the book, including the extensive resource section at the end, which reinforces Waterhawk’s desire to give readers somewhere to turn after the final page.
The personal stories are where the book opens up most fully. Contributors write about postpartum depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, alcoholism, drug addiction, grief, professional stigma, military trauma, relationships, medication, creativity, and the difficult work of staying alive and engaged with life. Their voices are distinct, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, sometimes spiritually grounded, and often painfully specific. Together, they show how differently people can arrive at similar feelings of isolation and how many forms support can take. A therapist describes living with mental health challenges while treating others. A veteran explains how recovery, psychiatric care, and a service dog became part of the same support system. Another contributor turns trauma into comic art as a way of processing what happened. The result feels less like a single testimony and more like a room full of people finally saying the things they’ve carried quietly.
By the time the book reaches its poetry, quotes, and closing resources, its title has earned its meaning. Being “dually blessed” comes to describe the possibility of turning hard-earned self-knowledge into empathy, usefulness, creativity, and connection. Waterhawk’s perspective is deeply personal and openly spiritual, and she makes room beside it for contributors whose healing has come through medicine, therapy, twelve-step recovery, family, art, service, and other forms of support. That generosity of perspective is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Dually Diagnosed, Dually Blessed speaks directly to people who’ve felt defined by a diagnosis or addiction and reminds them that a life can contain illness, recovery, purpose, setbacks, love, and usefulness all at once. This is a book about surviving what once seemed unsurvivable, then turning that survival into a light someone else can find their way by.
Theodore McDowell’s Drinking From God’s Well: Exploring the Journey From Trauma to Renewal and Recovery is a book-length poetry collection shaped as a spiritual and autobiographical account of addiction, mental illness, family trauma, grief, recovery, and faith. Its three-part structure moves from “The Struggle to Survive” through “Releasing the Pain” and finally to “Life on Life’s Terms,” giving the collection a clear emotional progression from crisis toward a more settled form of acceptance. McDowell writes repeatedly from the most difficult regions of his life: homelessness, substance abuse, a traumatic brain injury, bipolar disorder, estrangement from his children, the deterioration of his marriage, his sister’s suicide, his mother’s dementia, and his own encounters with suicidal despair. Yet the collection treats these experiences as parts of an ongoing spiritual life. The result is poetry that functions at once as memoir, confession, prayer, lament, and meditation on how a damaged life can be gathered into meaning.
McDowell’s strongest poetic feature is his recurring network of images. Jazz is especially important. Saxophones, improvisation, rhythm, silence, and blues become ways of understanding marriage, grief, mental illness, and recovery. Nature serves a similar purpose. Redbud trees, morning glories, egrets, lakes, storms, and falling leaves give physical form to emotional states that might otherwise remain abstract. These repeated images also create continuity across poems written from different stages of life. A storm can embody marital conflict in one poem, while morning light becomes an image of reconciliation in another. Water shifts from danger and uncertainty to cleansing, grace, and renewal. McDowell’s Christian imagery is equally persistent, but his faith is rarely presented as effortless certainty. God is questioned, resisted, cursed, sought, and finally experienced through suffering, forgiveness, human intimacy, and ordinary moments. This tension gives the spiritual dimension of the book much of its substance.
The collection is particularly effective when McDowell turns from his own suffering toward the people who endured its consequences. Poems about his wife and children complicate the recovery narrative by insisting that sobriety alone can’t repair years of injury. In “An Amends to My Daughter,” the speaker tries to listen without defending himself as his daughter describes the damage addiction caused during her childhood. The emotional turning point arrives not with easy reconciliation but with her quiet statement, “I finally feel heard.” That moment captures one of the book’s central understandings of forgiveness: healing requires attention, accountability, time, and the willingness to remain present before another person’s pain. Throughout the collection, marriage is treated with similar seriousness. Love appears as desire, memory, resentment, caretaking, endurance, physical intimacy, companionship, and spiritual shelter. McDowell’s imagery can be highly concentrated, sometimes layering biblical, musical, natural, and erotic references within the same poem, but that density reflects the way the book understands memory itself. The past is continually resurfacing inside the present, transformed by age but never entirely erased.
Drinking From God’s Well has broadened from survival and recovery into a meditation on aging, mortality, gratitude, and the sacred character of ordinary life. Grandchildren, morning coffee, gardening, family meals, walks, music, a wife’s presence in another room, and the simple experience of waking sober acquire the significance that earlier poems gave to catastrophe. McDowell doesn’t portray renewal as the disappearance of trauma. In “Trauma and Grace,” he describes the continuing work of recovery as “finding the miracle / within the marrow of suffering,” while accepting wounds and scar tissue as part of the foundation of renewal. That idea provides an apt description of the entire collection. Drinking From God’s Well is a sustained poetic attempt to integrate suffering into a life that can still contain faith, intimacy, beauty, responsibility, and joy. Its final achievement is not a declaration that the past has been conquered, but a vision of a person able to inhabit his whole history and still recognize grace within it.
How to Sit With Someone is an intimate guide to offering peer support and explores active listening, stigma, self-compassion, boundaries, mutual power, and recovery. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Peer support changed my life, and I believe it has the power to change other people’s lives too.
The book places a strong emphasis on boundaries alongside compassion. Why do you believe healthy boundaries are essential for both the supporter and the person receiving support?
We share more in relationships once trust is developed. It’s important in life to maintain a balance between expanding our boundaries as we engage in relationships and keeping ourselves safe by sharing at the appropriate times and with the right people.
You explore difficult topics like addiction, psychosis, and stigma with remarkable nuance. How did you balance honesty about these experiences while still offering hope?
I think hope matters because I believe people can respond to what they’re going through, even when they can’t control everything about their situation. That doesn’t mean change is simple or that everyone has the same choices available to them. But I do believe people can grow, recover, and find new ways of living. This optimism is a part of peer support, that we aren’t irredeemable.
Addiction, psychosis, and stigma are real, and they can be incredibly difficult. I don’t think it helps to cover that over with blind positivity. Hope is only meaningful when it stays connected to what people are actually facing. There are some big obstacles with these sorts of things, but determining what is feasible to change and what isn’t is up to the person living it.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from How to Sit With Someone?
I hope readers take away that mental health struggles are often made worse by disconnection from other people, from community, and sometimes from ourselves. Some of the most meaningful healing happens in relationship, when someone feels seen, heard, and less alone. This book is about learning how to come alongside people with more care, humility, and presence. You don’t have to say the right thing, or fix the person. Just be present with them human to human.
How do you support someone who is struggling without trying to fix them, rescue them, or say the perfect thing?
How to Sit With Someone explores the skills and ideas that make conversations safer and more useful: listening without taking over, staying curious, setting boundaries, reducing shame, and knowing when it is time to involve more help.
This thoughtful and accessible book offers a steadier, more human way to support someone through mental health challenges, while also helping us reflect on our own healing and growth.
King of the Sky is Gregory R. Gilmore’s candid account of addiction, identity, collapse, and spiritual recovery, tracing his path from a small-town Indiana childhood shaped by silence and conformity to a glittering but increasingly lonely life in Miami, then into the chaos of substance abuse and, finally, toward sobriety through faith, self-inquiry, and connection. The book moves through painful terrain with unusual openness: a hidden sexuality, a marriage that couldn’t survive the truth he was avoiding, professional success that never quite became peace, and the haunting image of a man living high above Miami while becoming more and more unreachable to himself. What begins in fog over Mobile Bay becomes a story about learning to listen, not only to God, but to the quieter, steadier voice beneath fear.
What stayed with me most was the book’s willingness to sit inside contradiction. Gilmore doesn’t present himself as neatly heroic, and that gives the memoir its pulse. He can be tender and self-protective, generous and enabling, spiritually hungry and still caught in the same destructive loops. I appreciated the way he lets certain images carry the emotional weight: the Rolex that has become less a symbol of achievement than a relic, the art room in high school that offers brief sanctuary, Sophie the dog as a small daily grace, the Miami condo that looks like success from the outside while becoming a kind of beautiful prison. The nickname “King of the Sky” is especially piercing because it sounds grand until you understand the loneliness beneath it. That tension gives the book its strongest emotional truth. It’s not only about addiction but about the ache of performing a life so convincingly that even you begin to confuse the costume for the self.
The writing is at its best when Gilmore trusts memory, scene, and vulnerability. His reflections on shame, belonging, and the hunger to be accepted feel deeply lived, and his voice has a plainspoken intimacy that makes the spiritual material feel personal rather than abstract. The book leans into explanation, especially when it turns toward teachings from A Course in Miracles, Abraham Hicks, Marisa Peer, and other sources of transformation. I found the ideas sincere and often moving. The central argument, that alignment with love and truth can become stronger than escape, could sound simple in another writer’s hands, but here it has been earned through humiliation, relapse, fear, and gradual repair. The book’s spirituality doesn’t erase the mess. It rises from it.
I came away from King of the Sky feeling that I had read the testimony of someone who had to lose nearly every false shelter before finding a real one. It’s reflective, emotionally naked, and sometimes raw in ways that made me pause before turning the page. The most convincing part of the book is not that Gilmore found answers, but that he kept learning how to ask better questions of his pain. This is a thoughtful and compassionate memoir for readers drawn to recovery stories, spiritual growth, LGBTQ+ self-acceptance, and books about rebuilding a life from the inside out.
How to Sit With Someone, by John F. Gerrard, is a thoughtful, intimate guide to peer support, rooted in lived experience rather than clinical distance. Gerrard writes about what it means to listen without taking over, to support without rescuing, and to stay present with another person’s pain while still respecting their autonomy. The book moves through ideas like active listening, stigma, self-compassion, boundaries, mutual power, recovery, and the dignity of risk, always returning to the same quiet center: people heal best when they’re met with respect, curiosity, and real human presence. From the opening memory of sitting in a parked car with coffee and a friend, the book frames peer support not as a technique, but as something many of us have already touched in our most honest relationships.
Gerrard doesn’t write from above the subject, and that makes a tremendous difference. He’s willing to admit where he’s overshared, interrupted, misread a moment, or leaned too hard toward fixing. That honesty gives the book its moral weight. The section on communication, where he recalls someone asking him, “Can you just let me finish?” stayed with me because it captures something so painfully familiar: the way our eagerness to help can sometimes crowd out the very person we’re trying to hear. I also found the discussion of sympathy, empathy, and compassion especially sharp. Gerrard understands how pity can shrink a person, even when it’s well-intended, and he argues for a warmer, steadier kind of presence that doesn’t turn suffering into spectacle.
The writing itself is plainspoken but often quietly beautiful. Gerrard has a gift for taking abstract ideas and making them feel lived-in. Dialogue becomes a racquet sport where the goal is to keep the ball in play. Recovery becomes a direction rather than a badge. Black-and-white thinking is treated with unusual generosity, not as a failure of intelligence, but as a kind of scaffolding the mind may need when life feels chaotic. I loved that nuance. The book doesn’t flatten people into inspirational lessons, and it doesn’t pretend that compassion is simple. Its strongest passages are the ones where Gerrard lets contradiction breathe, especially when he writes about psychosis, stigma, the “tortured artist” label, or the night he resisted using again by shrinking the moment down to small, almost invisible choices. There’s real emotional intelligence in the way he honors both agency and limitation.
How to Sit With Someone offers less of a manual and more of a posture toward life: patient, curious, boundaried, and deeply humane. Its concluding reflections on lifelong learning bring the book full circle, suggesting that connection softens isolation, and that small acts of presence can change the direction of a life. I’d recommend this book to peer supporters, mental health advocates, caregivers, friends of people who are struggling, and anyone who wants to become less frantic about helping and more trustworthy in their care. It’s a sincere, grounded, and quietly moving book for readers who believe that sitting beside someone, when done with humility and love, can be its own profound form of support.
Karen Gustafson’s Trauma Recovery is a faith-centered and research-informed guide to understanding trauma and healing from it. The book brings together biblical reflection, psychology, attachment theory, personal experience, and practical recovery tools in a way that feels sincere and purposeful. Gustafson writes from both professional training and lived grief, which gives the book a grounded, compassionate voice.
This is a book about wounds and restoration. Gustafson explains trauma as something that can affect the brain, body, spirit, emotions, relationships, identity, and even a person’s relationship with God. Early on, she writes, “Post-traumatic emotions can last for years, but it’s possible to understand and recover from them so that they don’t last a lifetime.” That sentence captures the book’s steady tone: trauma is taken seriously, but healing is treated as real and reachable.
One of the book’s strongest threads is the comparison between the biblical parable of the four soils and the psychological framework of attachment styles. Gustafson returns to this image often, using it to show how environments shape people and how healthier emotional and relational “soil” can be cultivated over time. The gardening metaphor works well because it keeps the discussion of trauma from becoming abstract. It gives readers a simple way to picture growth, damage, patience, and repair.
The book is also practical. Chapters move from the impact of trauma into recovery, covering emotional healing, differentiation of self, relational repair, and recovery in one’s relationship with God. Gustafson’s tone is often instructional, but it stays warm because she’s clearly writing for people who may be carrying pain. When she says, “There is no better reward than seeing those who have been trapped in trauma symptoms experience the benefits of trauma recovery!” it reflects the book’s larger sense of mission.
Trauma Recovery is a thoughtful resource for Christian readers who want a bridge between counseling concepts and biblical faith. It’s part teaching guide, part devotional reflection, and part recovery roadmap. Gustafson gives readers language for what trauma does, but she also gives them a hopeful picture of what healing can look like: deeper self-compassion, safer relationships, renewed faith, and a life that can grow again.
The Making of a Warrior of Light is part memoir, part motivational guide, and challenges readers to turn survival into strength through discipline, truth, and relentless self-reinvention. Was there a particular moment when you realized your experiences could help others?
I first realized my story could help others when I was in college at Alverno. Until that point, I carried a lot of shame about my childhood and almost never spoke about it. My focus was simple: survive it, bury it, and move forward.
Then I read A Child Called “It.”
While reading that book, something shifted inside me. For the first time, I saw how a painful story, when told honestly, could become a source of strength for someone else. Instead of something to hide, it could become something that helps others feel seen and understood.
At the same time, I was confronting the beliefs I had carried about myself for years. Growing up, I had internalized the message that I was dumb and worthless. Simply believing that I could succeed in college felt like a radical act of defiance against the past I came from.
In that moment, I made a quiet but powerful decision: my past would not determine my future. And I promised myself that when I made it to the other side, I would share my story so others could see what was possible. If I could overcome those beliefs and rebuild my life, then maybe someone else reading my story would begin to believe they could too.
That promise eventually became The Making of a Warrior of Light.
You describe how survival behaviors can look like personality. Can you explain that idea?
Most people don’t realize how much of their personality is actually built around survival. When we grow up in environments where we feel unsafe, unseen, or unsupported, the mind adapts quickly. It creates strategies to protect us, and over time, those strategies can start to look like personality traits.
Hyper-independence can look like strength. Perfectionism can look like ambition. Emotional distance can look like confidence. But often those patterns began as ways to stay safe.
One of the biggest survival patterns in my own life was overworking. From the time I was fifteen, I was working two to three jobs while going to school. That pattern continued through college and into adulthood. Even after I started my own business, I was working seventy-hour weeks while also being a full-time caregiver for my son and pursuing multiple degrees and certifications.
For a long time, I framed that as a positive identity. I told myself I was a “growth goddess,” someone who loved learning, building, and achieving. But underneath that drive was a deeper belief I hadn’t yet questioned: if I wasn’t producing, learning, or accomplishing something, I didn’t feel valuable.
What looked like ambition was actually survival.
Recognizing that was a turning point for me. When we start to see the difference between who we truly are and the version of ourselves we built just to get through hard circumstances, we can begin to release the patterns that keep us exhausted and disconnected from our worth.
Because the truth is, our value was never meant to be measured by how much we produce.
Worth is not something we earn through survival. It’s something we remember when we finally stop trying to prove we deserve to exist.
What does “Beast Mode” mean in the context of personal growth, and how can readers apply that mindset to their own challenges?
In the context of personal growth, “Beast Mode” means making a non-negotiable decision that you are done living the old way. It’s the moment when you stop negotiating with your limitations and commit to doing whatever it takes to transform your situation.
A lot of personal development advice focuses on gentle, daily practices, and those are incredibly valuable. A few minutes of meditation or a short coherence practice each day can create powerful shifts over time. But there are moments in life when things are collapsing all at once—your finances, your health, your emotional stability, your sense of direction. In those moments, transformation often requires a different level of commitment.
Beast Mode is when you decide that your breakthrough is the priority.
For example, creating heart-brain coherence through practices like breathwork or HeartMath can absolutely be done with a few minutes a day. But when I’ve gone through intense seasons of my life, Beast Mode meant something much more devoted. It meant practicing coherence every hour for several days, or committing to that level of discipline for weeks if necessary. It means regulating my nervous system, aligning my thoughts, and staying spiritually anchored again and again until the internal shift became undeniable.
Anyone can wait for life to improve. Beast Mode is when you become the person who decides it will. It requires devotion–a willingness to show up for your transformation with extraordinary focus until the old pattern breaks.
Because ultimately, a breakthrough doesn’t belong to the most talented people. It belongs to the ones who become relentless about their own evolution.
What advice would you give someone who feels stuck in survival mode?
The first thing I would tell someone who feels stuck in survival mode is this: start by regulating your nervous system. When your body is constantly operating in stress, fear, or overwhelm, it becomes almost impossible to see clearly or make empowered decisions. Practices that bring your body back into coherence—breathwork, stillness, movement, prayer, or meditation—create the internal safety required for real change.
But regulation alone isn’t enough. You also have to become devoted to aligning with your highest timeline.
What that means in practical terms is that you begin disrupting anything in your life that dishonors who you are becoming. Sometimes that’s a habit. Sometimes it’s an addictive coping pattern. Sometimes it’s the way you treat your own body through food or self-neglect. And sometimes it’s the dynamics within your relationships.
Growth often requires a reordering of your life. I’m not saying people need to abandon their families or cut everyone off. But many people do need to establish stronger boundaries around their time, their energy, and the environments they allow themselves to stay in. Survival mode thrives in chaos, depletion, and misalignment. When you begin protecting your energy and choosing environments that support your expansion, everything starts to shift.
Moving out of survival mode is rarely a single decision. It’s a series of courageous choices that gradually reshape your life.
Because ultimately, the life you’re meant to live can’t fully emerge until you stop making space for the patterns that keep you small.
#1 International Bestseller Unleash Your Inner Warrior: A Journey of Resilience and Hope
Discover the transformative power of resilience and hope in “The Making of a Warrior of Light” by Theresa Rubi Garcia. This gripping memoir delves into the heart-wrenching struggles and triumphant victories that have molded Theresa into a beacon of strength and inspiration. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by adversity or sought a beacon of light in your darkest moments, this book is your guide to finding that inner strength and forging a path to a brighter future.
As you read, you will find: A Journey of Courage: Traverse the raw and unfiltered path of Theresa’s life, from the shadows of abuse and prejudice to the radiant light of hope and empowerment.
Empowering Narratives: Discover the power of resilience through Theresa’s heartfelt stories that encourage you to find your own inner strength.
Universal Inspiration: Whether you face personal challenges or systemic obstacles, this memoir offers universal lessons on overcoming adversity and achieving personal transformation.
A Beacon of Hope: Theresa’s story serves as a guiding light, demonstrating how love, inner strength, and unwavering determination can lead to a brighter future.
A Call to Action: This book is more than a memoir; it’s a motivational call to rise, confront your struggles head-on, and emerge stronger and more empowered.
Heartfelt Connection: Feel a deep sense of solidarity and support as Theresa’s journey resonates with your own experiences, fostering a sense of community and shared purpose.
Join Theresa Garcia in “The Making of a Warrior of Light” and be inspired by the story of a woman who turned her darkest moments into a luminous future. Let her journey guide you to uncover your inner warrior and rise above life’s challenges. Embrace your own journey with the good, bad, and ugly, and find the strength to close the cycles that hold you back.
