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The headlines ring with stories of opioid addiction and overdose. Parents complain about their children's screen addiction, law enforcement decries the flood of fentanyl, scores of Americans overdose and die daily, and teen alcohol poisoning and marijuana-induced psychosis rates continue to rise. Disabling depression and anxiety are diagnosed at alarming rates in families across the country. Now, more than ever, families struggle to live with, care for, and protect their family members suffering with addiction or mental illness.Kenneth Perlmutter, a California psychologist with 30-plus years in the field, has written Freedom from Family Dysfunction specifically for family members who love someone battling addiction or mental illness who want to break the cycles of codependency and relapse plaguing their dysfunctional systems. The combination of compelling vignettes, lively dialogues, and step-by-step instructions makes this guidebook an indispensable tool for the parents, partners, adult children, and the clinicians who treat them, to heal the powerlessness, pain, and impossibility of life with someone they've been trying to help, sometimes for decades.Perlmutter takes a systemic and inter-generational view, combining current knowledge with his deep personal experience of addiction and family dysfunction to guide readers toward understanding their systems, their positions in them, and the forces that keep things stuck. "Stress-Induced Impaired Coping (SIIC) " is the term he's coined to describe his ground-breaking model of family system pathology and recovery. He invites families to see themselves not as dysfunctional, but as wounded, as they work toward connection, closeness, and the restoration of systemic mental wellness and sustainability. Best of all, the method works regardless of whether the one identified as "the problem" makes changes or not. Family members who take up Perlmutter's method will: create closeness by pursuing connection over being right reject "tough love" learn to communicate authentically and to set boundaries confidently and fairly rebuild trust, authenticity and equality in family relationships reduce chaos, anxiety and distress in the mind and in the home shift the entire family system itself toward wellness



About the Author

Kenneth Perlmutter

Kenneth Perlmutter grew up in New York City and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area at the tender age of 18. Already a junior in college, his love of words and writing was exercised prior to his cross country move as Editor in Chief of the Fredonia State University (New York) weekly newspaper and then as a reporter and editor for the San Francisco State University weekly newspaper, the "Phoenix." He would go on to marry his editor in chief at SF State, Jacqueline Harmes, several years after graduation. The two remain together today, 42 years since their first meeting, parents of two sons and proudly welcoming a granddaughter born in late 2018.During a 15 year stint in San Francisco's raucous advertising scene in 1980s San Francisco, Kenneth earned his master's and then doctoral degrees with the intention of becoming a psychotherapist. Originally drawn to psychoanalysis, by the early 90s he was immersed in family therapy, residential treatment for severe mental illness and in 2000 deepened his work around substance abuse, recovery, spirituality and parenting.His first drafts and treatments of Freedom from Family Dysfunction were developed in 2010 with earlier working titles of "It Stops with Me" and "Dissolving Fear" based on the William James quote found in the current book and shown in the photos section of this author page. He hopes "Freedom" will provide just that to the family members and professionals who take up its recommended process. He welcomes inquiries and comments at FamRecovery@gmail.com.



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