Changing Self-Destructive Habits: Pathways to Solutions with Couples and Families

Changing Self-Destructive Habits: Pathways to Solutions with Couples and Families by Mathew D. Selekman, MSW, and Mark Beyebach, PhD, is a well-written and insightful guide to a brief family therapy approach to treating self-destructive behaviors. By coincidence, I was in need of a text for my upcoming class titled “Substance Abuse and Families Systems.” I was so impressed with this book that I was excited to adopt it as one of the main texts for the class. This class is an elective for master’s-level marriage and family therapy, community mental health counseling, and social work students. This book would also make an excellent text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in substance abuse and family systems. To me, one of the issues in the substance abuse field is that practitioners can become black and white in their thinking about their theory of addiction. We can lose track of our mission to help a person with an addiction in an academic debate about the origin of and path to recovery from that addiction. A clear strength of the book is its broad “both/and” approach. It describes how and in what instances addiction can be a disease with a pronounced biological component as well as how in some instances addictive behavior can be the result of maladaptive habit. The organization of the book is logical and develops the argument for this approach as it flows through the first three chapters. The authors lay out the assumptions that provide the foundations of the authors’ perspectives. Chapter 1, titled “Self-Destructive Habits: A Collaborative StrengthBased Brief Family Therapy Approach,” lays the foundation for the rest of the book. My only critique of this book is the density of the first chapter, and as I write this, I realize this is an unfair critique. The density is a function of the breadth and depth of materials covered. It explores selfdestructive behaviors comprehensively from societal and period effects to mental health/relationship issues and down to biological/brain issues. As I read this chapter, I was grateful for the illustrations and diagrams. These added clarity to a robust and comprehensive presentation.