Because my family has been involved for many years with foster care and adoption, addiction is something I'm familiar with. I've seen how substance abuse wrecks innocent brains and is passed down through family lines, how poverty and violence and shame rot everything. So I approached Seth Haines' book about addiction and what underlies it with some trepidation. When I was done, I had mixed feelings. First, I know Seth and know his sincerity and honesty and that comes through in this book. He is unflinchingly transparent about his own pain and the coping mechanisms that led to addiction in his life. That experience gives him a clear-eyed view of the tendency we all have to turn away from Divine Love and towards things that can trap us. (Money, sex, and social media get equal treatment alongside substance and porn abuse.) He believes that the way out of these disordered affections is through communion with God, and he experiences this in a very literal sense when the wine of the Eucharist becomes the agent of healing for his addiction to wine/alcohol. (Even though Haines' theology seems closer to Catholicism in this book, the writing style is still very evangelical in its folksy reliance on the bible for any spiritual input. That may be hard for readers who are not part of the target audience.) His best insights, in my opinion, come at the end of the book, when he talks about true sobriety. He describes a 135-pound heroin addict who gets clean, but ends up gaining over 100 pounds because he's transferred his addiction to junk food. "Sober? Really?" Haines asks. "Without an approach to dependency that treats the whole person, including the underlying narratives of pain, we'll never walk in waking sobriety." This I can agree with wholeheartedly.
Haines goes to great lengths to show that most of us deal with addictions of one kind or another that keeping us from connecting with Divine Love. On this level, I think the book works well and will be best for the type of people who have the money, time, and inclination to pick up a book on addiction and apply it to themselves. (Haines himself admits at one point that if you're reading the book, you are probably affluent-ish.) I do not think that Seth set out to write a manual for treating serious substance addiction or its generational effects and so I don't want to critique him too harshly on that point, but I did feel it was important to draw a distinction about who this book would be appropriate for. Personally, I would not simply hand it over to people I love who are mired in cycles of serious substance abuse and poverty. As a relatively healthy person, I can understand what he means when he says of his healing Eucharist experience, "The wine of my poison - it has become the substance of salvation," but as a mother, sister and friend of people who fight addiction daily, I had to put the book down for awhile. (He does leave a caveat for alcoholics saying they need to know their own weaknesses and do what is best for them. But I think that implies a level of health and awareness that many people I am involved with wouldn't have.)
According to the summary on the back of the book, "As Seth writes - addiction is simply misplaced adoration." I can certainly see areas in my own life where this is true and I appreciate Seth's encouragement to keep stripping away the things that obscure my connection to God, and I think this book is most appropriate for people who are in a similar place (or at least have done a good deal of work on rehabilitation, have wise support around them, and are ready and able to go deeper spiritually.)