THRIVING IN RECOVERY

A former NFL athletic trainer and current psychology professor offers his own psychological approach to the strategy of recovery.

“Dysfunction underlies the insidious nature of addiction,” Reese writes in this memoir and self-help book. “Learning to identify dysfunction is a necessary step in maintaining recovery.” The first section of Reese’s book is devoted to excavating his own troubled upbringing, which, according to him, laid the groundwork for the heavy drinking that he did during his 25 years working for the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets. This section’s climax, in which Reese hit bottom and entered treatment, will be familiar to regular readers of recovery literature or veterans of the recovery experience. This segues to the book’s second section, in which the author narrates his recovery journey through the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and his acquisition of a master’s degree and a doctorate in psychology. In the concluding section, he describes what he calls “the 13th step,” stressing that there should be more to addiction recovery than simply maintaining sobriety; it’s also important to thrive, he asserts. Reese is an engaging narrator, and each section of his book can effectively be read as self-contained, separate entities. However, they don’t all work equally well. The predominantly autobiographical sections tend to get cluttered with details and figures from his past (“Nick the Knife stormed into my office with Cal in tow and informed me that he had been on the phone to Mr. Hess and needed to know the results of my inventory”), but his storytelling is earnest and passionate. The section on recovery is shot through with hard-won, wry humor as readers witness his initial attempts to be “the best recovering alcoholic ever.” The book’s most gripping segments, though, are its most theoretical ones, toward the end, when Reese distills the lessons he’s learned and expresses a sense of joy in a way that one rarely finds in books about addiction.

A moving, if sometimes overly chatty, story of one man’s journey toward renewal.