Loving Through the Wreckage

Loving Through the Wreckage is not a book about how to fix someone you love who is trapped in addiction. It is a book about how to love them without being destroyed by the wreckage addiction leaves behind.

Written from the other side of addiction, Michael Bauer offers parents and families a perspective they rarely get to hear: the voice of the person who caused the chaos, survived it, and eventually found freedom in Christ. Rather than writing as a parenting expert looking into addiction from the outside, Bauer writes as the son who once lived in the very darkness so many families are desperately trying to pull their loved ones from.

Through raw personal experience, biblical truth, and the teachings of Jesus in the Beatitudes, Loving Through the Wreckage explores the painful difference between loving and enabling, surrender and abandonment, boundaries and rejection. It addresses the questions that keep families awake at night: Am I helping or making things worse? When do I say no? How do I surrender someone I love to God? And how can I have peace when someone I love is still living in chaos?

This book does not promise a formula that will make your loved one choose recovery. It offers something different: a path toward loving them faithfully while releasing the burden of trying to save them.

For the parent staring at the phone at 2:00 a.m., the family member wondering whether this will be the call they have always feared, or anyone exhausted from trying to rescue someone who does not yet want to be rescued, Loving Through the Wreckage offers a Christ-centered message of hope:

You can love them deeply without following them into the wreckage.