Understand the pull.
Find your way back to yourself.
Undertow: The ISLAND Method for Breaking Free from Love Addiction is a compassionate guide to the gap between knowing and leaving. It names the patterns and the pull that keep readers tethered to relationships they know are hurting them, and offers The ISLAND Method: A Framework for Relational Recovery™ as a step by step way home to the self.
What if the relationship feels impossible to leave?
Some relationships create a pull that is hard to explain from the outside, and even harder to explain to yourself. Undertow: The ISLAND Method for Breaking Free from Love Addiction puts language to that experience without shame or judgment.
Drawing on 26 years of clinical work and her own recovery, Debra Alper offers The ISLAND Method: A Framework for Relational Recovery™, a clear path for recognizing the patterns, understanding the pull, and finding your way back to yourself.
Recognize the patterns that keep you tethered.
See the cycle of thrill, intensity, distortion, and emotional dependence for what it is.
Understand why intensity is not intimacy.
Learn why the hook feels so powerful, and why knowing is not the same as being able to leave.
Walk a step by step path back to yourself.
Move from insight into practice, with the tools to stand on your own ground.
This is more than a book about a difficult relationship.
It is a book about what happens to your sense of self when a relationship becomes the center of your emotional world.
The goal is not blame. The goal is understanding — because once you can see the pattern, you can begin to change your relationship with it.
- Clarity without judgment
- A framework you can return to again and again
- Questions that encourage honest self-reflection
- Practical direction for moving forward
You cannot change what you cannot see. Understanding the undertow is the beginning of finding your way back to yourself.
— Debra Alper
Start understanding the undertow today.
Get your copy of Undertow: The ISLAND Method for Recovering from Love Addiction.
