About Douglas and Deborah Bey Authors of "Loving an Adult Child of an Alcoholic"

Doug and Deborah Bey have worked with adult children of alcoholics (ACOA) and their significant others throughout their professional careers. Together they have over seventy years of clinical experience working directly with these patients. Deborah Bey is an adult child.  She read the ACOA literature and went through therapy prior to meeting and marrying Dr. Bey.  She trained at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and was the head nurse on a hospital chemical dependency unit for a number of years. She later worked in a multidisciplinary private psychiatric group practice with Dr. Bey where she counseled adult children on an individual and group basis.  Several members of Dr. Bey’s family suffer from affective illness. He trained at the Menninger Clinic, served in the Army for two years before starting his private, multidisciplinary, practice of psychiatry.

He has worked with many adult children and their partners over the years.  Dr. Bey is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, served as a board examiner for the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry for many years, was past president of his county medical society, his hospital medical staff, and his county board of health.  He’s published a number of scientific papers and recently Wizard 6 a memoir of his year as division psychiatrist in Vietnam.  Both Deborah and Dr. Bey have learned from each other through their relationship and marriage.

Doug and Deborah recommended that adult children of alcoholics, and those who are in relationships with them, read the ACOA literature to help them learn the patterns of behavior they developed to survive as children in an alcoholic home and to understand how these patterns affect their adult relationships. The book they most frequently suggested is Claudia Black’s It Will Never Happen to Me.  They noted that it was frequently the spouse or non-ACOA who brought the couple in for treatment because they were unable to understand the adult child’s seemingly irrational behavior in the relationship. Nearly twenty percent of the population of the United States has an alcoholic parent and most of these individuals are involved in some sort of a relationship. The authors attempted to find a book to offer to persons who were in a relationship with an adult child but were unsuccessful.  They contacted Claudia Black for a recommendation and she said that she wasn’t aware of a good book devoted to this topic and suggested that they write one. This was the conception of Loving an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.

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