The book was a bestseller in North America and Europe, and has been described as "the bible of the 'survivors' movement". Discussing the book in relation to narratives of incest, professors of English Janice Doane and Devon Hodges believe the book's popularity is due to it offering "an enormously enabling fantasy that by the same token refuses a complex analysis of the very means of recovery, writing, that it so confidently touts" and for promising to completely make sense of the reader's lives through the simple process of writing. A large number of therapists who used the book lacked training in research and awareness of the confirmation bias failed to appreciate the risks of seeing incest behind any symptom, or even a lack of symptoms and did not consider that other factors besides incest may have caused sexual problems in their clients.