Forward: As I was calling around to set up interviews, Ben Bass came up in several conversations. Several people in attendance told me he was at the historic St Paul 2001 Recovery Summit. When I did this interview and spoke with him about the summit and his recollections of the beginnings of the new recovery advocacy movement, he let me know he was not there. He was involved in planning things at his RCO leading up to the event and implementing them following the summit. The Director of his organization who was not in recovery attended instead. In talking with him, it became clear to me why several people thought he was at the Summit. It was because he was in the initial SAMHSA Recovery Community Support Program grant cohort. While these grants were relatively small, they had a huge impact on recovery efforts in America, Ben was at that time and remains now a leader in these efforts.

Ben is the Executive Director of the Recovery Alliance of El Paso. He began at the Alliance as a volunteer and has served as the director of the Alliance since May 2002. He is the current vice president of the board of the El Paso Coalition for the Homeless; a former member of the board of directors of Faces and Voices of Recovery in Washington, DC; is on the Advisory Board of the South by Southwest Addiction Technology Transfer Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Bass published in 2009 in Family Community Health Journal an article called Faith Based Programs and Their Influence on Homelessness. In 2011 Mr. Bass was honored at the White House as a Presidential Champion of Change for this work.

This interview helped me to better understand the other major element that helped launch the recovery movement in the United States, the RCSP grants. These SAMHSA grants brought together some amazing people and organizations that have had a huge positive impact on recovery efforts across the nation. The grants were small, but they paid huge dividends in the development of recovery capital across America.

  1. Who are you and what brought you to St Paul at that time?

My name is Ben Bass, and I am a person in long term recovery, and that means I have not used alcohol or drugs in over 34 years. But it means a whole lot more than that, it means I have been able to hold a job, raise a family and to be a productive member of my community. I was not able to attend the Summit in 2001, there was another person running the Recovery Alliance and she attended instead. I became the director a few months later in 2002. I was very involved with the other RCSP grant holders from across the country, including providing TA on Recovery Community Centers in 2004. I was aware of the influence of the summit on us all and was  involved in building on top of the foundation that came out of the summit.

I had been in recovery for a number of years, and it became apparent that we had a lot of holes in the care system in El Paso. I wanted to be involved in addressing those and helping get more people into recovery. So I started to volunteer with others. We were in essence a community action group that developed into a Recovery Community Organization (RCO). I didn’t even know what an RCO was at the time. As it formed, I became a Board member in 1999. It is a long story, but it became apparent in the months after the summit that the director was not a good fit for our RCO. Our board did a search of over 30 candidates and none of them really had the passion for recovery we were looking for. I uttered those three words “I’ll do it,.” I have served in that capacity ever since.

The work we do is so powerful and vital. We are about saving lives. What is more important than that?  We have come together to save the lives of our own people – everyone who experiences addiction. That is what gets us out of bed everyday.

The other huge factor beyond the St Paul Summit that drove the movement was the RCSP grant and the amazing people that those grants brought together. Recipients like Don Coyhis of White Bison, Tom Hill of Speak Out: LGBT Voices for Recovery and Phil Valentine of CCAR. I think there were nineteen of us, and we started to talk about stigma and how we were going to address that. We began to develop recovery support services. One of the facets that helped get those grants in place was a Washington Post letter to the editor written by June Gertig about recovery and the need to expand opportunities for recovery in the USA. All the facets came together, the right people at the right time. The rest is history.

There was tremendous energy around what we were working on and that energy propelled our work, both here in Texas and across the country. We would hold a grant meeting and 300 people would show up. When I look back, the people who were running those RCSP projects were key to the development of the recovery movement. They were the right people at the right time, and they worked extremely hard to build something meaningful that is influencing everything we do today in respect to treatment and recovery.

As I mentioned, beyond the summit, it was those SAMHA RCSP grants. As far as actual dollars, they were small, but the grants helped bring us all together. Through those grants we developed peer services. As the recovery community came together, we also started to focus on changing negative public opinion about us.

I remember one thing that really galvanized our recovery community here in El Paso and beyond. Christian Dior, the fashion company came out with a fragrance they called “addict.” Their naming of that product and media campaign around it was terrible and really magnified all the horrible negative stereotypes about addiction while also trivializing it. It really upset people. Susan Rook, who was a CNN reporter and the Faces & Voices Communications Director and who was in open recovery contacted us in El Paso and visited. Locally we marched on the local department store and demanded that they pull it from their shelves. They did. We have a lot of military bases in the area, and our advocacy here locally helped to get it pulled from military base here in Texas and at base exchanges worldwide.

Other media sources picked up on it. The executives of Christian Dior ended up having to get on a plane from Paris and fly to DC to meet about it. Dior changed their marketing campaign. Our efforts worked! We saw that we had this immense power to do good things when we all came together. We saw the power of recovery and the possibilities that could come from uniting our community and working towards things that got rid of stigma against us and illuminated the benefits of recovery.

We have done so very much to strengthen recovery efforts and save lives; bit we are still just scratching the surface. There is so much work to be done!  There is still a whole lot of stigma and discrimination around addiction and recovery. Getting people to stand up and be open about recovery was huge. We have started to put a face on recovery. Getting a CPA or other professionals to talk openly about recovery let the community know that they are in recovery has had a huge positive influence on how we are seen.

I still think that we would greatly benefit from a huge national media campaign on recovery. What happens is it is so hard to keep the gains we have made. Our focus becomes the provision of services and how to fund the work we do, which is always such a challenge. We are very busy people, and a lot of our focus has been on how to keep the things we have already built.

Patty McCarthy of Faces & Voices of Recovery has done amazing things to help fund our work. Faces & Voices rose out of that 2001 Summit and has helped get people involved across the nation and to some significant political successes to fund efforts nationally. I also see the Association of Recovery Community Organizations as a key organization moving forward. Both of these were born out of our early efforts. I would love to see a summit where we brought everyone together and talk about what our goals and objectives are moving forward. We need to make time we can all sit down together and talk and work creatively to work things out and propel our efforts forward. Something beyond the typical conference with preplanned speakers. An actual sit down to really look at what we have done, what has worked, what has not worked and to plan our next steps. We are all so terribly busy it is a challenge to hold such a space and really use our creativity and knowledge in ways to set the stage for what comes next. I think it is really important that we try and do something like this as a way to set an agenda for the next twenty years. We must recruit new leaders to propel the movement forward.

We missed focusing on more direct confrontation on discrimination and stigma against us. We need to be clear about addition. Addictive drug use is very damaging to our health, our families and our communities and the public can see this with its own eyes. We need to be honest about it. Drug use can be devastating, and people can see it all around them. Society has a lot of antipathy about us, and we have to be careful of how we raise issues around stigma reduction and focus on recovery in ways that highlights what happens when we stop using drugs and alcohol and regain our lives.

So far, what we have missed are opportunities to engage the larger society in mass media campaigns that highlight the power of recovery to transform lives. Having media spots run across the country with Robert Downy Jr, Morgan Freeman and Eminem all taking about recovery and how without it they would be dead. We have yet to transform public opinion about us and to highlight how focusing on recovery can change a lot of things. We are assets in our communities, and we need to take the next step and move recovery efforts forward in ways that capture the imagination of America.

I am concerned about the sustainability of peer recovery support services.  The funding mechanisms limit what we can do and threaten the future of these services. Here in Texas, there are two billing codes, one for individual peer coaching and one for group peer coaching. We are permitted to bill for fifteen-minute increments and the rates are abysmally low. While the ability to bill is welcomed, it does not pay for the work that is actually done to sustain recovery through the recovery community.

We have been working very hard on trying to figure out other funding mechanisms that actually provide the things that are needed and would therefore be sustainable. The way things are now we end up trying to raise dollars to fund the work we are doing. We need to get private insurance to fund things at levels like they do with medical care so that all of the ancillary services and supports are able to be provided. I do see some movement. Some insurance companies are thinking about it. Perhaps this is one of the things we should bring recovery community organizations together on and to share what we have all learned and what we can do to move the world in this direction.

It is important for the next generation to know that we do recover. We are part of the most vital, life altering movements in American history. It is a movement to save lives. I would want the future generation of leaders to know that when we come together, we can do anything! All we must do is do it! If we look back at the last twenty years, we can see that. We can see it if we look back further in history. Look at what Harold Hughes brought together in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Look back to the 1940’s and the work of Marty Mann and the formation of the National Council on Alcoholism. History shows us what happens when we come together – we change the world! I would want future leaders to study our history and take what we have done to the next level, if they bring us together, it is certain it will work!   

I stumbled on Sober 21 this morning, which describes itself as “a compendium of essays by, and interviews with, sober musicians”.

The editor’s introductory essay describes the project as follows:

It’s a free resource for musicians who want to begin the journey, or are new to the path of getting clean and sober from drugs and alcohol. … Few professions are as incessantly perilous to the potential alcoholic/drug addict as that of being a musician. You are literally paid to be in rooms with alcohol every night you perform, and are plied with drink tickets and booze in the green room. Alcohol and drug abuse is quite often not only normalized, but expected, encouraged, and even celebrated. … While there are shelves of truly wonderful books dedicated to sobriety, a dearth of material exists that specifically addresses the unique challenges musicians face in getting clean. … Sober 21 brings together a group of musicians that varies in age, gender, race, sexual orientation, musical styles, amount of time sober, and years in the music industry. What they have in common is that they were actively addicted to alcohol and drugs, and that they share here that they are now free from that addiction.

I found the essay by Peter Hook (Joy Division / New Order) interesting and really enjoyed the interview with Darryl “D.M.C” McDaniels (Run-DMC).

I’m looking forward to reading the rest. Enjoy!

From the recently updated NIAAA fact sheet on alcohol and health:

An estimated 95,000 people (approximately 68,000 men and 27,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third-leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.

Of course, there are lots of other social costs associated also with alcohol and tobacco.

This should prompt reflection and planning as move toward decriminalizing and celebrating other drugs.

We are pleased to announce the release of our newest Tips & Tools for Recovery that Works! video the Keys to Happiness Part 2.

Health and happiness are desired outcomes of successful recovery, and SMART Recovery has compiled a list of 12 tips for greater happiness that can help anyone. In this Part 2 of the series, we discuss the last 6 tips.

Watch on our YouTube channel.

Watch the Keys to Happiness Part 1 video.

Watch the Unconditional Other Acceptance video.

Watch the Unconditional Life Acceptance video.

Watch the VACI video.

Subscribe to the SMART Recovery YouTube Channel

Video storytelling is a powerful tool in recovery, and we are proud to share our SMART Recovery content free-of-charge, available anywhere, on any device. Our videos hope to inform, entertain, and inspire anyone in the recovery community.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and be notified every time we release a new video.

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments
we consider outside our guidelines.*

Subscribe To Our Blog

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from the SMART Recovery Blog.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Recovery: a lived experience of improved life quality and a sense of empowerment

Best & Laudet

When it comes to drinking problems, men and women have differences. Women tend to binge, have higher pre-existing trauma levels and can suffer more (or different) kinds of stigma and discrimination. They are also more vulnerable to physical complications and have greater mental health co-morbidity. Alcohol-related mortality is higher. In my work I’m seeing more young women with alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver than ever before – a worrying trend.

Gender norms and societal expectations often result in stigmatisation when the ‘alcoholic woman’ deviates or is unable to fulfil prescribed gender roles (i.e. wife, mother). Such stigmatisation results in a reluctance to ask for help.

Women and recovery

Recovery can also be different. Women face barriers to treatment. Issues around childcare and fear of losing custody, domestic violence, trauma and unemployment can act as deterrents. In addition, it has been found that some services are more tailored to men than women. Recovery capital resources may be less available to women who can experience ‘oppressive experiences of social control’.

Wanting to know more

It’s really good to see alcohol research focussing on women. Zetta Kougiali, Alicia Pytlic and Kirstie Soar took a look[1] at qualitative studies which examined women’s pathways into dependence and then into recovery. They quote the Best and Laudet[2]description of recovery as ‘a lived experience of improved life quality and a sense of empowerment’. 

The authors wanted their study to offer valuable knowledge towards understanding the different needs, mechanisms, and factors that can facilitate or hinder women’s recovery.

The research

They examined 23 published studies, including one from Scotland. They identified 4 themes.

  1. The pre-drinking ‘self’

Kougiali and colleagues found that women linked trauma and victimisation experiences (e.g., childhood sexual abuse, growing up in abusive families, emotionally absent parents) in earlier life to the development of their drinking problems. These experiences had generated intense shame and feelings of not belonging, inadequacy and inferiority. 

The experience of having to conform to gender norms, feeling choices were limited and lack of ability to allow the ‘real self’ to emerge were all cited as relevant.

2. Alcohol as a corrective agent

Drinking was used as a technique to ‘correct’ negative feelings through the creation of a ‘substitute self’, a ‘substitute reality’ and temporary empowerment.

3. Escalation of drinking and the dependent self

Although alcohol was initially used to ease the difficulties, a tipping point came when this could not be maintained. Paradoxically, the use of alcohol started to create the same problems that it had been used to tackle, resulting in despair and hopelessness linked to shame and stigma. A sense of being trapped developed.

4. The recovering self

The process of recovery happened when power was transferred from external things, like alcohol and other people, back to ‘the self’. Although turning points varied, they were connected in the sense that a belief that drinking was no longer sustainable developed. The authors say, ‘Participation in recovery groups helped gradually move from concealing perceived problematic aspects of personality to increased self-expression, sense of belonging, and empowerment.’

Going to recovery meetings also helped develop a social network that countered the loneliness and emptiness that can accompany early recovery.

Women’s accounts revealed their understanding of recovery groups as spaces of collective as well as individual empowerment.

Kougiali et al, 2021

According to Krenzman et al[3], women make up a third of Alcoholics Anonymous membership and do better than men in terms of outcomes. However, for women attending AA meetings there can be controversy over the concept of powerlessness. In this study, participants identified powerlessness as a helpful concept, as they did other features of the AA programme, such as self-awareness and self-reflection, group membership (sense of community and belonging) and sponsorship (sense of connection).

There were benefits to attending women-only meetings, though interestingly, most women stressed the importance of attending mixed meetings too, even though some women experienced distress when disclosing their past in mixed meetings. This led the authors to suggest that women with adverse experiences and those in early recovery should be ‘informed both of the implications and potential benefits of participating in mixed-gender meetings’.

Summary

“Alcohol was initially used as a corrective agent and as a tool of temporary empowerment, regulating structural and familial imbalances. However, drinking became progressively compulsive and overpowered every aspect of life. Initiation of recovery was often hindered by shame and stigma and facilitated by belonging to and being accepted by recovery groups and a revision of ‘the self’ within wider social structures.”

Continue the discussion on Twitter: @docDavidM

Photo credit: fizkes/istockphoto. Under license

[1]Zetta G. Kougiali, Alicja Pytlik & Kirstie Soar (2021) Mechanisms and processes involved in women’s pathways into alcohol dependence andtowards recovery: a qualitative meta-synthesis. Special issue on mechanisms and mediators of addiction recovery, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, DOI: 10.1080/09687637.2021.1904836

[2] Best, D., & Laudet, A. (2010). The Potential of Recovery Capital. Royal Society of Arts.

[3] Krentzman AR, Brower KJ, Cranford JA, Bradley JC, Robinson EA. Gender and extroversion as moderators of the association between Alcoholics Anonymous and sobriety. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2012 Jan;73(1):44-52. 

Forward – While I conducted this interview with Carol McDaid over the phone in mid May 2021, recently I also had the opportunity to visit with Carol and her husband John Shinholser founders of the McShin Foundation a few weeks earlier in their home. I visited as spring was breaking and the pandemic was lifting. They put me to work in their kitchen as we made dinner together. Later, we sat by a fire that John fed with old pallets (and what looked like old lawn furniture) and talked about the history of the recovery movement. We discussed what we could do to move it forward. It was an important visit for me and time with them helped put some bounce back into my step. Few people have poured more of their lives into the purpose of sharing recovery than this couple. It is clearly a labor of love. It was an honor to spend time with them. I hope that you enjoy reading this interview half as much as I enjoyed gathering it.

My name is Carol McDaid, I am a person in long term recovery. My day (and sometimes night) job is being the Principal at Capitol Decisions, Inc. Capitol Decisions does policy work with special expertise in addiction and mental health policy. Helping to craft and pass laws to support better care for our people has been my life work. One of highlights of my time serving in this arena was an effort that led to a federal law to help people with addictions access care. This was when I was strategist and advisor to the Parity NOW Coalition, which was influential in passage of the 2008 “Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA).” This landmark legislation requires insurers to treat addiction, mental, and physical health problems equally. The Parity NOW Coalition became a model for also successfully advocating for inclusion of addiction and mental health benefits in health-care reform legislation. Those legislative actions tie into the topic of this interview. That historic 2001 Recovery Summit helped to develop and organize the recovery constituency we needed in place to get this historic law passed.

As far as the 2001 St Paul Recovery Summit, it took some effort for me to get into that room. At the time, I was associated with treatment providers because of my work with Capital Decisions. The organizers wanted to keep a focus on recovery, so I had to use my lobbying skills to get in there. I cared about recovery and I wanted to be in the room. I think many of us felt that way because it was the first time the resources were there to accomplish the task. We all wanted to establish a national recovery advocacy organization and it had enough support at the time through a $250,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to be successful. There had been prior efforts to get it off the ground, but this felt different. I suspect that one of the reasons I was included was that I had made a decision a few years earlier in my work as a lobbyist working on parity to be open about my own recovery status. It is important for people who were not around back then to understand that this was not something people in recovery did back then.

There are two moments that have stayed with me since that summit twenty years ago. The first was watching the interaction between Senator Paul Wellstone and Representative Jim Ramstad. It was really clear that they cared deeply about our issues and that there was common ground that both of them felt strongly enough about to rise above partisan dynamics. It took a lot of political courage, and we need to honor what they did for all of us. They are both gone now, but their leadership and the way that they worked so hard for us made a lasting impression on me. It is important for people to understand that throughout our history, we have only been able to move things forward when our needs resonate on both sides of the aisle. Addiction does not know party lines and impacts all of our families. These two men found ways to work together on our issues that has left us an important and lasting legacy. That they did so is something that needs to be remembered and honored. It is also instructive for any future effort; we only succeed in our efforts when we have such bipartisan unity.

The second memory was at the very end of the event. We had these little torch-like things that they gave us all that emitted sparkles and lit up. As the event ended, we gathered as one in a circle and held these little torch sparkly things in the air. Together, we held a moment of silence for all we had lost and for the hope that we could come together and form something larger than all our individual efforts by working together. I stood there in silence and felt a sense of hope. I still have my sparkly torch. This work can have rough days, and on particularly hard ones I pull it out and feel that sense of unity in our movement and the hope I first experienced on that day and in that moment. 

It has to be acknowledged that a huge factor in us coming together was that $250,000 dollar investment in us by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It felt like a fortune at the time. There was almost no money around back then at all for things focused on recovery. Other than the SAMHSA Recovery Community Services Program there was virtually nothing for us. I think a lot of us knew this was probably are best opportunity to get a national recovery advocacy effort off the ground. As I mentioned there had been prior attempts, probably the most well-known of those efforts was when Senator Harold Hughes set up the Society of Americans in Recovery (SOAR) a decade earlier. What is also true is that there was a growing desire in the recovery community to start living recovery out loud. At that time, it was controversial and risky to even acknowledge your recovery status, the stigma against addiction and recovery was that strong.

Another factor is that people in recovery were not in the hearts and minds of the treatment providers in that era. A lot of the private sector care across the county at that time was private pay only. If you didn’t have money, you did not get help, much of the services that were available across the county was in this acute care model and didn’t really even connect with the recovery community. Much of the nationally treatment system was aligned around the acute care model because that is where the money was. It was not an inclusive model. We wanted to change that dynamic and focus resources on long term recovery supports. We are still working on that goal, but that is another story.

We have accomplished quite a lot!

The summit itself was organized through the Johnson Institutes Alliance Project, which led to the establishment of Faces & Voices of Recovery, our own national organization focused on advocacy led by and for people in recovery. As a policy person, of course I would want people to know how this effort laid the foundation for the passage of MHPAEA and the inclusion of addiction services as essential benefits in the Affordable Care Act. We made history. These laws have laid the foundation we can build on moving forward, and it was made possible in no small way because we set in motion a recovery advocacy movement during that historic 2001 Recovery Summit in St Paul. Obviously, much more work on parity, full implementation remains to be accomplished.

One of those critical moments came in 2007, right after a national recovery month event. Our bill was stuck and we needed to show leadership we were a constituency of consequence. Because we all worked together, we flooded the Speaker Pelosi’s offices with over 10,000 calls asking for movement on our Bill. We shut all the lines down, which created the momentum we needed.  The speaker was behind us, but we needed to show we had the support. As President Truman once said, “I want to help you, but you have to make me do it” and we did! By the end of the day, Wendell Primus called and asked us to stand down and that the message was heard. It worked. It happened because we were able to come together through the framework created out of the vision, we had at that summit in 2001. We now have mandated benefits as a result. There is a long way to go to ensure everyone who needs help gets it. That work continues but it is only possible because we built the foundation to carry the effort forward.

We also helped give voice to people in recovery and helped people communicate about recovery in ways that reduce stigma and normalize recovery. For people who were not around then – understand that at that time, the very act of saying openly that you were a person in recovery from an addiction was a revolutionary act. We normalized it. We have a long way to go, but the work that was done was significant.

I would go back to that last point – people are willing to be open about recovery. Up until then, it simply was not done. Nobody talked about that thing in the middle of so many living rooms across the country. Addiction is common in many of our families across America. When it was talked about it was whispered. When members of Congress or Congressional Staff became aware I was in recovery, they would ask me to stay after a meeting and whisper that they had that thing in their family too, and then they would ask for help. We made recovery audible. We didn’t need to whisper anymore. We became a constituency of consequence in DC, something that is so hard to do but is so easy to lose. That one act of being open has normalized recovery and helped people talk about addiction and recovery in ways that have helped hundreds of thousands of people get help. Thousands of lives have been saved. We never need to whisper, ever again. Can there be a bigger success than that?

Looking back, I think we took unity for granted. History is clear. We have never gotten anywhere without unity of purpose. It is my sense that some of that unity has been lost along the way. We should have focused more on being unified and working out any issues we have as a movement behind closed doors. It is certainly not too late to focus efforts on unity and I think it is vital that we do so. When we are not unified, we get divided up and we all lose. Our pathway forward must be to figure out how to walk together in ways that meet our collective needs. When we fail to do that, we are not taken seriously and all the resources that could save lives and build recovery community flow elsewhere.

That lack of unity I just spoke about is a huge concern. We need to get our focus back. We are that house that cannot stand divided. Elements of this have always been present. We organized the summit in ways that were inclusive of MAT on purpose. We focused on multiple pathways of recovery as our foundation. It was important at that time to recognize and value recovery pathways that were not well understood or widely accepted – like MAT which at the time meant methadone. History needs to show that the 2001 recovery summit was organized to be inclusive of MAT. We have done this; MAT is certainly now seen as a viable and worthy pathway of recovery. In some ways, the pendulum has shifted. I see a lot of open bashing of 12 step recovery and persons who choose abstinence-based pathways. It is destructive to our common purpose and must stop. We focused on multiple pathways to honor all of them. It was then and remains now the right thing to do. Unless we unify around that, we all lose.

People must stop attacking each other publicly, it does immeasurable damage to all of us. We need to build bridges, not burn them! We fight each other while someone else eats our lunch and the resources flow away from us. It may even be true that the seeds of such discontent are sewn by groups who would directly benefit from our disunity. It is a bit ironic that we worked so hard to get money for recovery and very little of it has gotten to the ground. This is in part because of our infighting. The money has largely flowed to other groups because of the open division in the recovery ranks. We must recognize this if we are to carry this movement on to the next generation. I hope this is broadly recognized sooner rather than later.

We need to plan our work and work our plan, together. This means more than chasing the next minuscule grant or stepping on each other for a sliver of pie or personal notoriety. I would ask the next generation to look at what we have done and capitalize on our successes and learn from our mistakes. It is true that because of some of our errors we have lost unity and direction, but it is all fixable! It is not too late. We don’t have to fall into the ash bin of history that so many before us have ended up in when ego and greed become our focus. This will not be our legacy if we all work together!

We have to keep our eye on our common purpose, getting more people access to services that support and sustain recovery. Accomplishing that is not just good for us and our family and friends, but it is also good for America. People in recovery are a huge force for good across the nation. When we come together, we help carry the vision forward of access to what individuals and families need to obtain and sustain recovery. There is no other condition where we see such a turnaround. Addiction is a massive drain on our country’s resources and communities, yet recovery leads to health, productivity and civic engagement. I think many of us want to see this effort picked up and carried forward. A lot of lives are in the balance, and I am hopeful it will happen! It must happen. If you are reading this, we need you. I hope you join us. We can achieve great things together.

We can continue to make history! We must, lives hang in the balance!

Expect a Miracle. Recovery delivers.

Every August, Fellowship Hall hosts a conference to celebrate recovery with hundreds of alumni from our treatment programs and their recovery allies, family members and friends who support their dedication and work to remain in long-term recovery.

This year, Mark D serves as the conference Voice, leading a group of committed volunteers in putting together the program for Conference, setting the theme, and giving their time and talents to pull the event together. This year’s theme, Expect A Miracle, is how Mark describes his recovery experience.

Mark can recall every detail of the moment he had his first drink, down to the color of the cup he used to steal the beverage from his uncle’s fridge at just nine years old. From that moment on, substances would hold a vice grip on his life for decades, until he would reach a point where he had nothing—and no one—left to lose.

As is usually the case, Mark was unaware that he was on his way to rock bottom. After a series of injuries, opiates entered his life – which led to an out-of-control spiral. “I came home one day and the electricity had been shut off,” Mark remembers. It wasn’t long before he had lost everything – his home, his car, his children, and his reality.

Family members attempted an intervention and after a month of avoiding them after the encounter, Mark took his las drink on December 17, 2015. It was after he completed treatment that Mark moved to Greensboro into an Oxford House. He was given the number of a Fellowship Hall alum, Jerry S, who welcomed Mark and took him to meetings for the next two weeks. “I dove in feet first. I loved AA from the very first meeting,” Mark shares.

With the help of his sponsor, Mark began volunteering at Fellowship Hall, driving guests to meetings and looking forward to attending conference each year. One thing he has learned since getting sober is that he expected a miracle, and recovery delivered with a wealth of new friendships, a new lease on life, and gratitude for friends, a home, a job he loves, and the opportunity to help others find the gift of being clean and sober.

Make plans to join us for this year’s conference and come expecting a miracle. The shared experiences and fellowship will strengthen and encourage you in establishing your recovery over the long haul. Register now for this year’s conference, August 6-9, 2021.

About Fellowship Hall

Fellowship Hall is a 99-bed, private, not-for-profit alcohol and drug treatment center located on 120 tranquil acres in Greensboro, N.C. We provide treatment and evidence-based programs built upon the Twelve-Step model of recovery. We have been accredited by The Joint Commission since 1974 as a specialty hospital and are a member of the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers. We are committed to providing exceptional, compassionate care to every individual we serve.

Eboni Jewel Sears speaks frankly about her sexual maladaptive behavior and how she began to use SMART Recovery several years ago to overcome it. She also became a SMART Recovery facilitator and hosts a weekly meeting on the issue for others in recovery, especially vulnerable teens and young adults.

Watch on our YouTube channel.

Listen to Eboni’s podcast interview.

Subscribe to the SMART Recovery YouTube Channel

Video storytelling is a powerful tool in recovery, and we are proud to share our SMART Recovery content free-of-charge, available anywhere, on any device. Our videos hope to inform, entertain, and inspire anyone in the recovery community.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and be notified every time we release a new video.

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to The National Suicide Prevention Hotline @ 800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

Subscribe To Our Blog

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from the SMART Recovery Blog.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Austin posted yesterday about Jon Soske’s piece selecting an addiction/recovery element to keep, one to drop, and one to modify.

The element Jon chose to modify is “medical mistrust.” A couple of sentences exploring this concept really grabbed me.

The pandemic made even more visible the intensity of suspicion regarding health institutions and the medical profession among communities rendered vulnerable and marginalized by structural violence, including people who use drugs.

Jessica Jaiswal is among the scholars of health and race to have described the shortcomings of “medical mistrust” as a concept—one that too often locates root causes in past events rather than in current structures and that lends itself to pathologizing communities by locating mistrust within their “culture.”

I’ve been involved in initiatives to make buprenorphine and naloxone more available in emergency departments and have spoken with a couple of EDs that have been discouraged by the numbers of patients declining buprenorphine prescriptions.

Jon’s comments prompted some reflection on these conversations and patient/provider mismatches in beliefs about the medication and related informed consent issues.

This is anecdotal and second-hand from people involved in implementation at other hospitals, but the medical provider’s perception was that they were offering a highly effective and evidence-based gold standard treatment.

I asked what they knew about their patients’ experience with the medication. They didn’t know much other than the fact that some of them had been prescribed it before and had been non-compliant.

I asked what they knew about their patients’ reasons for declining. They believed that stigma and impaired judgment associated with active addiction were key drivers.

In one of these conversations, I asked, given the provider confidence in the medication and the assumption that stigma is the driver of refusal, how do they view this pattern of behavior in their patients? Would they view this as something akin to a patient with a life-threatening bacterial infection refusing antibiotics? Or a highly vulnerable patient refusing a vaccine because of misinformation? Again, this is second-hand and anecdotal, but she said that probably captured it.

I encouraged them to learn more about their patients’ experience with buprenorphine. I expect they will find that a very large portion of their more chronic and severe patients are experienced with the medication. Some of them will have found it to be a useful tool to help achieve a better quality of life (or recovery), some will have found it to be wholly inadequate, while others have experienced it as part of their addiction rather than a step toward recovery.

Given this mismatch, I suggested that some of their patients may experience their conversations about the medication as overselling its effectiveness and/or proof that they don’t really understand the patient’s experience or goals.

A better understanding of these patients’ experiences, their goals, and how various treatment options (including options not immediately available) interact with those goals and experiences would go a long way toward improving relationships with patients and improving care.

This understanding could lead to improved acceptance rates, improved informed consent, as well as improved care plans. For example:

I’ve long expressed concern about drug policy reform becoming a front in political culture wars. What I didn’t foresee was science becoming a front in political culture wars and, as a result, become an Us vs. Them identity. This has intensified through the course of the pandemic, I’ve worried that the sloganeering around “I believe in science” would intensify institutional & professional suspicion of patients and communities that don’t trust them.

I’d always thought more about this as an important context in the area of policy and what treatments get funded. I’m now much more concerned about these broader cultural contexts entering individual patient encounters with health care providers. In this context, I worry providers are less likely to be genuinely curious about a patient’s “medication hesitancy” and assume it is irrational or tribal anti-science superstition preventing the patient from accepting an obviously and unambiguously good treatment.

So… Jon’s piece observed that “The pandemic made even more visible the intensity of suspicion regarding health institutions and the medical profession”. I’m suggesting that it’s also true that the increased emphasis on slogans like “believe science” have intensified institutional & professional suspicion of patients and communities that don’t trust them.

It has been an exciting week in the recovery space. Most notably, with Jon Soske’s paper on what to keep, drop, and modify in the recovery world. Jon is a friend whom I met through Dr. Schwartz. I was in Providence at the Collaborative Perspectives on Addiction Conference (APA Division 50), filling in for my research partner who could not attend to present our work. Dr. Schwartz asked if he could connect me with a local guy; I agreed, and Jon and I met and had coffee the next day. Jon did not give me much background that first meeting, though we briefly recounted our stories regarding how we came into the recovery space. Jon was very open, inquisitive, and asked many questions about general theories, ideas, and my thoughts on recovery history. Little did I know that Jon would come to play a significant role in my intellectual life (outside of recovery science) and that his influence would shape and modify the very bedrock of my own theories and methods (within recovery science) in the years ahead.

Jon will never tell you (unless you ask), but I feel like I should highlight that Jon is an accomplished intellectual and scholar. Dr. Soske, to be more precise. His expertise involves such topics as decolonial struggles, African American history, and S. African apartheid. Dr. Soske has a Master’s in Comparative Literature and a Doctorate in History. He has authored articles, written and edited books on apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC), and has taught at one of the more prestigious universities. Jon was on sabbatical when I met him, and he was interested in getting involved in the recovery space. I say this not to highlight Jon’s credentials, though they are impressive, I highlight this fact because such personal histories are not uncommon. I’ve met lawyers, (real life) cowboys, accountants, millionaires, former mobsters, football legends, housewives, school teachers, songwriters, tennis trainers, real estate brokers, and even a professional Fooseball coach, all of whom now work in recovery spaces.

In Jon’s case, he brings his past experiences to bear on the recovery field, and in doing so, offers us an opportunity to refocus on our work as a social and political movement seeking emancipation through radical forms of acceptance, democracy, and agape love, that can overcome oppression, criminalization, and intersectionalities that layer and compound stigma, judgment, racism, and marginalization from society.  

Fast forward a couple of years, and Jon is now a front-line advocate, organizer, and peer collaborator, doing daily street-level work while also pursuing scientific, historical, and cultural scholarship on recovery. Despite his humble demeanor and soft-spoken style, Jon is precisely the real deal radical intellectual that has come to define the recovery movement. He joins an army of them. Talk to any street-level harm reductionist whose years of hardcore street experiences have taught them how to theorize on power, the State, and systems of inequity. You will immediately note the incredible political insight and situational awareness. You will also note the thousand-yard stare of someone who works in close proximity to death and carnage that our mechanized systems and society constantly produce as a byproduct. Lived experience, street-level HR, and community-based work forges a unique intellectualism and political savvy that you cannot find in the purely clinical or academic space. Like many of us, Jon exists in multiplicity, hybridized, brilliant, shaped by the forces of genius, trauma, recovery ethos, inexhaustible hope, and deep empathy with the afflicted and oppressed. 

I preface today’s post with this note on Jon quite simply because he represents an essential fact about the recovery movement and something that Tom Hill once taught me: We already have our “experts,” and we already have our history. Our movement overlaps with the histories and struggles of people from across the planet- from LGBTQ Liberation to AIDS activism, from the early 20th-century Progressive Movement, led by the early feminists of the Women’s Rights Movement, to today’s Carceral Abolitionists, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing Indigenous and Decolonial struggles. To say nothing of the Disability Rights and Community Mental Health Movement. Jon is illustrative of a basic fact: we have a history that we are obliged to learn, and we have expertise that can be forged nowhere else but from within our experiences and that of the collective. 

Li Hua, 1946. Title: Take Him In

In short, from within our ranks and through these histories, we can find our truth, ethics, and a set of practices that no sympathetic politician can offer. We can envision a way forward that will not come from insider posts at the ONDCP, or SAMHSA. Instead, we can commit to a way of life defined by alleviating the suffering of others in ways that are impossible to accomplish through monolithic agencies- no matter how many people in recovery are elected to such positions. While we should never stop trying to work the levers of official power, we should not consider such power to be what defines us, nor what should guide us, nor can we wait for such power to recognize what we do. 

Finally, no amount of scientific breakthrough can tell us more than what we already know. The best evidence in the world does nothing when the systems of power refuse to acknowledge it. Nor can objective science be helpful when it is stripped of the very ethos that defines our community, to be made into manuals and medicines to be bought and sold. To echo Jon’s words- recovery does not require a political patron, a moneyed philanthropist, a government champion, scientific legitimation, or sympathetic best-selling authors. We have our own experts, our own history, and therefore, we define our future.          

Jon writes, 

“My colleagues and collaborators understand the sacrifice and dedication of people working at every level of the crisis—from street outreach to departments of health. But none of us believe that any aspect of this macabre pantomime is necessary. We are dying from a callous alloy of racism, cynical indifference, Puritanism, lack of imagination and—most fundamentally—dishonesty. Any community less crippled by shame, fear and criminalization would have started the fires a long time ago.

At a basic level, the structure of this legal impasse distorts the contours of the crisis, obscuring what we are actually dealing with. Significant research identifies stigma as a major impediment—if not the single greatest obstacle—for people seeking help for problematic substance use. At every intersection (institutional, cultural, individual) stigma is interwoven with, works through and is reproduced by racism, neoliberal class and housing structures, for-profit medicine and the criminalization of substance use.

There is no way to model or design interventions to address stigma as it actually functions in this society without addressing the still accelerating “War on Drugs” and these other issues. Indeed, public officials and politicians often euphemistically talk about “stigma” to avoid directly acknowledging and addressing the public health consequences of prohibition. It is not that we should refuse to tackle discrete issues until we have the capacity to transform these systems (we urgently need to make whatever gains we can), but that the state-manufactured deadlock makes it impossible to clearly delineate their attributes and effects. Our social science is hamstrung by ad hoc pseudo-concepts and working fictions. We are wandering between mirages.” 

We are a population that has suffered and continues to suffer under the lash of biopolitical, necropolitical, and psychopolitical forms of power that diffuse into society through capillaries of discipline, surveillance, and juridical institutions that constantly appropriate the language, ideas, interventions, and rationale of the recovery movement; thereby engulfing and subsuming these within the bosom of inherently flawed systems. In doing so, these systems strip the revolutionary potential of care, kinship, solidarity, collaboration, and compassion that are the basis of our life and work in this space. These systems then offer back to us a Justice-Like product, fresh for new markets and consumption. This systemic sleight of hand is the source of rage that you feel when a client dies alone in some dingy bathroom after months of progress under your care.

The systems that define, delimit, and frustrate our work are also the first systems to capitalize on the ingenuity and goodwill of our community. While at the same time, agents of these systems pay lip service in the language of social justice. Therefore, we must heed what Jon has taken the time to illuminate for us: these systems reproduce stigma, oppression, exclusion, and brutality. Even the most cautious and socially aware forms of engagement with the current system will always already further reproduce oppressive power, by legitimating, reifying,. and promoting a flawed system built upon marginalization, profit, and puritanical judgments. What we choose to do with that knowledge is up to us. The reproduction of institutional oppression is well studied and often written about by critical feminists, Indigenous scholars, Black liberation, and political revolutionaries.

Perhaps our intellectual, collaborative, and political futures lay elsewhere, other than trying to work within these systems which resist change at every turn? Well, our first duty then, is to be found in educating ourselves about history, about other struggles, and about the ways power is accumulated, exercised, and embedded within the social matrix of society. It is only then, that we may see a way forward that is not obscured, or confused by the forces that weigh in on us.

Copyright © 2025 Recovery Alliance Initiative
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram