Recovery Careers: the quality of care and life

Recovery Careers: the quality of care and life
12th International EWODOR Symposium
University of Stirling, Scotland: 19th – 21st October 2009

Here is my presentation for Tuesday 20th

‘My name is Annemarie Ward and I am a person in long-term recovery, which to me means that I haven’t had a drink or a drug since August 13th 1997. Recovery has given me a new life, a new direction, and has helped me to find the passions in my life that were absent before I came into recovery.

My story begins like many others who have been either randomly plucked, lucky, blessed, or in my case desperate enough, to find themselves in recovery.

As a child, I didn’t fit into my own skin. I felt less than everyone and everything from the beginning; I was a stranger in my own family. In the home where I grew it is my truth that I experienced physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I do not say this for sympathy, it is quite simply fact.

I am aware now after many tears and years in recovery that because of the abuse, I never learnt how to feel my feelings. Of course, even if I had felt my feelings, there was no way I was allowed to communicate them.
Even as a small child, I always felt like I was the problem – that somehow, I was flawed, defective, that there was something wrong with me.

Alcohol, along with the many other drugs I used until the age of 25, was my saviour, my respite, my solution. I genuinely believe that had I not found that mind-altering substances that took away my fear, pain, and complete inability to feel normal, I would not be alive today.

Of course, whilst chemicals gave me something, they also took away any chance I may have had to deal with the issues that preceded their use in the first place.

I would ask you to consider the fact that booze, hash, cocaine, heroin, gas, deodorant, speed, LSD, ecstasy and a few other mood-altering substances were truly my, albeit it unconventional and somewhat injudicious, reprieve from a life I had no way of living and coping with.

Maintaining my recovery has been a constant focus as I find new tools and resources to help me keep the life I now enjoy to be a healthy and dedicated one.

Over the years, I have been introduced to the growing recovery advocacy movement, and have the honour of working with Wired In as their Recovery Co-ordinator for Scotland. This allowed me to expand my world of recovery and travel all across the country to work with hundreds of recovery advocates and to help organize people in recovery.

I truly believe that the resources that were available to me should be available to anyone, as recovery housing, mutual support groups, advocacy opportunities, and ongoing therapy are all a part of my story of recovery. I will continue to fight to get the help for those who need it most!

I have been fortunate to travel and expand my view of what recovery is all about, and know that millions of people in recovery are serving as productive members of society who have fought barriers themselves, and are real human beings rather than just statistics.

I encourage anyone who is in recovery to tell their recovery stories to anyone who will listen to our successes. The more we put a face and a voice on an issue, the more real it becomes to others.’

When we march in Glasgow next year we march not in supplication but in service; not asking for something, but offering something; not advocating for ourselves, but for others; not acting as individuals, but in communion; and not seeking solutions through formal institutions but through our own communities.

Arthur Frank, noting the propensity to call those who have lived through life-threatening illnesses “survivors,” casts his vote for the term “witnesses” – the latter suggesting the responsibility to tell others what happened. Perhaps there is a day in the future when, with diminished stigma, all recovering and recovered people will have the choice to be a recovery witness.

What would be the impact upon my country or yours if it were to experience thousands of voices of recovering people, with the influence of each witness spreading outward like the spreading ripples of a rock thrown into water?

Erving Goffman, in arguably the most famous essay on stigma ever written, noted the toll stigma takes on the stigmatized. He reported how the autobiographies of such people often describe finally reaching a “state of grace” where they no longer felt a need to pass and were able to accept themselves as whole persons.

Senator Harold Hughes, two years before he died, spoke out on the effect “passing” had on others.

We in recovery have been part of the problem. We have both accepted and perpetuated the stigma that kept us from getting help and that has killed millions of addiction disease victims. By hiding our recovery, we have sustained the most harmful myth about addiction disease: that it is hopeless.

And without the examples of recovering people, it’s easy for the public to continue thinking that victims of addiction disease are moral degenerates – and that those who recover are the morally enlightened exceptions.

We are the lucky ones – the ones who got well. And it is our responsibility to change the terms of the debate, for the sake of those who still suffer.

The New Recovery Movement is declaring that it is time for a vanguard of recovering people to stand up and announce their presence in this culture – NOT as members of any identified recovery fellowship, but as members of a larger recovery community.

The vulnerability of a recovering person is magnified when they stand alone under a media spot-light; the strength of recovering people is enhanced when they stand together in such numbers that no spotlight can focus on one face or fully encircle them.

This might be called the power of the plural that has long marked addiction recovery: the discovery that what cannot be achieved alone can be achieved together. This invitation today explicitly includes family members in recovery.

Even those of us who have lost loved ones to addiction must become more than saddened spectators of such loss. We must find a way to tell our lost person’s story wrapped within our own story. We must witness for them as well as ourselves.

WHY

Because it is time for “addiction treatment” agencies to become “recovery agencies.” This means that treatment agencies need to shed their models of acute intervention in which severe and persistent alcohol and other drug problems are treated as if they were a broken arm or a bacterial infection.

It is time the focus shifted from brief episodes of acute intervention to models that reflect an understanding of, and focus upon, the long term recovery process.

RECOVERY-ORIENTED SYSTEMS OF CARE

One function of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement will be to influence professionally-directed addiction treatment toward a more recovery-oriented system of care.

Briefly, this will entail such changes as:

• The Integration of medical/psychotherapy model of treatment with community development models of recovery
• An aggressive approach to eliminating personal and environmental obstacles to recovery (“recovery priming”)
• The reconceptualization of treatment from that of the first line of response to addiction to a last resort – a safety net for those requiring resources beyond indigenous recovery support systems, e.g., family and extended family, the church, mutual aid groups
• A shift from time-limited acute interventions to long-term recovery management – a shift from treatment planning to recovery planning – and the abandonment of such concepts as discharge and aftercare.
• A shift in locus of service delivery from the treatment institution to the natural environment of the client, and
• A shift from a hierarchical (expert-patient) helping model to a partnership (sustained recovery management) model.

Many of us experience a need to “reclaim our voice” because in the past we had multitudes of professionals, and social and religious and political reformers speaking about us, but rarely have our first-person voices been heard without the filter of professional/moral interpretation.

The New Recovery Advocacy Movement is in part a declaration that we recovering people should be speaking for ourselves. We should be playing a part in shaping the knowledge base of addiction medicine and addiction counselling as well as having a role in shaping social policies that affect the lives of addicted and recovering people.

It is in the transition from personal recovery to social/political advocacy that recovering people discover the “connection between telling their stories and changing the world.”

Through our addiction, we have wounded ourselves, our families and our communities. In gratitude for the gift of recovery, we declare our responsibility to manage our own recovery, to make restitution for the injuries we have inflicted, to carry a message of hope to others, and to contribute to the larger health of our communities.

The leadership of this New Recovery Advocacy Movement should be authentic, and what I mean by that is the leadership should come from those in recovery and their families.

But technically, what is most important is that recovering people and their families choose their own leaders and that those leaders remain responsive to this constituency.

Recovery for me means that I acknowledge and accept how well my reliance on various substances worked over the younger years of my life and that I am not ashamed of my previous dependence or need for them.

I would also like to point out that at no time did I ever abuse these substances. They were in fact the only tools I had access to, and because of that I held them in very high regard and treated them with the utmost respect.

Recovery has taught me that when I am the abstinent addict, I am looking for a quick-fix for my particular problem with life that day. Whereas when I am in recovery, I have a desire to seek out and I expect to find a new way of living without the need for any substances in my life.

For me, in my early recovery, there was a fundamental misunderstanding that abstinence cured problems such as not coming to in a stranger’s house, paying bills on time, and showing up for work on time.

But it wasn’t long before I realised that most of the unmanageability of my previous lifestyle was quickly resolved and I needed to address the underlying causes of using mind-altering substance in the first place.

This is my understanding of recovery and it is an ongoing process. These ‘underlying causes’ infiltrate everything from my attitude and reactions, to my beliefs and values. It is these things that are constantly being re-evaluated and measured against a rigorous self-inventory process, which insists that if I wish to remain in recovery there are no days off.

Yes, it is incredibly hard work, but the rewards are beyond my wildest dreams.

I and many others have a life today that the child in us never even dared to dream about.

I have proved to myself that not only am I worthy of love and respect, but that if I am not getting it then I have to protect myself by sometimes painful actions, like letting go of some family members and old friends.

I have learned to love without fear of rejection and for loves own power.

I have a level of understanding and forgiveness for human frailties and compassion to oversee and get me though whatever life brings to me today. I have proved to others that I am good enough, and in that proof over time believed in the reflection they project ‘some days’.

I have learned in recovery that anger is a healthy emotion if I channel it correctly, and that the sense of injustice that is always with me can also be used to help others.

I have came through some ‘character building’ events in my 12 years of recovery, including a chosen period of poverty in order to gain a masters Degree, giving birth to a son on my own, and burying close family members, some who were too young to die and some whose deaths have left the family without an anchor.

I have also had to redefine friendships from my using days and luckily still having some in my life today.

Finally, falling in love several times and finally meeting the kind gentleman and gentle man I will spend the rest of my life with. To know that my son and future children will never see me under the influence, and that I can equip them with the tools of my recovery for their lives, is probably the most wonderful and valuable gift of all.

In essence, to finally know that I am a clever beautiful young woman who deserves to be happy, and if I want happiness it is up to me to define it and go get it, this to me is my recovery.

Thank you for listening and allowing me to remain in your service today with a grateful and overwhelmed heart.