Defintion of Recovery

Although I graduated from school over a year and half ago, I am very new to the field of addiction counseling. The job I am currently in I am really considering as my "first" job in the field, mainly because I feel like I am still getting some significant mentorship in building the style of counseling I want to provide. The first position I held, I worked about 12-20 hours per week. I ran a group and saw some people individually. My time was so tight, my main focus was on getting all the documentation done since I wasn't there full-time. I think there was also a slight overconfidence of my employer that I could just be out there, 100% on my own with minimal supervision. I don't mind being independent; however, being so new in the field, I might have needed a little more of a guiding hand to develop some additional skills. 

Initially, when I started at this position, it was a little disheartening to me that my level of experience was brought up and generally not in a positive light. I felt like I was a little further along in my skill set than I might actually be. Wisconsin requires more supervision of its counselors than MN. I didn't care for that initially, but, now, I am so grateful for the extra time and mentorship. I also have the benefit of challenging me to grow beyond my own personal knowledge of addiction treatment. There is a difference between being a professional in the area of addictions counseling and my own personal recovery. It can be really easy in the beginning to rely on my own recovery journey as the blueprint for my clients. However, there are far more clinical interventions available and many more ways to define recovery than my personal definition of recovery. I required inpatient and outpatient treatment. Not everyone does. I needed a lot of outside accountability. Some people have great internal motivational means and don't need the threat of license revocation to get sober.

When I first started in graduate school, I had my own beliefs about the definition of recovery. Recovery means that a person no longer uses substances AND reconstructed a post-use life that was worthwhile for that person. That is what I did, right? I stopped drinking and then used every single last DBT skill I learned to develop, as Marsha Linehan puts it "a life worth living." Because I participate in AA, abstinence only is the understanding in AA for full recovery. The steps are designed to look at the problems, address the problems, fix the problems and then help others. Also, not a bad blueprint. Did I believe in harm reduction? Not really, it wasn't recovery. Did I believe in any other definition of recovery other than my own? I can honestly say, I didn't believe in much other than AA and total abstinence. 

As graduate school went along, I started learning more about alternative approaches to recovery. We spent much time on counseling approaches. Person-centered, Motivational Interviewing, Gestalt, Freud, Solution Focused, short-term, long-term, and on and on. I started realizing that maybe recovery was more than just one thing, just one approach. We started talking about alternative recovery programs like SMART recovery, Celebrate Recovery, Faith-based, Rational Recovery, traditional psychotherapy and a few others. It took me a while to stop seeing the information presented to me as "something that wouldn't have worked for me". Addiction is so complicated and permeates into so many areas of life, it was a little pretentious of me to take a stance of a one size fits all. Or that one way, one program, one approach is the only means to achieve a goal.  

Since I have started working in my current position, I have been really challenged in a great way to push beyond my own recovery and expand what recovery can look like for other people. Person-centered/motivational interviewing approaches ask me as the counselor to fully respect where the client is at in their journey of recovery. I am asked to put them in the driver seat and have them develop a plan they want to be invested in to achieve their goals -- not mine. When I learned about this in grad school, I was a bit hesitant at first. I kept thinking, "my brain was so sick, I needed someone to tell me what to do and how to do it. I needed someone to put together the pieces for a while because I just couldn't think straight." Again, I was attempting to reject something based on what I thought would or wouldn't work for me. And while true, I was not always thinking straight, my DBT counselor often used this motivational technique. She would ask me, what do I want? What would make my life more valuable to me? What would help me to find hope again that I could really do this? She never told me which skill I should use. She never told me that my goals were too small or too insignificant. If I found even the littlest thing that I thought was interesting or was willing to change, we worked on it together. She was my guide to helping me open my eyes to what I was changing and what I wanted to work on in the future. I just hadn't really seen it like this until just a little while ago. As the professional, she guided me with the idea of finding something that kept me focused on the present and the future. 

Defining recovery is a really challenging thing. It's not about not using. Oh boy, I tried that and my life was worse than when I was drinking all the time. Is it about being involved with support groups? Not exactly. It is something I recommend to my clients and not always AA/NA. Addiction is a lonely place and it feels like no one really understands. Finding that support is so important. Treatment was the first time I was surrounded by people who understood the insanity of my life. They understood what it was like to say I was never going to drink again and drink within 2-3 hours. They understood what it was like to hate and love alcohol at the same time. They understood that I wasn't a horrible, terrible, worthless person; I was a sick person with a complex disease that needs to be address so I can find that person of value again. People are able to find recovery support outside of AA/NA at church, in the community, through therapy, through sober activities. I mainly encourage people to find others in recovery because there are few things better than being understood by another person on a very deep level that is often hard to articulate to others who haven't suffered from addiction. It is also important to have quality people in one's life regardless of their addiction history. Some of my greatest friends are not in addiction recovery. They respect my journey and my limits. They also support other areas of my life my spiritual journey and my fun journey. They are just good friends who love me regardless of my addiction.

My personal definition of recovery is first and foremost not drinking. In my mind, I cannot do anything worthwhile if I am drinking. Recovery is also about leading a life of humility and helping others. I think I was always motivated to help other people. Even before having an addiction, I wanted to help other people. I thought about majoring in psychology in college for a short while. I had wrote my application essays for college with the intention of majoring in nursing. Both of my parents were deeply involved with giving careers and also giving back to the community. I felt a strong sense of urgency for many years to continue with that tradition. I latched on to that in early recovery because I wanted to be the person I used to be who valued giving back. It was very helpful to create purpose. As my recovery became stronger, I took that desire to help others to a higher level with sponsoring people and ultimately going into this field. 

Recovery for me is also taking care of my mental health. I definitely had issues with anxiety and depression for many years prior to my addiction taking hold. For some reason when I was growing up, I just didn't want to say anything about it. Maybe it was the "I am too cool for school" high school years that I didn't want to admit something was wrong. On some level, I thought maybe I was just this way -- this was my personality. I had a hard time admitting the difficulties that I was experiencing. When my mom would try to talk to me about it, I would run away like the roadrunner from the cartoons. Of course, when I got into addiction, my mental health spiraled out of control to all new levels. I was given meds but medications do not work if you drink with them. They are counteracting each other. I remember clearly making a decision to stop the medication because if I drank with them I got a headache. Stop taking the meds, stop the headaches. Yup, that is addiction thinking for ya! In recovery, I try to pay attention as much as I can to my current mental health status. Ups and downs are natural and it's not going to be perfect. However, despite some big challenges, I have worked with my providers to stay on top my mental health the best I can.

In early recovery, once my mental health was stabilized, I started finding some purpose in sobriety and finally surrendered to the fact that my recovery requires me not to drink, everything took a very different turn. My outlook changed. When I try to explain to people what happened when I hit my first year of recovery, I usually say "It was like I was able to take one big sigh of relief and relief actually stayed." I have to admit, I struggle to exactly explain it. There was some internal struggle that stopped. There was some inner conflict that was resolving. From a scientific side, my brain chemistry was finally starting to even out for good. My medications were probably finally working at an optimum level. On a psychological level, I was armed with more skills than I had ever had. I was content at my job for the most part. I was settled into my new routines and structure. It was like I didn't have to try so hard just to live. I had learned it was ok to be happy. 

Professionally, I am working to expand my working definition of recovery beyond my personal definition. I still carry some hard and fast ideas about drug and alcohol use once addiction sets in, but it is certainly not my place to try to jam my clients into one mold. When we look at harm reduction which on a simple level is minimizing the negative impact of use on one's life. If a person is able to decrease their use from 18 beers to 3 beers per day, by some people's standards, this is not good enough. We are aiming for abstinence. For me, 3 beers a day is impossible so why would it be possible for this person? However, there are many people who don't drink excessively once they have one, so should I be requiring everyone on the planet to not drink at all? Just as addiction is complex, so is the definition of recovery. Here is SAMSHA take which I think is a good start: http://www.samhsa.gov/recovery

I look forward to the next year at this job. Whether I want it or not, I require weekly supervision because I am "in-training" as far as WI's counseling board is concerned. One of the things I loved about my career in nursing was the constant opportunities to learn new things. I was so excited to be in transplant because there is something new everyday. Now, with my weekly supervision and also my position, I getting that opportunity to learn and really be mentored in such a supportive way. I am so energized by that. In fact, I think I need it in order to be content with my job. The last piece that is very important in my recovery is an attitude of gratitude. I absolutely need to be grateful each and every day that I don't drink. I need to be grateful for the opportunity that my life has presented me with since getting into recovery. I need to be grateful for all that have. I pray every night for the still suffering addicts and anyone who is suffering in life. As you will see in the above mentioned article about recovery, hope is the foundation of it all. I pray for those still suffering that they continue to find and have hope that there is something better. 

Peace out!
J

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