Interesting Phone Call

The caller on the LifeRing 800 line identified himself as a 25-year member of AA, and one of the best-known speakers on the West Coast AA circuit. He said he happened to be in a recovery bookstore and my book (Empowering Your Sober Self) "jumped out at him" and be bought it and, over the next 24 hours, read it straight through. "I want to start a LifeRing meeting," he said. "I've been reading recovery literature for 30 years and I've never picked up the phone and called before."

He's going to contact some of the people he knows at local treatment centers to see about getting a room and referrals. I advised him he might run into some resistance with some of his AA friends. He said he is ready for a new challenge. We'll talk some more. He's aiming to open the doors of a new LifeRing meeting in September.

And now, Liability Insurance

LifeRing Treasurer Robert Stump reports that the whole LifeRing network is now covered by a general commercial liability policy. 

We now have a NIAC Commercial General Liability Insurance Policy covering the fifty states and Canada. It became effective 5/11/09 and will last one year. This policy will cover any liability and/or property damage  that might occur at any of your weekly LifeRing meetings. Personal injury and property damage are up to the limits of the policy stated here.    

 The following is a highlight of some of the coverage:

• General Aggregate                                           $2,000,000
• Products-Completed Operation Aggregate           2,000,000
• Personal & Advertising                                       1,000,000
• Each Occurrence Limit                                      1,000,000
• Fire Damage (Any One Fire)                                 500,000 
  
• Medical Expense (Any One Person)                       20,000 

The insurance policy will be on file at the Service Center in Oakland. For any questions please contact the Service Center, service@lifering.org or me, Robert Stump at CFO@lifering.org

This policy won't make any difference to most LifeRing convenors, because we've never had a claim or are likely to ever have a claim, but in a few cases it will make the difference between having a meeting or not having it.  Some churches and other meeting room providers absolutely require organizations to have such insurance.  Well, now we have it.  If you are a convenor for whom this is an issue, you will need a copy of the Declarations Page to show the meeting room provider.  Contact Robert at CFO@lifering.org for a copy.

This policy is also another part of the answer to the question sometimes asked: what happens to the money we send in to the Service Center.  

His Excellent Adventure

The LifeRing Expo May 9-10 is already fading into memory.  You can read the quasi-'official' wrap-up I wrote on the lifering.org (aka unhooked.com) website, with some photos by Karen Ivy, here.  But to really get the flavor of the event, particularly for a traveler who came a considerable distance, you have to read "My Excellent Expo Adventure," by Craig Whalley, here.  Craig's account is all the more interesting because he is mainly an online participant -- he is listmeister of two lists and online contact for a third -- and does not have a face-to-face meeting he can go to.  What's it like when online participants meet face to face for the first time?  Craig writes well, and has a good eye for the quirks and foibles that make people human and lovable.  Worth reading.  It would be good if more people followed Craig's example and wrote such journals.

Partners: Push/Pull

Some of the calls to the LifeRing 800 line are from people who are on the edge of their sanity. I try to make it clear at the outset, gently but firmly, that this is not a crisis hotline and that I'm not a counselor or a doctor, and have no qualifications to offer advice.

This gentleman was talking through tears and sobs. What was the problem? He has a friend, a very good friend, a wonderful person (when he's sober) who broke up with his wife, got drunk and high on pot, and came over to the caller's house and did more drinking and pot smoking there, and invited the caller to go for a drive with him. The caller had made it very clear to the friend that he did not allow drinking and pot smoking in his house, and that he was absolutely not going to get in the car with the friend driving under the influence. But the friend had completely disrespected the caller's wishes, and now the friend was angry at the caller for his 'negative attitude.' Hence the tears.

After repeating that I had no qualifications to offer advice, I told the caller that I was not surprised at his friend's behavior, that I had done similar things when I was in my addiction, and that (now that I was sober) I also kept my house free of alcohol or drugs and I also would never get into a car driven by somebody under the influence. The caller had done exactly what I would have done under the circumstances.

Still, the caller was not consoled. He loved this friend and was terribly upset at the thought of losing this friendship. This was really a wonderful person when sober. What should he do?

After repeating a third time that I had no qualifications to give advice, I suggested that the caller might adopt a push-pull attitude toward his friend. When the friend is sober, pull. Engage him, involve him, enjoy him. But when the friend is drinking/using, push. Firmly maintain the wall between yourself and him, disengage, disinvolve, stay cold, stay away. Don't attack him, don't give him advice (except in the most passing, casual, matter-of-fact way), don't try to change him or convert him. Eventually, when you have been consistent, your policy may work some changes in him. You may reinforce, with your "pull," the sober part within him, the wonderful person that he is when sober. You may disempower, with your "push," the other him, the part of him that is in love with alcohol and other drugs.

Or, you may lose him as a friend. That happens. Prepare yourself for that possibility by looking around, even now, at the other people in your life that you could be friends with.

Somehow, that made sense to the caller. It offered a way forward. He stopped crying, his voice returned to normal. I concluded by reminding him that my advice was worth exactly what he paid for it. He gave a little laugh, and we ended the conversation.

Another door opens by a crack

A few weeks ago, as I reported elsewhere, I was invited to speak about LifeRing at Mountain Vista Farm, one of the oldest rural inpatient treatment programs in California. Mountain Vista's reputation is that of a citadel of the 12-step approach. Yet there was genuine interest in hearing about the LifeRing approach, and my presentation appeared to resonate with quite a few of the counselors in attendance.

Now comes an invitation to speak about LifeRing at another well-known bastion of the 12-step approach, the Henry Ohloff program in San Francisco. I will be addressing staff at the outpatient center on June 2. Like Mountain Vista, this program is not ready to host a LifeRing meeting, and it may be quite a while before the treatment protocol opens up to the reality that there are many roads to recovery. But meanwhile, there are staff members in these tradition-bound programs who have their eyes and ears open for new developments that may help some of their clients.

This is certainly a welcome sign. If I ask why it is occurring, the answer is that patients/clients are driving it. In at least 80 per cent of the cases where we are contacted by a treatment professional and asked for more information about LifeRing, a patient or client was the driver. A patient or client introduced the professional to LifeRing literature or the LifeRing web presence, or informed the professional that he/she was attending LifeRing and that it was helping.

And even when an individual patient or client is not directly the driver, in the sense that he or she located LifeRing and put LifeRing on the professional's radar screen, it is still patients/clients who drive the process passively, by voting with their feet when the professionals only offer an approach that does not work for them. A treatment program that only offers the 12 steps and nothing else is going to experience, sooner or later, the reality that 80 per cent of newcomers to AA walk away within 30 days (and 95 per cent within a year).

While few treatment programs retain a patient as long as a full 30 days -- the average stay at one nominally 28-day program I know is around 10 days -- the client resistance to 12-step may well show up from Day One of treatment. If the program has nothing else to offer, it's going to lose clients earlier than if it offered choices. Monomodal treatment translates into high patient turnover. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.

And so, the wheels turn, and sooner or later a call goes out to LifeRing, or another alternative approach. Quite a few LifeRing convenors now have had the experience of explaining LifeRing before audiences in treatment programs. To be sure, it's far too early to proclaim a tsunami, but if we compare the interest in LifeRing from treatment programs ten years ago and now, we're almost in a new era. Ten years ago, most minds were closed and we couldn't get in the door. Today, we're frequently in the embarassing situation of getting requests from a program director to start a meeting, and not having a convenor to take the room. It's a problem, but it's a better problem to have.

Where are those Documents When You Need Them?

The convenor of a LifeRing meeting at a nearby hospital called in a voice filled with anxiety:  

"The facilities coordinator has kicked us out of our meeting room because we haven't filed an application to renew our room permission.  I didn't even know we had to do that!  Now they want a bunch of documents about LifeRing -- a mission statement, and a 501-c-3.  What are they?  Do we have that?"

Yes, we have that.  

We have our Mission Statement in two formats.  One is the Meeting Charter (every meeting should have one) that you can download from the website here.  That's a simple, one-page statement in a decorative format suitable for posting, should you wish to.  If that doesn't impress the facilities czar sufficiently, you can hand them a copy of the LifeRing corporate charter, downloadable from here.  That's an official State of California document with the state seal, showing that we're chartered as a nonprofit public benefit corporation.  

The "501-c-3" is a document from the federal tax people, the IRS, certifying that LifeRing is a charitable entity, so that donors who make gifts to LifeRing are entitled to deduct the gifts from their income taxes as charitable contributions.  The document comes in the form of two letters from the IRS.  The first is our initial determination letter, saying that we're classified as a charity provisionally for four years.  The second is the renewal letter, saying that our charity classification is now permanent.  You can download the first letter here, the second letter here. 

In case you lose this blog post with its links, you can find this set of papers again easily by going to the home page of the LifeRing website, and in the menu on the left, click "About LifeRing" (near the bottom).  On the "About" page submenu, click on "LifeRing Documents."  Bingo!  

Choices Abound -- but let's get it right

"Choices abound to help you stay on the path to recovery" is the upbeat title on a Jan. 7 story by Jodi Mailander Farrell, posted on the Sober24 blog.  She leads off with that wonderful 1944 quote by Bill Wilson that's also a tagline on www.unhooked.com: "The roads to recovery are many."  

Another nice quote is: "There are not just 12-step programs anymore," spoken by Pat Taylor, executive director of Faces & Voices in Recovery.  F&VR is an advocate of the new recovery model charted by William L. White and others, reviewed here and in my New Recovery blog, and it's a good sign to hear Taylor say it.  Was the echo of Dorothy's line, "We're not in Kansas anymore" intentional?

Among the options Farrell includes is peer-to-peer counseling at recovery centers, pharmacological treatment, and non-religious groups.  I was naturally very pleased that, under this last heading, Farrell cites LifeRing.  But I was dismayed to read the next sentence:  

"LifeRing Secular Recovery, a California-based nonprofit, bills itself as the anti-12-Step approach."

That's just flat wrong.  Farrell must have us confused with some other group.  We have never "billed ourselves" as "anti'" any other recovery approach.  Although our approach differs in some fundamental ways from 12-step, we are not "anti" 12-step or anti-anything else that helps some people get sober.  We specifically bar attacks on any other recovery approach during our meeting hours.  About a third of our membership also participates in 12-step groups, and that's fine.  We are not about negating other approaches.  We are about adding to the range of choices available to the recovering person.  

In my forthcoming book, Empowering Your Sober Self: The LifeRing Approach to Addiction Recovery,  I begin by taking note of a central fact that emerges from solid statistics and from widespread clinical experience:  only a small minority of people who start in AA stick with it.  (At the end of one year only five per cent are still attending, and not all of those are sober.)  I then go on to outline the LifeRing approach , suggesting that more people will get sober if there are more different roads for them to walk on.  Much later in the book (Ch. 5 of 7) I ask why so many people walk away from AA after trying it, and I suggest that one big turnoff is the doctrine of powerlessness, which derives from one particular and widely rejected stripe of theology.  I also criticize some versions of the disease concept and an exaggerated emphasis on genetics.  But to criticize some of the theoretical foundations of the 12-step approach in a book is not to become "anti" the whole organized 12-step effort.  No matter how wrong-headed I think some of the 12-step theory is, the 12-step organizations remain social groupings where (mostly) sober people gather, and it's fundamental to my understanding of recovery that any gathering of sober people is a good thing and deserves support.  

Unfortunately the blog post where Farrell's story appears doesn't allow for reader comments.  So I've posted my remarks to Farrell's Facebook page (incidentally, I had to join Facebook to do so (groan, more computer time)) and I've asked her to please post a correction.  

Farrell's paragraph on LifeRing goes on to say:

The group’s meetings encourage give-and-take dialogue with no religious overtones, as opposed to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) practice of uninterrupted monologue.

That's true enough, but again the phrase "as opposed to" puts an unnecessary edge on things.  There are people who like "uninterrupted monologue" and it works for them, and they also like LifeRing meetings, where we have dialogue.  It's not necessarily either-or, it's both-and.  The point is not to knock one thing down, but to broaden the range of choices available. 

P.S.  Farrell responded to my email with surprise that this item of hers was picked up just now; she wrote it a long time ago and "It's been out for a long, long time...I'm sure some of it is outdated."  

Recovering from opiate use in LifeRing

A blogger who focuses on recovery from opiate addiction observes that there are now recovery options besides 12-step, including LifeRing, but wants to talk with people who use them to find out what it does for them.

If you are recovering from opiate use in LifeRing, you might want to sign onto that blog and share your experiences.  

LifeRing at the National Association of Addiction Professionals' Conference

From Andy Ross, who represented LifeRing at the annual meeting of the National Addiction Professionals' Association (NAADAC) in Kansas City:

I'm back in Wichita from the National Conference of NAADAC, the National Association of Alcohol and Drug Counselors; combined with the annual conference of KAAP, the Kansas Association of Addiction Counselors; and NALGAP, the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Addiction Professional, which was held last weekend in Overland Park, Kansas. I do not have a count of how many attended though it seemed to me to be not a great many more than attended the last KAAP conference I went to a couple of years ago.

Perhaps the increased cost of travel, the date being the Labor Day holiday weekend or the fact that somehow Overland Park has escaped the world's notice as a premier "destination" city contributed to a turnout that was a bit lower than I expected. Nonetheless, there were several hundred attendees, many from Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and nearby states but also representatives from all of the regional centers in the nation and a few international members.

I arrived at the Overland Sheraton Wednesday, August 27th, around 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. and found the exhibit hall about half full of exhibitors booths already set up or being set up and, with a little fumbling on my part, was able to get the LifeRing booth set up properly.  There were perhaps 40 - 45 other exhibitors, ranging from SAMHSA, NIDA and a few other government agency reps; to a Narcotics Anonymous booth, Hazelden (the Minnesota based treatment program and publishing house), providers of urinalysis and drug testing kits, nutritionists, meditation music and literature providers; really, a whole gamut of services.  The government booths, especially,  provided a plethora of free literature and information. 

The exhibitor's hall was open Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 a.m. and just about everyone attending hit the hall each morning bright and early as that was also where the free continental breakfast, juice and coffee were served each day prior to the beginning of workshops and plenary sessions.  Again, as to the total number of attendees, I can only make a guess but the most I saw, based on a quick guesstimate-headcount at a plenary session, was about 175.  I believe quite a few attendees, especially from Kansas and Missouri, came for only a part of the conference and returned home and they were coming and going throughout the weekend.

Our booth was at a junction of two aisles of exhibitors and directly across from the coffee tables so we had excellent traffic flow past the booth and many people stopped and chatted with me about LifeRing's philosophy and about the nuts-and-bolts aspects of how we operate.  The one pamphlet I wish now I had thought to request more of, specifically, was the LSR Online booklet.  Because the majority of attendees were from the middle of the country, where LifeRing has few face-to-face meetings, our online presence particularly interested many. 

Attendance in the exhibitors' hall was pretty spotty and sparse whenever workshops and meetings were in session which gave me time to browse the other booths and to attend some workshops myself.  LifeRing got an unexpected and unsolicited plug at the workshop of Gary Blanchard, MA, LADC1, whose presentation focused on his book, Success Centered Addiction Recovery Facilitation.  Mr. Blanchard had been by the booth and picked up pamphlets and spoken to me and he was very impressed with LifeRing's approach, which neatly dovetailed with his own "non-traditional" philosophy of addiction treatment. He urged everyone at the workshop to check out our booth and I spoke with most of those in his workshop later in the day as they came by to see what we were about.

Thursday was the busiest day at the booth and Friday morning was a continuation of that but the traffic tapered off by late afternoon.  Saturday, by contrast, was quite light and by early afternoon a number of the other exhibitors were already breaking down their booths or leaving them largely unattended.  In retrospect I wish I had kept a log of how many came by and perhaps taken notes as Marty did in Nashville.  I'll know to do so in the future!  Trusting to memory proved to be a less than adequate method of tracking contacts.   Everyone I met expressed  interest in alternatives to traditional recovery support and also acknowledged the very great desirability of such alternatives. 

Just from memory I did meet with counselors from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Nebraska, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, W. Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Vermont, New Hampshire and Minnesota as well as a man from Kenya and three counselors from Reykjavic, Iceland.  It was an exhausting weekend from which I am still not quite feeling fully recovered; but tremendously rewarding and well worth the time and effort.  I encourage anyone who has the chance to attend similar events to do so and represent LifeRing to the people best placed to refer newcomers to recovery to our philosophy and support!

LifeRing at the APA in Boston

From Kathleen Gargan, who represented LifeRing at the American Psychological Association Conference in Boston:

I'm back from the 2008 American Psychological Association Conference in Boston. This was a fascinating, if exhausting, experience. The exhibition Hall was open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and from 9;00 a.m. to noon on Sunday.

On Thursday and Friday, I handed out 317 "Welcome to LifeRing" pamphlets, and repeated my "In a Nutshell" description of LifeRing: "Can I tell you about LifeRing? LifeRing is a non-profit, secular alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous for people who don't relate to the spiritual or religious focus of the 12 step approach."

I learned quickly how important it was to get the word "nonprofit" out of my mouth as soon as possible, since most of the other booths were there to sell something. On Saturday and Sunday, traffic was much lighter and I gave out 75 pamphlets and visited exhibit booths of treatment centers, as well as academics who were giving papers on addiction related topics.

I also visited the AA and NA booths and was received cordially in each case. By far, most of the people I talked to were very positive about LifeRing. No one wanted to argue about The One True Way to get clean and sober.

One man asked if AA was "threatened" by our group. I told him that it certainly doesn't need to be, and asked him what made him ask such an interesting question. He laughed and said something about territoriality.

Even people I interrupted as they walked by very quickly with the "my destination is more important than anything you could possibly tell me" vibe thanked me for stopping them when they heard about LifeRing.

Several people wanted to know if we had studies to show the effectiveness of LifeRing; some asked if we were related to Rational Recovery, and many people expressed surprise to hear that such a thing as a secular recovery program could exist!

Therapists from Oregon, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Massachusetts and Utah wanted to know if there were face-to-face meetings in their area. Psychologists and students from Kuwait, Egypt, Spain, the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico now know about LifeRing.

I collected cards from several people who want more info One author from Pennsylvania expressed interest in doing an article about non 12 step recovery programs for the state Psychologists' journal. I plan to follow up with an email to each one. It was wonderful to hear so many people say that there is a great need for a secular alternative to 12 step programs.

It seems to me that having a presence at this event automatically gave LifeRing a certain gravity; as if we should be taken seriously as a resource for recovery. There were no representatives from Women for Sobriety, Smart Recovery or S.O.S. Likely this is because it is expensive to participate. (I learned when I arrived that we were

required to rent 10 square ft of carpet, $218.00 for 3 & 1/2 days,

and if we wanted a table and chair, we would need to rent them as well, and for equally appalling amounts)

I also feel that it would be helpful to have more than one person "personning" the booth. Sometimes as I was talking to someone, I noticed 4 more people walking by. Also, as time went on, I found I had less energy to approach people. I would have helped to have had at least one other person there to reach more people and to trade off with. Of course this will not always be possible, but it's something to think about for future conferences.

All in all, I'm very glad I got to do this gig, and I recommend to all!

I'm sure there is pertinent information I am leaving out. Please ask me questions if you want to know more!

-- Kathleen

Letter to Dr. Davis from an Audience Member

[Note: Dr. B.J. Davis, Clinical Director of Strategies for Change in Sacramento, was guest keynote speaker at the 2008 LifeRing Congress in Berkeley May 31 2008. See Congress review page. After his talk, which was met with a standing ovation, Dr. Davis received the following letter from an audience member.]

Dear Dr. Davis:
I attended your presentation at the LifeRing Congress yesterday. I am passing on a monumental and heartfelt thank you for offering me something that you may very well not be aware of. Your efforts helped me release something that although I was not fully conscious of, I have been holding onto for several years now. I struggled with binge drinking, starting in 1998 and came close to death on a few occasions. I was admitted into Clearbrook - a 28 day, 12 step program in Pennsylvania in 2002. I had attended AA meetings prior to that time and it never resonated with me. In fact, the bulk of that which AA stands for always felt completely contradictory to who I am and what I believe.

Quite frankly I found the whole thing offensive, short sighted, and erroneous. At the same time, the aggressive, hostile, shame-inducing, punitive, thoughtless, deeply insensitive, and invalidating tactics of the 12-step treatment center made AA, on its own, seem light-weight, in terms of harm. My time in treatment is truly one of my most disturbing memories - in my adult life, anyway. I hesitate to go too deeply into it because firstly, it would require dozens of pages, but more importantly, I believe that to whatever extent I hold the responsibility for having created the circumstances for which I ended up in treatment, I am also able to create and put for my solution to the same extent. I like that the solutions to all of my life challenges remain in my hands.

Since years have passed since my treatment, I felt that for the most part I had moved beyond my negative and enormously frustrating feelings as well as the deep conflict that I endured during my 28 days. During your presentation, it became apparent that I had not fully let go of that experience and its impact, until today. As I heard you speak the very essence of what I have felt, believed and attempted to express on countless occasions -- during and subsequent to my treatment, I realized that there were still pockets of stored sadness, desolation, deep frustration, and even fear -- fear of once again being misunderstood, or being accused of having a sick-mind, even though I knew (ironically, in my mind) that my mind was precisely the very part of me that held my solution. If my mind had guided my decisions, I never would have had a drink. I was always clear that my poor choices and decisions were directed by emotional conflict, pain, etc. and my mind at those times was abandoned.

To hear you speak so confidently and knowingly of the very things that I too have known, yet have failed to successfully communicate and in some ways, fully embrace, proved to be quite a profound experience for me. Therefore, I have to point out your one inaccuracy, which is that you said at the beginning of your presentation that you did not have anything profound to offer. That proved to be unquestionably false for me. As I heard your wise and insightful words combined with your compassion, understanding, and alignment with universal truths that transcend any short-sighted concepts and beliefs espoused by AA (and other organizations), I somehow felt compelled and safe to release whatever was left inside of me that once felt so hurtful.

Without sounding too dramatic here, I came close to leaving the room during your presentation, because I actually got teary eyed and was fearful I might just burst into heavier tears. Yet my tears did not reflect any current sadness, but rather a release of old sadness, replaced with a renewed feeling of freedom and hope that I had neatly tucked away and fiercely protected. Thank you so much for offering me the segue between having shut myself down and feeling safe and free to re-open certain places in my heart and mind.

Again, I may be treading dangerously close to drama here, but after treatment, I felt much like I imagine a little boy would feel after being punished for doing something wrong that in reality he didn't do at all. Or better stated, being accused and punished for doing something wrong and bad in the face of attempting to do something quite pure, innocent and good. Your insights touched me similarly to how a boy would have felt if a parent believed him for the first time after years of carrying around the guilt and shame for something he never did. That pretty much sums it up for me.

Truly, thanks so much for your courageous efforts, your big heart and your wise mind. I personally think you should have an endless supply of Ben n Jerry's and anything else your heart desires..... and so it shall be.

Sincerely,
(Name Withheld)

The Recovery Skills Format

As noted on the bulletin board, the Ontario (Canada) based group Addictions are Us recently affiliated with LifeRing. Addictions are Us brings their own "Recovery Stills" format where meetings consist of three parts, an open discussion (much like How Was Your Week), a directed topical discussion (like one section of a Recovery By Choice Workbook group), and a carry-over of a past discussion. The group's new brochure describes the format in more detail. Take a look at it here.

What may be of most interest to LifeRing convenors is the rotating topics list for the second section. Most are topics that appear in Recovery by Choice. Some are not. Some convenors may have a list like this – plus topics of local interest – handy for times when their group wants to do something a little different.

Cravings & Triggers
Daily Program
Trust – Using it and re-building it.
Dreams About Using
Setting Goals
How to Handle New Free Time
Expectations
Communication
Importance of Diet
Importance of Exercise
Problem Solving
Small Steps – Large Changes
Journalizing
Anger Management
Identifying Feelings
Allowing for Change in Yourself
Alternative Sources of Support
Cycles in Mood
Stress Management
Helpful Criticism – How to deal with it.
Substitute compulsions / addictions
Dealing with loss
Holidays – Extra plan for handling those special functions
Post Acute Withdrawal symptoms

Convenors seeking to make their own brochures may also find Southern Ontario example illustrative.

Draft of new brochure, for comment

This past week I've given LifeRing presentations to two groups of lawyers, one in Hayward and another one here in Oakland, today. At the Oakland talk a number of social workers were also in the audience. There were expressions of surprise both from the lawyers and from the social workers when I mentioned the recent federal court case that said 12-step groups are religious and that a government official cannot refer a client exclusively to 12-step groups. I was surprised they were surprised -- I kind of thought that maybe lawyers would know this stuff and that social workers would have been told by their employers. Am I naive, or what! Sooo, right after the noontime talk today I drafted up a new LifeRing brochure, called "Choice of Support Groups: It's the Law," and I would appreciate it if those of you concerned with this issue would have a look at it and give me the benefit of your comments on the brochure. The draft is posted for your download here. Please post comments on the brochure here.

The text of the brochure is drawn largely from my earlier blog post about this court case, there. Please post comments about the court decision there. Thank you.

Confrontation Therapy, R.I.P.

Two of my favorite scholars have combined to write a powerhouse of an article that everyone interested in addiction treatment will want to read. William R. Miller, co-author of the Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches (reviewed here), and William L. White, author of the monumental history Slaying the Dragon (reviewed here), have written what hopefully will be an obituary for an era, entitled "Confrontation in Addiction Treatment." It's in Counselor Magazine.

I've posted excerpts and a short comment in the New Recovery Blog; go there.

Email from a Treatment Professional

The head of a hospital-based treatment program where LifeRing meetings started last year sent this email to the LifeRing convenor who had asked to move the LifeRing meeting to a larger room on a different evening:

"All the newest scientific literature in recovery says "one size does not fit all - and should not" implying people should have choices that will keep them coming, as it is difficult to affect change when the patient does not attend. Historically, we have viewed resistance to 12-step programs as "denial". We are moving away from that dogmatic approach to substance abuse counseling. This is my long-winded way of attempting to say I no longer view LifeRing as "competition" to [12-step], especially given the extraordinary acceptance it has had among our IOP patients who would not have otherwise attended AA or NA.

Consequently, I suggest you move the meeting to whatever date and time you wish.... Given what we are learning about substance abuse treatment, disallowing to the change would not be in the best interest of the patients wishing to attend, and therefore hard to justify. ...

So, in summary, I say move the meeting on your own.... Again, congratulations on a very popular treatment alternative that has meant the difference between attending or not attending self-help groups for a large number of our patients."

2008 Congress Coordinator Steps In

I'm delighted to be able to announce that Gillian Ellenby has accepted the position of 2008 Congress Coordinator, effective immediately.

Gillian is a former member of the LifeRing Board of Directors and the former Secretary of LifeRing. She is an active and experienced LifeRing convenor, and has participated in LifeRing Congresses going back to 2002, when she was one of the presenters. She has been involved in all aspects of Congress organizing in the past.

Gillian will be the central go-to person for all 2008 Congress issues. Please contact her at Gillian@ellenby.com.

Education level of CA counselors

CAADAC, one of the California addiction professionals' organizations, has released a membership survey showing, among other things, the highest educational level reached by its membership. It shows that 29 per cent, the largest single category, do not have a junior college certificate or college degree; they have completed unspecified drug/alcohol studies only. Another 18 per cent have a junior college degree. Twenty-eight per cent have a B.A. as their highest degree; 20 per cent have an M.A., and 5 per cent have a Ph.D. Altogether, 47 per cent don't have a college degree; 53 per cent do. The association's membership includes counselors and program administrators. Source.

Get well soon, John G.!

We've received a terrible medical bulletin from John G., the convenor of the LifeRing meeting in Brampton, outside of Toronto. He is going to be starting radiation therapy soon and will have to reduce his activity. If you would like to send him a get-well wish, please address it to John at lifering_recovery@yahoo.ca

Thanks. -- Marty N.

Another professional discovers LifeRing

Received at the LifeRing Service Center today:

I am thrilled to learn of the existence of your organization. I am a Treatment professional that deals every day with patients who have been failed by "old-school" treatment modalities, and completely alienated by 12-step groups. Many of them are legally mandated to attend "sobriety-based self-help groups" but have no options other than AA, etc. or some extremely fundamentalist religious groups. There are a few SMART recovery groups around, but not enough. My particular position allows me to specialize in one-on-one counseling with patients who come through emergency room interventions and might not otherwise access help. I utilize a totally strength-based counseling method, which is obviously completely in alignment with your philosophy.

I would like to get my free copy of "Presenting Lifering" so I can begin to distribute it among my colleagues and possibly support some of my successful patients in forming a group of their own.

My Agency is called [...]. I will be looking at solutions to get my company to invest in a full complement of your literature as a healthy alternative to AA. [...]

Thanks so much. I am excited to get started in expanding Lifering.

Learning from educators: "The Virtues Project"

Teaching kids who have got in trouble with the law and are booted out of the regular schools into alternative schools is a challenging educational assignment. You might think that with these "bad kids," teachers have to be super-authoritarian, try to take the kids' power away, and get them to surrender. Guess what, that doesn't work. By contrast, a highly successful approach in use at the Sacramento County Boys' Ranch begins with The Virtues Project. The secretary who handles the kids' enrollment asks:

Do you know what virtues are? Then she launches into how virtues are the 'good seeds' in us which make up our character. Usually, the student is momentarily dazed, first by an adult in an institution asking him personal questions that aren't tied to his criminal or school history, and secondly, by the word itself -- 'virtue.' Given a few examples, the student then looks over a giant poster listing 52 Virtues and selects -- often with encouragement -- one or two that he feels are his 'strength virtues' and explains why. .... Teachers recognize, acknowledge and reinforce the virtues of students, which forges a vital link and connects with them on a level beyond the stereo-typical teacher-student superior-subordinate relationship. A whole new world of significance is opened up for both teacher and student ... which creates greater student buy-in.

("Forging Vital Links with Students in Alternative Schools," by Brett Loring, in The Journal of Juvenile Court, Community, and Alternative School Administrators of California," Spring 2007, p. 10.) Since adult alcoholics and addicts have so much in common with these "bad kids," I thought that educators' experience with these kids might be relevant somehow ....
.

Once again on the AA dropout rate

Many people are now aware of the statistic that 95 per cent of newcomers in AA drop out during the first year. Out of one hundred who start, at the end of one year, only five are left.

I first learned this statistic from the Bufe volume, reviewed here. Bufe attributed it to AA's own Membership Surveys. However, I drew a blank -- and some hostile looks -- when I visited the AA library up on Riverside Drive in 2005 and asked to see the original survey reports. Since Bufe might be accused of anti-AA bias, I wanted a less impeachable source. Thanks to a very knowledgeable psychology Ph.D., I now have it, and it's very interesting.

Don McIntire of Burbank CA was given access to the AA membership surveys from 1968 through 1996. He is a staunch defender of AA and cannot be accused of negative bias. His article "How Well Does A.A. Work? An Analysis of Published A.A. Surveys (1968-1996) and Related Analyses/Comments" in the Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly (Vol 18, No. 4, 2000) centers on the 5 per cent one-year retention rate and attempts to explain it.

The 95 per cent dropout rate is anything but a statistical fluke. AA's own membership surveys demonstrated the identical pattern, give or take trivial variations, in five successive triennial data collections spanning twelve years. McIntire depicted the trends in a graph (inset) showing a fairly tight braid whose strands are the data sets from different years. The five per cent figure is the average of the five studies.

Most of the attrition, McIntire's analysis shows, comes during the first 30 days. This is not obvious from the graph. The graph begins at 30 days. If you can read the tiny numbers on the x axis, you will see that the bundle of line graphs begins at around the 20 per cent mark. If the graph began at Day One and 100 per cent, the lines would drop almost like a rock.

• McIntire found that an average of 81 per cent of AA first-time attendees dropped out during the first 30 days.

• At the end of 90 days, 90 per cent of newcomers have dropped out; only ten per cent are left. (This gives a new dimension altogether to the "90 in 90" slogan, doesn't it?)

• The attrition curve from 90 days to a full year is, by comparison, rather gentle: from ten per cent to five percent, a relative loss of "only" fifty per cent.

McIntire, who (as I said) is a staunch defender of AA, argues that the attrition during the first 90 days should just be ignored, and that AA should claim a 50 per cent success rate based on the trend from 91 days to one year.

The author's apologetic argument is that the FTA's (first time attendees) who drop out quickly aren't really alcoholics, or aren't really trying to get sober, and so they shouldn't count. Although that has a ring of plausibility for some cases, the author presents no data as to percentages.

AA co-founder Bill W., looking at numbers of this type, asked "What happened to the 600,000 who approached AA and left?" (Reported in White, Slaying the Dragon, p. 139) Despite Wilson's concern, apparently nobody in AA has ever, yet, bothered to try to contact any of the 95 per cent to try to find out their reasons for leaving.

We know from other data that alcoholics who don't do AA can nevertheless succeed in achieving long-term sobriety. In fact, the AA Grapevine has conceded that the majority of alcoholics who achieve the milestone five-year mark do it without using AA. (Vaillant., 1996, 2001)

Consequently, it's extremely unlikely that lack of motivation to get sober accounts for the 95 per cent AA dropout rate. Lack of desire to get sober is undoubtedly a part of the picture, but there has to also be a healthy percentage of the 95 per cent dropouts -- perhaps a majority -- who want to get sober but drop out of AA for other reasons.

McIntire's article never looks at this bigger picture. To do so would be to confront the reality that AA is driving people away who have a sincere desire to get sober (and many of whom will achieve that aim).

Letter to a columnist

The letter below is by Michael Walsh, convenor of the soon-to-be-started LifeRing meeting in Victoria BC Canada. He addresses it to Sharon Kirkey, a columnist who penned an article on alcoholism read throughout Canada, that mentions only AA as a resource.

Dear Sharon,

I am happy to see your latest writings on alcohol however I am dismayed to see that the only choice you provide alcoholics is AA. I have been in recovery for six years, five of which I have been completely clean and sober. I did use AA for the first three years but the religious aspect of the program does not sit well with me and does not sit well for thousands of others. Please see how many times God is used in the steps below. You also say AA is a self-help program which it is absolutely not. The old timers of AA would read that and scoff because they know (in their AA washed minds) that you cannot do anything without God. You are seen as a powerless soul and that your best thinking got you into the rooms of AA.

I know Dr. Cunningham as well as I went through Homewood Health Center myself and was provided an excellent experience.

Sharon, I am not knocking AA right off of it’s mantle but even AA head office in NYC will tell you that their retention rate is only five percent in the first year of one’s recovery. Further, sixty percent of people who go into recovery do so without the use of AA. Bill W is quoted as saying that there are many paths to recovery.

There are many ways in which people recover and I would really like to see people who are going to write a column in which tens of thousands of people read do more research and provide more than one route. It is like Starbucks or Tim Horton’s.

Treatment facilities, drug and alcohol counselors and medical/mental health professionals are actively looking for alternatives for their clients because many do not want to go the AA route or they stop going. Any counselor should tell you that a recovery program is different for everyone and AA is definitely not for everyone. Does anyone ever look into and talk about the failure rate of AA? No!

One such viable alternative group is called LifeRing out of California. It is slowly starting to get the recognition it deserves as major treatment centers in the USA are starting to buy into it’s program. Their website is www.unhooked.com. I am about to start a meeting here in Victoria next month. Vancouver Coastal Health Authority has bought into LifeRing as of late also.

Sharon, you would be doing readers a great service by providing them with more than one choice in recovery. I will also add that Bill W and his partner both died of lung cancer due to smoking cigarettes. Bill W’s last speech showed him being rolled up in a wheel chair with oxygen tank in hand. There is so much tobacco use at AA meetings which is another reason why I do not go.

Thanks for listening and I implore and beg you to please issue a column related to my e-mail to you today. Many people will thank you for that.

Happy season to you.

Michael Walsh

310 – 283 Michigan Street

Victoria, BC

V8V 1R4

250.920.2095

• Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
• Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
• Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
• Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
• Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
• Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
• Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
• Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

Empowerment in Two Minutes

I sat in on a LifeRing meeting the other day with 29 people in it. That's considerably larger than the average LifeRing meeting, but it's normal for this particular group. It convenes during lunch hour at a treatment center. There's a treatment group session immediately afterward in the same room. There's no way to stretch the meeting time. Bottom line, if people are going to get their sober self empowered in this meeting, they each have an average of two minutes for it to happen.

There were times when the meeting was sparkling. The face of the person speaking was animated with feeling. People's eyes were focused on the speaker. There was quick, positive feedback. The convenor added a few choice words. The group gave the speaker an enthusiastic round of applause.

At other times the meeting was flat. The speaker's face was a mask, and their recital was unrevealing. People looked away. There was no response. There was perfunctory applause. The convenor gestured to the next person to go.

I wondered, can we define what makes a good check-in under these circumstances, when time is at a premium? Can we, as convenors, deftly intervene so that the meeting enjoys a larger proportion of the sparkling contributions, and fewer of the flat?

Here's the basic elements of a participant's check-in:

(1) Introduction. (a) Name: "My name is ___________." In many settings, this may be followed by (b) Label: "I'm an alcoholic/addict" and by (c) Time: "I have _______ days clean and sober."

(2) Story. "My week was _________."

(3) Feedback from other participants. "I had a similar experience .... (etc.)"

(4) Conclusion, and transition to next person.

Four simple elements, usually present in any check-in, no matter the length. How can we handle them so that something useful happens in an average of two minutes? Let's see.

(1) Introduction.

(a) Name. If the person forgets to say their (first) name, that's not good. The convenor or someone should ask them to say it. It's good for people to put their names out. Saying your name is a way of declaring membership in the circle, of connecting with the group dynamic. It's a friendly thing.

(b) Label. Whether a person then labels themselves ("I'm an alcoholic/addict") is optional in LifeRing. It's mandatory in some treatment settings and in many 12-step settings, but not here. The glue in LifeRing is the commitment to a common behavior -- abstinence -- and not to any particular label, diagnosis, or theory about what's wrong with us. Research suggests that on the average, people can stay clean and sober whether they label themselves or not. Moreover, in LifeRing it doesn't make any difference whether your "drug of choice" was alcohol or meth or whatever, so there's no need for people to declare whether they qualify for this meeting (alcoholic if AA, heroin addict if NA, etc.). Everybody is welcome. Bottom line, if the convenor senses that people in the meeting are labeling themselves because they think it's required of them, or because they mistakenly think they're in a 12-step meeting, it may be wise to say a few words to indicate to people that it's optional. "In our LifeRing format all we ask is that you say your name; the rest is optional." Save a few seconds; it all adds up.

(c) Time. Many treatment centers and 12-step groups require people to declare, in their introduction, how much clean and sober time they have. In LifeRing, it's definitely optional. In the particular session I observed, the treatment center's format had penetrated into and become part of the LifeRing meeting's format. Each person said their time ("I have 11 days"), and the room gave each person a round of applause for it. After a while that ritual started to feel repetitive, and the applause tapered. A person early in the hour with 5 days would get twice as much applause as a person later in the hour with 10 days. When I convene this kind of short-format meeting, I try to shift these time declarations to the end of their story. True, it's empowering to receive applause for your time. But it's much more empowering for you, and more instructive for the rest of the group, to receive applause for some specific victory you won that got you to this count of sober days. This brings us to the main element of a person's two-minute share, the content or story.

(2) Story. "My week was _________." The dullest, flattest shares here consisted of nothing but an adjective or two: "My week was fine." "My week was bad, but I made it." An adjective or a string of adjectives don't amount to a story. The person who tries to get by with this contribution is not participating. They're not revealing anything about themselves. They're not putting anything out that other people can relate to. The convenor now has to make a quick decision: is this person unclear about what's expected, or is this person refusing to participate? Everyone has a right to refuse to participate, and if that's the case, the convenor and the group have to respect it and go on to the next person. However, it's very rare for a person in a LifeRing meeting to refuse to participate. After all, we're not asking for the story of their life or their innermost secrets or their opinions about some book passage that they haven't read. We're just asking, "How was your week?" The convenor who runs into a participant who says "My week was fine" and then looks to the next person, needs to nudge a little. "So what was the finest thing that happened to you?" "What were your highlights and heartaches?"

LifeRing meetings don't revolve around the recital of life stories, but that doesn't mean the abandonment of stories as such. On the contrary, stories are the heart and soul of the check-in. "How was your week?" is precisely a request for a story.

A hundred years ago, asking for a story probably meant settling in for a half hour or more. Today, people have sat through tens of thousands of stories each told in 30 seconds or a minute. TV and radio commercials are miniature narratives that assume the audience has a limited attention span, and they probably over time generate ADHD-like symptoms in the brains of those who spend much time watching TV. Zillions of amateur videos posted on You-Tube tell their tales in less than two minutes. Bottom line: in our culture, asking people to present a story inside of two minutes or less in a LifeRing meeting is not an unreasonable request. It can be done and it's done all the time.

And what stories people tell! How was my week? My boss assigned me to ladle out the rum punch at the office party, and I did it and I didn't drink. -- I got together with my sober buddy and we watched the Raiders game and didn't drink, for the first time I can remember. -- I drove home and there were my parents in the living room smoking crack. I ran out of the house and got back in my truck and peeled out of there. -- My sister and I talked and hugged each other for the first time since my daughter killed her daughter in a car accident when she was drunk, following in my footsteps. Now that I'm sober, we're talking again. -- I have no money now, nothing at all, and I went to my mom and asked her if I could move back home, and we cried. -- The week has been a roller coaster of feelings. Sometimes I felt ecstatic, other times I thought I was going insane. -- Today is my birthday, and if I make it to bed sober it'll be my first sober birthday since middle school. -- And so on, in infinite variety.

Stories like these, which can be spun in a few sentences, have a three-dimensional vividness that many people in the meeting can resonate with. Mere adjectives -- "my week was fine"-- are barricades. Narratives told from real life are doors and windows that invite people in and create emotional relationships. I feel an emotional bond with a person who tells me a story from their week, even if nothing remotely like the same incident has happened to me; just the fact that they opened themselves up and shared it with me inclines me to view them with respect and attachment. And if I have experienced something similar, the affinity bonds can be quite strong and lasting.

In the brochure "Self-Help Is What We Do" and in other LifeRing publications, there are diagrams showing arrows going between the "S" and the "S" in two people -- reinforcing connections that strengthen the Sober Selves. It's in the telling of real-life stories that these arrows of empowerment issue out of the narrator, fly across the room, and hit their targets in the viscera of the listeners. The LifeRing slogan, "Empower Your Sober Self," has a very broad set of meanings; but in the specific context of a 30-person 60-minute meeting, the process of empowering the sober self flies on the wings of personal narratives, stories.


(3) Crosstalk. Can there be crosstalk in meetings where the average time available is two minutes? My experience is that there can be and should be. When the person has finished their story, if I am the convenor I always look around the room and ask: "Comments? Feedback?" Sometimes no one has anything to say, but often there is one hand, or two, and then more, and webs of connections get spun across the room in several directions. True, with crosstalk, the time allotted to this person may go well over two minutes; but if the topic is interesting and animates the group, that's worth doing. Other speakers will finish in a shorter time and stimulate no crosstalk at all. Two minutes is an average, not a rigid mold. We don't keep an egg timer, an oven timer, or a stopwatch with a bell. As the convenor gains experience, you develop a gut feeling for when to allow a dialogue to go on, and when to cut it off and move to the next person. Frequently the feet of the participants will tell you; if a lot of feet twitch, tap, and twist, it's time to move it.

(4) Conclusion. Psychologists have found that the opening and the ending of a presentation are the most memorable parts, and of these two, the more memorable is the ending. The speaker's vivid narrative generated flashes of sober empowerment all around, but to engrave that experience more permanently in memory, a strong and positive conclusion is necessary. It's here at the end, more than in the speaker's introductory recital of their sober time, that a solid note of applause is called for.

In a two-minute presentation, sometimes the speaker will end on a note that draws a strong audience response. Sometimes a crosstalk contributor will supply the cue for a round of applause in support of the speaker -- for example, "You WILL have a sober birthday today! I'm rooting for you!" If that doesn't happen, the convenor can do a lot of important work here with just a few words. The goal is to frame the speaker's story in empowering terms, as a sober victory. For example, to follow along with the illustrative stories outlined in an earlier paragraph:

"Shame on your boss for making you serve the rum punch. Congratulations to you for surviving that experience clean and sober! You deserve a hand!" -- "That was smart, to get a sober buddy to watch the Raiders game with! And it worked -- the Raiders won!" (Laughter). -- "That's hard, coming home to parents who are smoking crack. I would have done the same as you -- peeled out of there! Let's give him a hand!" -- "I feel really moved by how your family is coming back together thanks to your sobriety. That is so inspiring!" (Applause) -- "Moving back home is hard. But now you have a second chance, a new start. Good for you!" (Applause) -- "You stayed sober even though you were riding an emotional roller coaster. That is awesome!" (Applause) -- "You WILL stay sober on your birthday today, we're all pulling for you!" (Applause)

What is being done here? The convenor is taking the gist of the speaker's story and defining it as a sober victory, as a gain in the power of the speaker's sober self. Sometimes the speaker is aware that her story is a victory, but often she isn't. She may, in fact, begin by feeling distressed; for example, by the emotional roller-coaster ride. Someone in cross-talk may have reassured her that this is a common experience. The convenor can go further and compliment her on sticking to her sobriety despite the distress that she felt; if she can stay clean and sober through this kind of extreme experience, most likely she will do very well with time, when the emotional swings become milder, as they typically will. The convenor is reframing her story in way that builds her confidence.

Reframing for the positive works even if the speaker has just had a disastrous relapse. "I don't have any days clean and sober -- I only have hours." -- "I admire you for your decision to come back into recovery and for being here at the meeting; that wasn't easy. Let's give her a round of applause for that!"

Positive reframing is possible 99 per cent of the time, but not always. In a recent meeting I convened, one person said they were there on a DUI and just had the bad luck to be caught, but they had no problem with alcohol and considered it just another food choice. I probed, optimistically: "So, have you decided that because of the trouble drinking has got you into, you want to give abstinence a try?" The answer was, "No, I have no problem with alcohol and I intend to keep using it." My instant response: "Next person, please; how was your week?"

Note that positive reframing isn't dispensing advice ("You should ____") or otherwise telling the speaker what to do. The convenor is not playing therapist, doctor, or sponsor. All that the convenor is doing is to summarize the speaker's own story in such a way that a sober empowering element in the speaker's own story becomes more visible and more memorable, both to the speaker and to the group. The ownership of the positive element always remains with the speaker.

Ending on a positive note is, of course, the necessary platform for the group's applause. I'm a strong believer in the power of group applause for an individual's sober victories, no matter how small. I watch the faces of people who are being applauded, and most of the time, what shows is genuine happiness. Happiness about one's own recovery is the vital fuel of of progress. Moments of happiness, a few seconds long, may give people the courage to keep going for days or weeks. Sober happiness powerfully expands the sober self and shrivels the addict self inside. So, in this LifeRing meeting with 30 people in recovery (not counting the one misplaced DUI parolee), the group will applaud at least 30 times. Because frequent applause can eventually lead to fatigue, in a meeting of that size I may discourage people from mentioning their sober time at the beginning of their check-in, the usual cue for applause in this environment (see section 1 (c) above). Applauding the count of sober days is good, especially if there's nothing else of substance to applaud ("My week was fine"), but applauding a vivid short narrative is much, much more empowering, both for the speaker and for the group.

At the end of the ring, I will ask the group for one more round of applause, for everyone present, as in the usual LifeRing meeting format. Because of all this clapping, LifeRing hours with 30 people tend to sound more like a pep rally than like group therapy. No doubt, participants in smaller LifeRing meetings -- a comfortable size is 8 - 12 -- have more opportunity to explore their issues in depth. But circumstances don't always permit the small group format. Luckily, the LifeRing process is flexible and scalable. The buzz after the 30-person 60-minute meeting I convened was clear: "Great meeting!" "Really enjoyed that." "Got a lot out of it." "Glad to be here." And they come back. If we pay attention to the basics of the LifeRing process, we can deliver sober self-empowerment in two-minute packages.

I have even experienced the LifeRing format further compressed to serve rooms with 45 - 50 people inside of an hour. LifeRing convenor Henry S., who leads the Thursday evening meeting at the Oakland CA Kaiser CDRP, has honed the short format to a fine art. From down the hall, this meeting sounds like a basketball game: every minute or so, there's loud cheers and applause. It may not be a place for deep, meditative reflection, but it's sober, it's secular, and it's self-help. Moreover, it's consistently popular. As LifeRing grows, we're going to gain more and more experience with participatory formats for larger gatherings.

They found each other in chat

From the convenor of a meeting in Northern CA:

The coolest thing happened at our meeting a couple of weeks ago. One Saturday morning two women who had never attemped recovery, who had never been in a chat room before both found the LifeRing website on Google and both went in the chat room on unhooked.com. They realized they both lived near [our meeting] and decided to come to the meeting and meet. That was day one for them. They have now been to three meetings and both have three weeks of sobriety and are great friends. It 's an inspiration to us all!

More Help from Professionals

This email came to the LifeRing Service Center a couple of days ago:

Hello LifeRing;

I am researching LifeRing and seriously considering getting a meeting started here in ______. ... I am looking for some guidance on how to become a convenor and start a meeting. ... I have 19 months sobriety this time around, almost exclusively without a 12 step program. I'm a participant at my CDRP at Kaiser Permanente. In fact, it is my therapist who suggested looking into starting a meeting.

I am very impressed with what I've discovered so far about LifeRing. I just finished listening to LifeRing 101 on my computer. I just ordered the workbook and "How's your week" from the website. ...

Any help you can give is greatly appreciated.

[Signature]

Note the line, "it is my therapist who suggested looking into starting a meeting." A very similar thing happened a few weeks ago in another city hundreds of miles away from the above: a counselor not only suggested that the client start a LifeRing meeting but set up the room and the time slot.

Another Professional Seeks LifeRing

Received yesterday at the LifeRing Service Center:

This is ___________ the owner of [Treatment Program]. I have space and would like to have an onsite LifeRing meeting on Friday evenings at our site. The ideal time frame for this meeting to start would be at 6pm and end at whatever the typical time frame is for meetings. We can however be flexible about the time if something else works better.

So, I need a facilitator and help getting it set up and listed. I will do anything you want me to do to help with this process. People being treated at our program would be encouraged to attend as well as it being open to the public. There would be no charge for the use of the space, we just want to offer the support group to our clients and the community.

Our only request would be that the room is cleaned up, materials put away, and that the building is locked up when finished.

Please let me know if this is doable and what are next steps. Thank you advance for considering us to provide this important service.

[Signed]

Choice philosophy gets boost

The choice philosophy that LifeRing advocates, and that forms the core of the Recovery by Choice workbook, has received a major boost from two recent publications by well-known treatment professionals.

The first publication, the report of a 2005 recovery conference under the auspices of SAMHSA, the federal agency, contains a summary of recovery principles beginning with the important basic truth that there are many roads to recovery. An excerpt containing the entire summary is in my New Recovery blog here.

The second is a new monograph titled Recovery: Linking Addiction Treatment & Communities of Recovery: A Primer for Addiction Counselors and Recovery Coaches, by William White, MA and Ernest Kurtz, Ph.D. A PDF copy of the whole 80-page essay is here. It's published by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center, a SAMHSA project.

The Preface, by Charles Bishop and Michael Flaherty, summarizes the main point in these words:

This paper’s most important focus is on recovery and the suffering addict’s (client) needs and perspectives as the most important throughout the entire recovery process. This paper emphasizes how each person has both the responsibility for and a philosophy of choice in his/her recovery. Thus, the counselor and clinical treatment system staff become supporting partners along with a rainbow of community-based, non-professional mutual aid recovery fellowships, all working to help the addict. (emphasis added).

Anyone familiar with modern medicine may be tempted to yawn here, because the concept of patient choice and responsibility is by now entrenched and familiar there (source). But much of addiction recovery is still in the Middle Ages, so the notion that the patient has a choice in recovery -- and that this is to be recognized and supported -- is nothing less than revolutionary. What's even more significant is that this recognition comes from two heavyweight authors with solid-gold credentials in the 12-step universe. White is the author of the definitive history of addiction treatment in America, Slaying the Dragon, reviewed here; and Kurtz's Ph.D. thesis, Not God, is one of the classic texts in AA history.

The authors zero in on the subject of choice on p. 19. After a preface that takes note, without comment, of widespread allegations that the 12-step approach does not work for everyone -- a point that virtually every front-line treatment professional would readily concede -- the authors "recommend promoting a choice philosophy and monitoring each client’s ongoing responses to recovery support group participation."

The Choice Philosophy: A choice philosophy is based on the recognition of multiple pathways and styles of long-term recovery and the recognition of the right of each person to select a pathway and style of recovery that represents the individual’s personal and aspirational values. (emphasis added)

Here's what a choice philosophy would look like in the practice of a treatment center:

■ Professional counselors, recovery coaches and volunteers represent the diversity of pathways and styles of recovery.

■ Professional counselors and recovery coaches are knowledgeable about the full spectrum of religious, spiritual and secular recovery support groups and can fluently express the catalytic ideas used within each of these frameworks.

■ Professional counselors and recovery coaches are aware of patterns of co-attendance (concurrent or sequential participation in two or more recovery support structures, e.g., co-attendance at WFS and A.A. meetings, N.A. participation with later transitioning to A.A. as one’s primary recovery support structure).

■ Individuals and their families are educated about the variety of recovery experiences and the legitimacy of multiple pathways and styles of recovery.

■ Informational materials, lectures and structured exercises that people receive represent the scope of recovery support options, e.g., posting all local recovery support meeting schedules on the treatment agency website and facility bulletin boards, giving each client a wallet card with the central contact numbers of local recovery support groups, profiling local recovery support groups in agency/alumni newsletters.

■ Individual choice is respected; individuals receiving services are not demeaned or disrespected for the recovery support strategies they choose; clinical strategies involve motivational interviewing principles and techniques rather than coercion and confrontation.

■ Professional counselors and recovery coaches are encouraged to self-identify and bring to supervision negative feelings they may have about a particular pathway of recovery chosen by a client.

This is an excellent, useful list. Persons shopping for treatment programs might print it out and ask marketing reps to what extent their facility matches this picture. Patients currently enrolled in programs might use the list to advocate for reforms in the way programs are operated. Staff members could bring up points from the list at staff meetings to suggest improvements in patient services. Program administrators could circulate the list for discussion at staff retreats.

The authors go on to raise some of the central theoretical and practical issues in choice philosophy:

Choice and the Stages of Recovery: To implement a choice philosophy, addictions counselors and recovery coaches must reconcile the philosophical and therapeutic value of choice with the growing evidence of how neurological impairments can impair the choice-making abilities of individuals in active addiction and early recovery (Dackis & O’Brien, 2005). The challenge for the addictions counselor or recovery coach is distinguishing authentic choice from what A.A. calls “stinkin’ thinkin,’” what Rational Recovery calls the addictive voice or “Beast,” what Secular Organization for Sobriety refers to as the “lizard brain,” what LifeRing Secular Recovery calls the “addict self” (versus the “sober self”), and what Christian recovery groups refer to as the “voice of the Devil.” Given the dichotomy between the sober self and the addicted self, the question becomes “Who’s really choosing: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?” Some would frame this as separating what each client wants/needs from what his or her disease wants/needs.

One way to partially reconcile this dilemma is to view recovery as a progressive rehabilitation of the will—the power to reclaim personal choice (Smith, 2005). At a practical level, this means that the first day of detox may not be the best time to rely exclusively on client choice. Without rehabilitation of the power to choose and an encouragement of choice, we get, not sustainable recovery, but superficial treatment compliance. To effectively apply a philosophy of choice will require discretion and skill where immaturity, acute psychiatric symptoms, drug impairment and impaired ability to read social cues severely limit choice generation, choice analysis and capacity to stick with any personal resolution. In such cases, we must carefully plot a path between complete autonomy (total choice and clinical abandonment) and paternalism (no choice). Scientific confirmation of this stance is found in a study in which people with severe alcohol problems, recognizing their impaired decision-making capacities, preferred therapist—set goals in treatment; whereas those with less severe problems preferred self-set goals (Sobell, Sobell, Bogardis, Leo & Skinner, 1992).

Creating Informed Consumers: A philosophy of choice is viable only with persons who have the neurological capacity for decision-making, who believe they have the right to make their own choices and who are aware of and can evaluate available service and support options. Creating informed, assertive consumers of addiction treatment and recovery support services can be enhanced by: 1) affirming the service consumer’s right to choose, 2) distributing and reviewing consumer guides on treatment and recovery support services published by recovery advocacy organizations, 3) teaching service consumers how to recognize quality services, 4) encouraging consumers to visit service options before making a decision (versus taking whatever is offered them), and 5) defining the criteria by which the client and service specialist will know if participation in a particular group is working or not working (Bev Haberle, personal communication). Similar considerations need to be extended to educate the family members of those needing or seeking recovery.

There's a lot here, more than will fit into one blog commentary. The authors clearly see the main issues. They have framed the topic in a way that can lead to useful discussion and to therapeutically important program reforms. LifeRing convenors, who have been facilitating the practice of choice philosophy in recovery for a considerable period of time, will have much experience to contribute to this discussion. It is gratifying to those of us who believe that recovery by choice is the wave of the future that these concepts are now being understood, formulated, and endorsed by respected and learned voices in the addiction treatment profession.

LifeRing at CAADAC '07

My plan was to leave home at 6 a.m. and arrive at the conference hotel when the Exhibit Hall opened at 7:30, but I overslept my PDA’s alarm and didn’t arrive at the Marriott in Rancho Cordoba, a suburb of Sacramento, until 8:30. That turned out to be fine. The volunteer at the registration desk quickly found my name tag and I as quickly found the LifeRing table in the Exhibit Hall. The exhibit tables were crammed into the hall like sardines, and there was only room for two of our three pop-up displays. Setup took only a few minutes, and – there being no one in the Exhibit Hall but other exhibitors – I dropped in on the plenary opening session in the large ballroom next door.

There, the keynote speaker, a Dr. Kevin McCauley, a former Navy surgeon now running a private addiction practice in Salt Lake City, was holding forth with a PowerPoint slide show on the disease model of addiction. CAADAC is the California Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, and had chosen a speaker from Utah to kick off its annual event. Dr. McCauley’s talk impressed me with the positive attitude he showed toward addicted people. It was refreshing to hear a treatment professional speak of the good qualities of alcoholics and other addicts, not just of their character defects. He said, for example, that the heroin addicts he knew were “sweet, affectionate” persons, and that addicted persons generally shared character traits of great sensitivity and empathy – traits that they used addictive substances to mask and obliterate. Other aspects of Dr. McCauley’s talk impressed me less. His model of brain functions in addiction was so crude as to be a caricature. He worked the issue of sexuality for laughs like in a sit-com script for a teen audience. He delivered a number of opinions that may have been popular with many in the crowd but were blessed with little in the way of supporting evidence – for example, that author James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) was a “sociopath,” or that people who recovered without treatment were not really “alcoholics." I got the uncomfortable sensation that the doctor was catering to the lowest common denominator – an impression that was shared, it appears, by others with whom I spoke later in the conference. As a keynote presentation, to my mind, it set the bar low.

At the first coffee break I was back at the LifeRing exhibit table. The aisles between the tables were so narrow that traffic was discouraged, and if one person stopped to chat, the aisle was nearly blocked. Nevertheless, people came; and all of them were drug and alcohol counselors.

As I had done at the NAADAC and the APA conferences, I buttonholed people, saying “Let me tell you about LifeRing. LifeRing is an answer to the question, ‘What do I do with clients who are willing to give recovery a shot, but they tell you that 12-step is not their cup of tea.’ Do you have clients like that?”

Not a single person answered in the negative. Some said, “A few.” Many said, “I have a lot of those.” A few counselors said, “Practically all of them.”

“What you can do with those clients,” I continued, “is send them to LifeRing.” While listening for and responding to the customer’s questions, I gathered up a bundle of LifeRing literature and put it in their hands. The LifeRing “magazine” that we published last year was still new to nearly everyone with whom I spoke. The great majority of people who stopped at the table had not heard of LifeRing before, but it seemed to me that the minority who knew our name was a bit greater than at last years’ event in Burbank.

Very gratifying was to hear the number of enthusiastic responses to the presence of LifeRing. A program director from Bakersfield gave me her card and said her facility had available meeting rooms that we could use for a LifeRing meeting, for the asking. A Sacramento program director offered assistance in starting LifeRing meetings there. The owner of an inpatient facility on the coast near Monterey offered to host a LifeRing meeting on their site. Quite a few professionals from Southern California expressed interest in learning about future LifeRing meetings and activities in their area. Several members of the CAADAC board of directors and the organization’s Executive Director, Rhonda Messamore, stopped by the LifeRing table and spoke words of appreciation for our participation.

After the coffee break I had the good fortune to attend a workshop on “What is Recovery and How Do You Measure It” by B.J. Davis, Psy.D., Clinical Director of Strategies for Change, a large outpatient facility in Sacramento. Dr. Davis quoted extensively from published research on treatment outcomes, and supplemented the findings with research projects he had undertaken personally at his facility and in his prior academic positions. The most powerful factor in bringing about successful outcomes, he reported, was the counselor’s ability to forge a therapeutic alliance with the client. The specific counseling ideology, by contrast, was a very minor factor. Accordingly, Dr. Davis said, the counselor’s ability to empathize with and to work out a treatment plan collaboratively with the client was a key to success. The most effective treatment is that which the client is motivated to follow, whatever it may be. The use of positive reinforcement is highly effective, whereas negative reinforcement – punishment – usually fails. Dr. Davis criticized treatment strategies that rely on control. Too many counselors think that treatment is about imposing their program on the client, thus rendering the client even more powerless than before. Treatment should be about empowering the client and working collaboratively. Too many counselors are lazy; they have only one treatment plan for everyone: “get a sponsor, work the steps.” They know nothing else. What would we say to a doctor that handed out Prozac to every patient, regardless of their individual profile? We would consider it malpractice. Yet we do the same kind of thing all the time in drug abuse treatment. Counselors are well-intentioned but good intentions aren’t enough. In conclusion, Dr. Davis presented a number of instruments for measuring the Quality of Life in recovery – based on the profound truth that clients will have difficulty maintaining sobriety unless they achieve a subjectively satisfactory quality of life in their recovery.

Dr. Davis was not only a well-informed but also a powerful speaker, charismatic and humorous, who led his audience forward and upward, even if this meant entering a discomfort zone. The Association would have done well to have selected Dr. Davis as its plenary keynote speaker.

Lunch this day was a two-hour membership meeting, featuring reports by the various officers and committees. I have been a CAADAC member for several years and attended with voting rights, symbolized by a green plastic wristband. I learned among other things that CAADAC has 1,678 full members, plus about 1500 student members and about 1700 “recovery workers” (aides), and that CAADAC is one of nine competing organizations of addiction counselors in California. The highlight of the session was a report from a CAADAC-affiliated project at San Quentin prison, initiated by prisoners, designed to train the inmates as fully qualified addiction counselors on their release. Nine of the eleven inmates who took the test for CAADAC certification passed it. One of the recently released prisoners, Brian Smith, spoke briefly and received a standing ovation. When that was done, there was no time left over for membership Q and A or for floor debate on motions presented, and the session closed without anyone having the opportunity to use the green wristband symbolizing their voting rights.

I spent the afternoon in conversations with visitors at the LifeRing exhibit table and with other exhibitors. Among others, I chatted with the woman at the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs about the impact of the recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision affirming that AA/NA were religious. She was only vaguely aware of the decision. She did not believe that people were coerced into attending 12-step programs, or that they should have the right to sue if they were. She believed that secular alternatives existed everywhere, if the client asked for them. She did promise to take the LifeRing literature I gave her to her supervisor. I also ambled over and had a friendly chat with one of the fellows at the Narcotics Anonymous exhibit table. He told me that NA was able to use the 12-step program and other literature of AA free of charge, whereas all the other “Anonymous” organizations had to pay AA royalties. I explained LifeRing to him and he listened. We had a friendly chat. I cruised some of the exhibit tables representing inpatient treatment programs. One program had only four beds, yet turned a profit. Another did very well with ten beds, even at 80 per cent occupancy. Three of the larger programs occupied adjacent booths and I learned that they were owned by the same company, which owns more than 240 separate treatment facilities nationwide. I met a new hire whose sole job was marketing for one of these programs. I got the impression that there is some serious money being made in the private for-profit treatment industry, even in this difficult economy.

The next morning’s plenary presentation centered on workforce development in the addiction profession. The presenters discussed an ongoing survey of addiction workers, with considerable detail about the questions asked, but little in the way of results, as they had not yet evaluated the answers. Much of the ongoing survey dealt with addiction workers in the public sector (those working for counties, cities, and the criminal justice system). Fortunately there was time for questions. I raised my hand, was recognized, and asked what plans the Association had to help its members working in the public sector in the wake of the recent Ninth Circuit ruling that AA/NA are religious. A counselor in the public sector who gives a client only the choice of “get-a-sponsor-work-the-steps or go to jail” can be sued. What is being done to make secular treatment options and secular support group options more widely available?

After a few clarifying exchanges -- the speaker was not familiar with the decision – the reply was denial that people are coerced into 12-step programs. The speaker thought that secular treatment alternatives were available practically everywhere. He did, however, promise to give the topic further study.

I had unusually heavy traffic at the LifeRing table immediately afterward from people thanking me for asking that question and expressing their frustration at the speaker’s denial that 12-step coercion occurs. It occurs all the time. People shook my hand and smilingly called me a troublemaker, sh*t-stirrer, and similar compliments.

Minutes later the hairy beast was in full evidence. I attended a workshop on “Therapy in Conjunction with Adult Drug Court” – Drug Court being one of the main settings where clients risk being coerced into 12-step programs – and the presenter provided a five-page handout containing on its last page a copy of the 12 steps.

During an early question break, I asked: “I see from your handout that working the 12 steps is part of your Drug Court treatment program.” -- “Yes, that’s right.” -- “And if the client is not compliant with the treatment program, they go to jail, correct?” -- “Yes, that’s right.”

I then explained the Ninth Circuit decision in a few words. The speaker had apparently not heard of it, and manifested some trouble wrapping his mind around the concept of client choice, but with some prompting from others in the audience, he eventually got it. He then retreated into the same denial as I had seen earlier. “Oh well, if the client brings in some other program they want to do, if they’re not just playing games, the court evaluators will certainly look at it.” And, “the county has secular programs available.”

A woman behind me muttered something hostile about “judges legislating from the bench,” and the session showed signs of flying off the rails, but I backed off and the speaker resumed the droning exposition of his counseling approach. After a while I had to leave or risk falling off my chair with boredom. In retrospect I blame myself for not making a bigger fuss over the issue; it might have been a healthy thing, a spur to positive change, not to mention a relief from tedium, for this workshop to blow up in a floor fight over the First Amendment issue.

An excellent workshop followed lunch, titled “The Ethical Issues of Nicotine Use by Care Providers.” The presenter, Steve Sarian, is director of the U.S. Navy’s Drug and Alcohol Counselor School, an ordained Buddhist priest, and a hospice chaplain. He conducted the session in a highly interactive way, which made for a lively time. Sarian was eloquent in showing that nicotine is a mood-altering addictive drug, and that counselors in addiction treatment programs face ethical issues if they are nicotine users. He also cited research showing that alcoholic smokers are more successful in achieving durable abstinence from alcohol if they also quit smoking. Sarian used a light touch in outlining the issues surrounding nicotine use, an approach that was highly effective in stimulating participation and mental processing in the audience. I gave him very high marks.

After a final afternoon session at the LifeRing exhibit table, during which I sold the remainder of the workbooks I had brought, I packed up the displays, left a few brochures and magazines on the table for tomorrow’s session, and hit the road. The big awards dinner in the evening, if it was anything like last year’s, was eminently missable – a round of Good Ole Boys giving each other wall ornaments. The conference program had half a day to run on Sunday, but traffic at the exhibit tables typically would be very light, and several other exhibitors were also packing as I left.

In looking back over this experience, several thoughts occur to me.

(1) It was good to be able to combine the role of exhibitor with the role of meeting participant. Many of the other exhibitors merely sat in the cramped exhibit hall talking to one another or playing games on their PDAs between coffee breaks. Boring. By participating in the workshops I learned things, and I was able on a couple of occasions to ask questions and to raise issues that will in the long term help LifeRing to penetrate the secular market niche where we belong. Being an active participant was also a lot more fun.
(2) The CAADAC organization has a long way to go before it becomes an effective advocate for the addiction profession. Its main problem is that its wheels are stuck in the 12-step rut. Content-wise, the 12-step approach is dead. It cannot be developed further. One can only repeat it as an article of faith, over and over, like a Nepalese prayer wheel. Scientific progress on this basis is an oxymoron. Twelve-step doctrine may be a viable foundation for a lay priesthood, but not for a modern healing profession. So long as this religious doctrine remains the core teaching of the profession, parity with the medical healing professions, which CAADAC so fervently seeks, can never be achieved. Moreover, the constant influx of 12-step recruits possessed of nothing but their personal experience, and willing to work as counselors for the minimum wage or less, means that a general elevation of salaries and benefits, so crucial to professional workforce development, will remain a Sisyphean effort. In order to advance, the association must take a firm and clear stand that personal experience with the 12-step approach is insufficient qualification for a professional. The organization must actively learn, teach, own, and promote secular alternatives, or it will die a lingering death.
(3) The national organization, NAADAC, is probably no less an alter ego of AA than is CAADAC. In both organizations, in any session, if you say “Hi, I’m Joe, I’m an alcoholic,” most people in the room will reflexively respond, “Hi, Joe.” But the eyes are a bit more open and the brains have been working a bit harder in the national group. So, for example, in the national’s conference program in Nashville, the 12-step meetings at the start and/or end of the day were labeled “Optional.” The CAADAC program lists them without that qualifier. NAADAC’s headline speaker was Carlo DiClemente, speaking on Motivational Interviewing – a secular approach that has little in common with 12-step but much in the way of helpful insights for treating addictions. CAADAC’s choice of the doctor from Utah, McCauley, as keynoter, tended to massage the soft belly of the status quo instead of kicking its hind end forward, which is what needs to happen. The NAADAC conference program had only one workshop specifically devoted to a 12-step issue, and that one was canceled. The CAADAC program was larded with pablum for the faithful: “The Medicine Wheel and the 12 Steps,” “A Musical Journey Through the Twelve Steps,” “Spirituality in Recovery” (by Father John), and others; and even where the Step approach was not in the workshop title, it was frequently present in the content, as in the Drug Court program. On balance, therefore, my feeling is that CAADAC’s continued affiliation with NAADAC is probably a good thing to the extent that the more advanced thinking of the national group may be able to pull the local organization forward.
(4) Virtually all the people I met both in CAADAC and NAADAC are sincere, well intentioned, hard working, and approachable. When I first entered these halls a year ago in Burbank I felt apprehensive, as if in potentially hostile territory. I no longer feel that way. These are good people and they can be talked to. LifeRing should definitely continue to participate in these organizations. As more and more of our members become treatment professionals themselves, they should be active in these groups and, in an appropriate situation, play leadership roles. Although there are people in these groups who have tunnel vision, most participants subscribe to the philosophy “whatever works,” and if we can make our aims and methods clear to them, they will be powerfully helpful to us in giving their clients the option of attending LifeRing support groups if they so choose.

-- Marty N. 10/7/07

Three little anecdotes

These three things all happened the week that I marked my 15th anniversary clean and sober:

A young man came from the Kaiser Chemical Dependency Recovery Program in Oakland and told me about a session he had with his case manager. Now that he was in phase three of the program, he must "get serious" about his recovery. That means -- the case manager told him -- he must either get a sponsor and work the steps, or he must work the LifeRing Recovery by Choice workbook.

A not-so-young man came to the workbook study group, first time, and said that he had been busted for growing marijuana. His case fell under Prop. 36, the California law that mandates the option of treatment instead of prison for certain drug-related crimes. The judge told him that he could not sentence him to attend AA/NA because they were religious. Instead, he sentenced him to ten weeks of LifeRing.

The program director of a new inpatient treatment program in a nearby suburb telephoned the Service Center and said they had reviewed the LifeRing materials (they had ordered a set earlier) and found them excellent, and could we please arrange to hold a LifeRing meeting at their facility.

Letter from a counselor about the workbook

My Agency is _________. We are part of ______ medical center. I have read the 3rd edition [of the Recovery by Choice workbook] and loved it. ... Ideally I would like to use samples from the book to have the client work on between my 10 session relapse prevention groups. I have already encouraged one of my clients to buy the book online and gave him your website. I have discussed what I am doing with my supervisor but still need to talk our director to see if the hospital will fund this or whether me and my supervisor will have to foot the bill. Ideally I would want all counselors to use the book and encourage their clients to buy it. So I am still working on the details of my project. I am going to talk to our director this week about the project but in the mean time I am encouraging my clients to purchase the book on line.

Sincerely
E.---------

More on the recent court case about AA/NA and religion

The recent court case holding that AA and NA were religious comes as no surprise. Two other federal circuits, including the middle-of-the-road Second Circuit (NY) and the conservative Seventh Circuit (Chicago) had already said so in the 1990s. See my New Recovery blog; see unhooked.com for the older cases.

What's surprising in the opinion is the lukewarm endorsement given to the 12-step programs' efficacy. On the surface, the court nods to the "fine work of AA/NA," but footnote 10 to that passage is much more equivocal. The footnote says:

The confidential nature of AA/NA treatment makes testing efficacy difficult. There is, however, some data to suggest that the programs, as part of a larger treatment strategy, have helped many people maintain their sobriety, at least for a period of time. See Max Dehn, How It Works: Sobriety Sentencing, The Constitution, and Alcoholics Anonymous, 10 MICH. ST. U. J. MED. & L. 255, 269-74 (compiling efficacy data).

"Some data to suggest ... many people ... at least for a period of time" is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Report from the NAADAC conference in Nashville

Getting Ready

The two LifeRing signs that Wilbur W. had printed and mounted for LifeRing at the September 2006 NAADAC conference in Burbank were so banged up at the end of the American Psychological Association Conference in San Francisco in August 2007 that the only thing to do was give them a decent burial. Furthermore, the log-cabin charm of the PVC pipe frame that hung the signs had worn off. For NAADAC ’07 in Nashville, we needed fresh new signs and a frame to hang them on.

Inspired by some commercial designs I saw at APA, I designed and built a set of three pop-up frames using PVC pipe, lawn sprinkler fittings, fiberglass tent poles, and bead chain. The biggest headache was the tent poles. There are two wilderness supply stores near my house that have a bin for miscellaneous poles, cheap. When I built the pilot for the new frames a few weeks earlier, poles were plentiful and I got a set for $6. When I returned to that store shortly before the NAADAC event to get two more sets, the pole bin was stripped. It was the same story at the other store – nothing but bent poles, poles without ferrules, and odd ends. Why? The clerk said, “Burning Man.” The annual desert festival drew scores of tinkerers and experimenters who built creative structures and sculptures, and they had cleaned out the odd-pole bin at the local stores. I had to plunk down nearly $40 to get two sets of brand new factory-made replacement tent poles. A can of silver spray paint gave the PVC pipe construction a semblance of commercial gloss. The frames looked respectable.

Now to the posters. I drafted the posters, 24” wide by 52” high, in Macromedia FreeHand, and emailed the files to Wilbur, who is a photographer who owns a wide-carriage printer. Unfortunately, Wilbur does not have FreeHand; he uses Adobe Illustrator, which I don’t have. After several unsuccessful tries to convert my files to Adobe PDF, I found a conversion utility that claimed to turn FreeHand files into Illustrator files, and Wilbur was able to open them and printed them on Monday morning, Labor Day, the day before my plane left for Nashville. When I got the posters home and unrolled them, I saw with dismay that two photographs included in my design were missing. The file conversion utility had quietly ignored them. Time to get creative. One of the photos was small enough for me to print out on my letter-size photo printer. That solution would not work for the other, which was the group shot on the cover of the workbook, blown up to 12” high by 20” wide. Photoshop to the rescue! I teased out the five faces from the photo as individual pictures, blew them up, and printed them individually. Then it was just a matter of mounting the photos to the posters with rubber cement. Apart from some buckling due to the cement, the solution worked, and from a reasonable viewing distance the posters looked fine.

The whole display package – posters rolled into mailing tubes, PVC pipes and chains stuffed into a pillow case – weighed just over 12 lbs. Weight was an issue because I was also carrying books and brochures and the airline had a 50-lb per suitcase weight limit. After considerable juggling and trimming, I got the whole package including my personal stuff into two suitcases just under the weight limit, plus my carry-on.

Some months before the event I had posted on several email lists that it would be nice if someone in Nashville had a couch where I could stay during the conference, to save hotel expense. Three people offered, but as the event came closer, each had to withdraw. Mike because they had no room, and Gregg because of a family and job issue. At the last minute Bettye had to cancel because of a gall bladder flare-up that sent her to the hospital. There was no alternative but to book a hotel. The downtown Renaissance hotel where the convention was being held was way too expensive for the LifeRing budget. After considerable online searching, I reserved a room at the Red Roof Inn (an East Coast motel chain) near the airport and on a bus line going downtown.

Tuesday

At the APA I had bought a four-wheeled Tutto brand suitcase from another exhibitor, and this proved a blessing, as I was able to pile the second case and the carry-on on top of the rolling suitcase. During the long BART trip to the airport, I did sometimes feel a bit like a mule hauling a truck, but the gear did the job, tolerably if not brilliantly, without breaking my back. The airline checked my hefty bags without incident.

The flight was uneventful. I was wearing a “Cal” hat – the UC Berkeley Golden Bears had beaten the Tennessee Volunteers 45-31 the previous weekend – and the bantering started at SFO, when a gentleman with a biscuits-and-gravy accent asked whether I was going to Nashville with that hat. I grinned and said I was. He said not to worry, “Those folks in Nashville don’t care for the Vols anyhow.” That turned out not to be entirely true. A waitress at the Waffle House near the Red Roof Inn – there’s nothing but franchises near the airport – said she couldn’t stand to look at the hat, and I would be charged double if I wore it, and there was more kidding along those lines.

Arriving at the Nashville Convention Center / Renaissance Hotel Wednesday evening, I found the NAADAC registration table set up, but not yet in peak mode. The first set of instructions given to me sent me to a dark and cavernous exhibit hall on the ground floor. On my return to registration, sweaty from hauling my truck over carpet, a very competent NAADAC woman named Diana Kamp took me in hand and led me to the proper floor. There, the table reserved for LifeRing near the entrance of the Exhibitors’ Hall, like most of the other tables in that room, turned out to have no space behind it to display our new pop-up posters. It was just a table against the wall. I had expected a booth, like last year in Burbank. There were suitable tables, however, in the hallway, still awaiting setup. The resourceful Ms. Kamp quickly switched booth assignments for me, and LifeRing now had a good table with ample space behind it. Thanking her, I began the setup. Note to self: when packing long bead chains, wrap them separately. During the flight, the six chains for the three frames, each chain 84” long, had mated and formed a Gordian knot of tiny metal beads. The setup, which should have taken fifteen minutes, took well over an hour. Finally, it was done.

Tired and hungry, I hit the restaurant strip on Broadway next to the convention center. This is a three-block string of honky-tonk bars and souvenir shops. Each of the bars featured a heavy-set barker in cowboy hat and boots trying to lure the tourists into his den of burgers, beer, booze and country music. Not much for a recovering alcoholic to like, there. At the end of the strip, around the corner of Second Avenue, I spotted a Japanese restaurant. Ah!

Unfortunately, when booking the motel near the airport, I didn’t check the bus schedule thoroughly enough. I now learned that the last outbound bus from downtown had left at 5:30 p.m. The inbound bus in the morning cost only 60 cents with my senior discount, but getting back to the motel at night would add an average of $20 in taxi fare to the $42 per night room bill.

The taxi driver on the ride to the Red Roof Inn was a young man from Somalia. When he won the green card lottery in Somalia he didn’t know anybody in the USA, but a neighbor of his had a brother in Nashville who promised to help him. So he went. It was the first time he had heard the word “Tennessee.” Fate got me here, he said. That is how fate is. He asked me whether it was true that families had moved out of San Francisco because of the gays. I said I didn’t think so. He wanted to know how many gays there were, and much else. When we had exhausted that fascinating subject I asked him how come the back seat of his cab didn’t have seat belt anchors. He said the drunk college students broke them. Another drunk pushed out a side window and tried to walk away. A group of drunk college girls once trashed his CD player and his meter. He said they were very nice, from good families, but when they got drunk they didn’t know what they were doing. I could relate.

My room at the Red Roof Inn is a “handicap accessible.” That means you can roll a wheelchair into the shower. My mind flashed on returning veterans from Iraq. I felt grateful that my own disability – amputation of alcohol and “drugs” – allowed me complete mobility and the free exercise of all vital functions.

Wednesday

The bus driver outside the motel said that my Cal driver’s license for proof of age was worthless, I needed a senior pass from the MTA, but he “would take care of me.” I got into town for 60 cents. At the convention center, Mike G. from Nashville showed up at the LifeRing table even before 9 am. Having Mike there at the table was great. Not only was he good company – we had to remind ourselves sometimes to focus on the customers instead of chatting with each other – but he also knew some of the local counselors and was able to build local rapport as I could never have.

• The very first counselor that morning was eloquent on the problems his clients encountered with 12-step programs. “Too many walls,” he said. There was the powerlessness wall – the biggest one -- the God wall, and a series of others. He said that the 12-step approach was “a hard sell” with his clients. He had had more than a hundred clients in his small Midwestern town and only three of them had formed a stable attachment with a 12-step group. “People need to find a group that fits who they are. The important thing is social support for recovery.”
• A counselor from Central Indiana said that an alternative was very much needed in her town, but that it would be hard to get it going. It was hard to get AA going.
• A counselor from Tucson stopped and said she had done AA herself but she was open to alternatives. She knew about SMART and had attended a couple of meetings but felt that the people there had more serious mental health issues than she was comfortable referring her clients into. She hadn’t heard of LifeRing. I told her that when the Tucson meeting started up she would be contacted. She nodded OK.
• A counselor from a residential center about 45 miles west of Nashville took all of our literature and said there was plenty of room in this “recovery Mecca” (Nashville) for all different kinds of approaches. She left her business card.
• A program director from a program in Nashville specializing in professionals said he would be happy to help get a LifeRing meeting going.
• A counselor from a federal prison in Arkansas said that her clients find God when they arrive, and leave him when they go. She currently has people who are interested in the 12-step approach and others who are not. She wants to know about whatever alternatives are available, and took the literature.
• A DUI counselor from the city said most of his people don’t want to go to any support groups because they don’t realize they have a problem, but it was good to offer them choices because it takes away one of their excuses.
• The owner of the Recovery Today newspaper stopped by and listened to my complaint that the paper had refused to list LifeRing as a resource. He said I should contact Linda at the paper and she would put in a listing for us. He said it’s not their policy to list only 12-step groups, they’ll list any support group that works for anybody. We’ll see.
• A counselor for an Army treatment center in Hawaii says she’s been in the counseling profession long enough to know that 12-step doesn’t work for everybody. They’ll go and they’ll come back to her and say there must be another way. She’s taking our literature back with her.
• A counselor from a program in Tullahoma, near Nashville, wants to be notified when a meeting starts.
• A counselor from Aurora, Ontario, north of Toronto, chatted for a while and took literature, saying she was interested.
• A counselor from Denver said he’s heard of LifeRing and has a LifeRing presentation scheduled at his program. He bought the workbook, saying it would help him understand LifeRing better.
• A counselor from Birmingham AL said “for sure” there are people who do want to do recovery but don’t want to do it the 12-step way, and is interested in hearing what we have to say.
• A young counselor from Metro Public Health in Nashville said that patients who object to the 12-step approach are “very common” but the only alternatives available are church-affiliated. She took our information and wants to be notified when we have a meeting going.
• Another counselor from Tullahoma bought both the workbook and How Was Your Week and expressed strong interest in having a LifeRing meeting in her town.
• A counselor from a local program gave us the name of a program director at a facility out of town who believes in offering people choices, and said we should call her.
• An exhibitor from the Vivitrol table stopped by and we chatted for about ten minutes. Vivitrol is the time-release form of Naltrexone, an anti-craving medication. She probed for our attitude on medications. I told her that if a patient was honest about their use with the physician, and the physician was competent in addictions, then we would support the patient taking their medication as prescribed. The medication was a sobriety tool, not a sobriety breach. She told me that it was refreshing to talk with somebody “who gets it.”
• A counselor from Vermont said that the issue of clients wanting to do recovery but not 12-step “comes up a lot” in her practice.
• A counselor from a very small town in Iowa, when I asked her whether she had clients who said yes to recovery but no to 12-steps, replied “Yes, most of them.”
• A senior counselor from Helena, Montana, said he “absolutely” has clients who are interested in recovery but not in 12-step. He said, “We need something, we need something.”
• A counselor from Dayton Ohio says he has “a lot of clients” who don’t want to do the 12-step approach. He said, “It’s awesome that you’re out there. It’s so great that you’re here.” He took all of the literature and left a business card.
• A counselor who works with adolescents near Nashville says she “definitely” has clients interested in recovery but not 12-step and wants to know more about us. She left her card so that we could notify her when a local meeting starts.
• A woman from a recovery bookstore said she was glad we were here because people need more approaches than just 12 steps.
• A counselor from a healing center in Memphis stopped and gave us encouragement.
• A counselor from a Lesbian center said she was very much interested and she would look us up online as soon as she got home.
• A young woman from a treatment program for professionals chatted and took our literature.
• A teacher from a recovery high school said they refer their students to 12-step meetings. I asked her, what if the students aren’t comfortable with that approach. She said, yes we do have that issue, and we’re not entirely sure what to do about it. She took our literature. If we got a meeting going, she would “definitely” refer people to it “if appropriate.”
• Three counselors from a small town in southwestern Tennessee stopped by. One of them said, “We have enough trouble getting 12-step going in our town, but this would definitely be interesting.” They took literature.
• A drug court counselor from GallatinTN and two counselors from a small town north of TN took literature and said that their clients needed options in addition to 12-step. The drug court counselor recognized Mike and said she was happy to see him there; would he be willing to volunteer some of his time to meet with their clients.
• A counselor from Indiana said he was interested and took literature.
• A counselor from Seattle said “I’m open to whatever works. As counselors we can’t just send people to AA or tell them not to use medications. Whatever works, is the motto.” I told him about the Seattle LifeRing meeting at the Good Shepherd Center.
• Chip Drotos, the publisher, and Gary Enos, the editor, of Counseling Professional magazine came by and we chatted about the article about LifeRing that I submitted more than two years ago and that they haven’t published.

After a while, I stopped taking notes. There was a definite theme here and we were hearing it with minor variations from all over the country. Just about everyone who talked to us told us that there was a need for broader options for their clients besides 12-step. One counselor told us that the need was “urgent” but she dare not bring our literature into her program as it was strictly 12-step and she would be written up. But most of the professionals who chatted with Mike and me at the LifeRing table professed to be open minded and supportive of alternatives. We put our literature into many dozens of friendly and receptive hands.

In the afternoon, the NAADAC program listed “focus groups” where people were invited to come talk to NAADAC leaders about how the organization could better serve them. I attended the first one. Two NAADAC staffers, one of them a specialist in curriculum development, plus a junior assistant who took notes, listened to a focus group of three. When it was my turn, I made a plea for greater recognition by NAADAC of recovery alternatives. I asked for links to LifeRing on their web site, and for end-of-day LifeRing meetings alongside the “Optional 12-step meetings” listed in their daily program. Notes were taken and my hopes were raised that some of these ideas might be acted on.

I returned to the LifeRing table and then showed Mike the labyrinthine path through the hotel to the second focus group session, where he was to inquire about job opportunities in the counseling profession, while I returned to cover the table.

At a few minutes to 4 pm I went to another hard-to-find meeting room in the hotel to give my Mirror Neurons presentation. This is the same talk I had given at the LifeRing Congress in Denver in May. I had expected to find no one at the workshop at all. Seven other presentations were scheduled in the same late-afternoon time slot. But four people were already waiting, with more coming in, and, counting stragglers, I ended up with an audience of fifteen. I was pleasantly surprised. The talk went down well. There were thoughtful, positive questions. A couple of people said it was the best, most stimulating presentation they had heard at the conference so far. Several people stopped to shake my hand and thank me and say kind things about the talk. Later I asked for and saw the feedback forms from the session. I had eight responses that were all “Excellent,” the highest grade, and four that were mixed “Excellent” and “Good” or all “Good.” One person complained about the lack of handouts. One person wrote that it was “inspiring” and another wrote that it was “the best session of the day.” This good feedback should be helpful to pave the way for other presentations in future years.

Traffic was slow when I returned to the LifeRing table. Mike was happy about his Focus Group session, and got something close to a job offer out of it. After waiting a few minutes for stragglers, we closed the table and went to find a late-running workshop put on by the LGBT folks (NALGAP – National Association of Lesbian and Gay Addiction Professionals, co-sponsors of the conference). This event, however, centered on evaluating an all-day training session they had just concluded, which we of course had not been able to attend, and after listening for some time, fighting sleep, Mike drifted away, followed a bit later by myself.

After an indifferent solo dinner I talked an airport shuttle driver into dropping me at the Red Roof motel instead of the airport; it was strictly against regulations, he said, but it was late and I was the only passenger. I saved a couple of dollars off what a cab would have charged.

Thursday

Early bus to downtown. Walked around and got a bit of a stretch, took a few photos.

The draw today was the Carlo DiClemente presentation on Motivation and the Stages of Change. With traffic slow at the exhibits tables, I joined the two or three hundred people gathered in the large ballroom to hear this main event. DiClemente with Felix Prochaska is the creator of the so-called TransTheoretical Model (TTM), best known for one of its components, “The Stages of Change.”

There’s hardly a PowerPoint presentation anywhere in the substance abuse field that doesn’t contain some reference to this paradigm, which has clients moving through distinct stages from pre-contemplation to contemplation, pre-action, action, and maintenance. The counselor needs to identify the stage the client is at and tailor the treatment appropriately.

Key to the client’s progress through the stages – or lack thereof -- is motivation. DiClemente got an appreciative laugh from the audience when he said that counselors who call the client unmotivated are usually mistaken. The client may be highly motivated – but not necessarily to do the things the counselor wants them to do. In any treatment relationship, DiClemente said, there are always two plans: the counselor’s plan, and the client’s own plan. At the break, I gave DiClemente a copy of the Recovery by Choice workbook, explaining that there were of course many books setting out counselor plans, but this was the only workbook that a client could use to build the client’s own treatment plan. He appeared impressed and interested.

DiClemente’s exposition of client motivation largely followed and built on the key chapter in the Hester-Miller Handbook that I reviewed on unhooked.com some years ago, and I won’t recap that here. When the client appears to lack motivation, he said, the problem is often not with the client but with the treatment approach. Quoting Pogo, he said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

DiClemente concluded the exposition by urging counselors to reframe the client or patient as a consumer. Borrowing from the consumer rights movement in other areas of health, including mental health, DiClemente urged treatment professionals to focus on the consumer’s needs and wants, not on the imperatives of the treatment program.

Di Clemente’s PowerPoint slide to illustrate the shift in perspective to a consumer perspective said:

• Pathology to Problems
• Pulling or Pushing to Persuasion
• Patient to Partner
• Provider to Facilitator
• Outcomes to Options
• Management to Motivation and Marketing
• Reactive to Proactive Care

Consumers have the power to choose, he said. They have a broad array of interests; they are persons of value and must be treated as such. “You will change what you do if you treat patients as consumers.”

In the question period, I raised my hand, was recognized, and stood up to ask, “You advocate treating patients as consumers who have the power to choose. Isn’t that going to be a difficult transition for programs where the first lesson they teach is that the patient is powerless and needs to stop making choices and surrender?”

Di Clemente’s answer began with a bit of fancy verbal footwork that didn’t stick in my memory. But he ended on a strong note, defending the principle of patient choice as the foundation of patient motivation and commitment to change.

As the session ended and I walked toward the exit, I caught a lot of appreciative smiles from faces in the audience.

Lunch this day was divided into regional caucuses. I had the opportunity to sit in a small room with counselors from California, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. Much of this session revolved around governance issues of NAADAC. I learned among other things that the California group, CAADAC, was by far the largest affiliate of the national association, with a correspondingly large contribution to the national’s budget, and this gave rise to some issues and tensions. NAADAC leadership people at the session made a strong pitch for more people to become involved, pointing out that practically all the work was done by a relatively small handful of people. I could relate to that. Mike meanwhile attended the much larger caucus of the southeastern region, which included the host state, Tennessee.

The hot spot of the afternoon’s program was a seminar for counselors on working with “GLBTQQAi” clients. That’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Allied, and intersex. NALGAP President Joe Amico, an ordained minister fired by his mainstream church after he came out as gay, and psychiatrist Penny Ziegler led this session to a packed room. The objective was to familiarize counselors with key points of the gay movement and to sensitize them to the issues that their clients were probably struggling with at different stages of the process of coming out. Although the workshop was a bit dry and on the academic side, I feel it was helpful in raising my awareness of issues that might confront the significant and growing number of “GLBTQQAi” participants in LifeRing. At a reception later in the evening, after being assured that one did not have to be a professional to join, I took out an individual membership in Amico’s organization.

Late in the afternoon, Mike and I attended a reception thrown by NAADAC for conference exhibitors, where we had a chance to chat with conference organizers and with various service providers, learn about their concerns and teach them about LifeRing. I also found that other exhibitors shared my feeling that about everyone who was going to visit the exhibit tables had probably already done so. Several confided that they would pack up and leave on Friday, skipping the last day of the event.

After that workshop, I caught just the concluding few minutes of a workshop on leading organizational change, by motivational speaker Jim Burgin. He compared the current state of the addiction treatment field to Georgia after Sherman’s march. Sherman is supposed to have said that he left Georgia so devastated that a crow who intended to fly across it had better bring its own corn. Likewise, addiction professionals entering the field now, he said, had better bring their own corn, and plenty of it. I’m not sure how motivational the attendees found this powerful image, but it certainly stayed with me.

Friday

On Friday morning, Mike and I met at the LifeRing table and we talked about how to move toward starting up a LifeRing face meeting in Nashville. We already have a potential core membership: Mike himself, Gregg F. who has been active online and in person for eight years, and Bettye D., who moved here after several active years in LifeRing, including experience as a convenor, in Oakland. At the conference, we had gathered up perhaps a dozen business cards from local area counselors who told us with every sign of sincerity that they wanted to be notified when a LifeRing meeting got going and they would include us on their referral list. I had copied the cards and given them to Mike. All the elements of a meeting appear to be in place. With that done, I packed up our displays, left a stack of literature for Mike, shook hands, and headed for the airport.

Next year’s NAADAC conference will be in Kansas City, on the Kansas side. I feel that this year’s event, even more than our maiden venture at the Burbank NAADAC conference in September ‘06, was time and money well spent, and I look forward to participating again next year.

APA Convention Journal (4)

At 9:11 a.m. when I reached the LifeRing booth, someone was already leaning over it, checking out the literature. He turned out to be the head of the substance abuse unit at a teaching hospital in LaCrosse WI.

• He said, "Anything that is an alternative to AA is useful and of interest." He said he has "tons of people" that won't do AA. He took one of each of the brochures. He said that if we had a meeting there he would definitely refer people to it.
• A few moments later the woman who was staffing the AA booth three booths away came by and returned one of our brochures that she had borrowed. She said it was "interesting" but she wasn't going to keep it.
• A counselor from Pittsburgh PA took one of each of the brochures.
• A solo practitioner in Palo Alto CA with substance abuse clients -- a former lecturer at both Stanford and UC Berkeley -- took all of our free literature and spent some time leafing through How Was Your Week.
• A counselor from the Army substance abuse program in Alexandria VA said he had never heard of us. The Army is using something called Primed for Life, he said, and he is not happy with the results he is seeing. He wanted me to give him a workbook. I said the Army could afford to buy one. He said he would check into it online.
• A psychologist from the Washington State prison system said she was interested in a secular approach and took literature. "We need to give people choices," she said.
• The director of an alcohol and drug abuse institute and professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle said that alternatives to 12-step were very interesting to him, and took all of our free literature. He said he is a firm believer in giving people alternatives to choose from.
• "AA has so many people court-ordered attending that it's been diluted. Nobody's serious about recovery in those meetings. The serious people don't go to AA anymore." That was a counselor from Jonesboro AK. "An alternative would be good."
• A nurse who is now working for the new Prometa program stopped by -- she knew LifeRing because she had been on night duty at the Merritt Peralta Institute in Oakland where we have a meeting. She gave me a hug. She says they have the Recovery by Choice workbook at Prometa and already have one client who does LifeRing and is doing well. She's looking forward to continuing to refer to us.
• A graduate student at the University of Michigan who is working on a research project on substance use among teens took our literature and expressed interest.
• A student from the University of Birmingham in AL said it would be very nice to see something other than 12-step. He asked whether I had seen the South Park caricature of AA. He said it made fun of the AA religious approach, pointing out that a religious approach turns a lot of people off. It also made fun of the disease notion, depicting it as an excuse for continuing to drink. He said it would be good to see an alternative to 12-step emerge.
• A counselor from Plainfield NY perked up when he heard we were not 12-step. He took all of our free literature. He has substance abuse clients and wants to offer them choices.
• A post-doc from a family practice in Piedmont CA says he has had clients who have struggled and struggled with the 12-step approach and then his supervisor told him about LifeRing, so he sent them to LifeRing and they are doing better. When he finishes his internship he is going to be working in the prison system.
• A counselor from a university in New Jersey who is finishing her doctorate and has worked in substance abuse in the past – she is an older student – says “a lot” of her patients were deeply troubled by “the god thing” in AA and got no benefit from it. She is very pleased to hear there is an alternative and wants to know do we have groups in New Jersey. She took the literature and says she will definitely read it.
• A researcher from the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville CA (next door to Oakland) spent 15 minutes chatting with me. She does outcomes research and might be interested in doing an outcomes study of LifeRing. We had a very nice chat.
• A clinician at a university health center in Sacramento CA who works with students was aware of Lifering and wanted to know did we have a meeting in Sacramento. She said she definitely would refer people to us if we had a meeting there. She says AA works for some people but turns a lot of other people away and an alternative is necessary.
• A counselor from Long Island NY became receptive when she heard we were a non-step group. She took the brochures and said she would give them to the people in her agency who do addictions. I told her about the Smithtown and Deer Park LifeRing meetings; she said that was not far from her agency.
• A counselor from Berkeley says he knows about us already and gives out our schedule to patients; I gave him a copy of the current local schedule.
• An older gentleman from Atlanta joked with me, saying that he was “a secular Christian,” meaning, an atheist. He was very interested and took our literature.
• A couple of women counselors from a residential program in Utah said they were interested in alternatives and took our literature.
• A counselor from Seton Hall University in New Jersey took the literature to give to a colleague who does substance abuse counseling in Orange.
• A student who is interested in becoming a psychiatrist expressed interest in our approach and took two brochures.
• A counselor from Mishiwa IN took our literature.
• A counselor from Ft Lauderdale FL who bought the Recovery by Choice workbook two years ago has been using it with his clients said he is having good results with it. It is “more cognitive, more motivational, than the traditional 12-step ‘do as I say’ approach.” His clients like that.
• A clump of people around the desk – too many too fast for me to note their name tags – grabbed literature and said they needed if for their clients “because AA doesn’t work for everyone.”
• A counselor in private practice in New Jersey and New York says it’s good to have alternatives. “We need them.” She took literature.
• A couple of high school seniors stopped and each took a brochure.
• A woman from the AA booth – a different one than the earlier one -- hovered. I gave her a friendly “hello” and we exchanged sobriety dates and chatted about how good it was to be sober. She asked a few questions about our approach, I explained it to her. I asked her, did she want literature. She said, “No thanks.”
• A student from Cincinnati OH said she hadn’t decided on a career, but maybe would go into substance abuse recovery. She took a brochure.
• A psych student from Nacogdoches TX wanted to know whether LifeRing subscribed to the disease model. I said our only criterion was the desire to get clean and sober and we left it up to individuals whether they found the disease model useful. He said he had read studies where the disease model served as a rationale for relapse. He is going to start graduate work in substance abuse in the fall. He does not like the 12-step approach because of its religiosity and because of the disease model. He took our literature.
• A counselor doing addictions counseling in Glendale CA says she has clients that go in and out of 12-step inpatient programs – “hello, something isn’t working there.” Very interested to hear there is an alternative, took our literature.
• A Ph.D. who works for the New York City Police Department took our literature and is going to pass it along to the substance abuse people in her office.
• A counselor from Toronto took literature.
• A person from Riverside CA took literature.
• The sales manager of the company that owns the new Prometa program took one of each of our brochures and says he wants to take me to lunch sometime because he is interested in our secular approach.
• “Being in combat cuts two ways. Some people get more religious. For other people, the whole religion thing drops away. They want nothing more to do with it.” -- A counselor at a VA facility in Pittsburgh PA. He says when they send those veterans to 12-step groups they just don’t relate to it at all. He is happy that there is a secular alternative.
• An undergraduate from La Mirada CA stopped, asked a few questions, and took a piece of literature.
• A counselor who works with teens in Edmonton AL took literature.
• A psychologist from North Anderberg MN says she has a brother who just got out of Hazelden, which is 12-step. She took our literature in case that doesn’t work for him, she has us for a Plan B.
• A private practitioner from San Diego who has addiction clients was interested to learn there is a secular option, and took literature. “I have group members who go to AA or NA and they come back to me and say it is not working for them. I want them to keep going and try something new.”
• A student intern from Wausau WI who does alcohol and drug recovery groups was interested to hear that we existed and took our literature.
• A young man who is on his way to a substance abuse counseling job in Victoria BC knew about us from his former job at Kaiser in San Rafael CA, and was tickled to hear we had a LifeRing meeting in Nanaimo, next door to Victoria.
• Two counselors from Denver – one from a university there, another from a mental health agency – stopped and asked a lot of questions and were very supportive. One of them bought the workbook. I told them to be sure to connect with the LifeRing meetings in Denver.
• A counselor from Long Island knew Smithtown and Deer Park, where we have LifeRing meetings, said she is not far from there and she is going to read our literature and send people to those meetings.
• A counselor from Columbus GA working for a private mental health agency there said they recently opened a unit for military people at nearby Ft. Benning. He corroborated what another counselor told me earlier about the effect of combat on religiosity. He says trauma generally can cut two ways, either reinforcing religiosity or tearing it down. He told me about a very devout churchgoing young woman who was brutally kidnapped and raped, but survived. She could not understand how God would let this happen to her. He says when people come to him – the substance abuse counselor – with questions like that, he sends them to the chaplain. He strongly agreed that treatment programs need to offer both a religious and a secular option to serve their clientele.
• A counselor from Lafayette CA, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, had not heard of us but said she was glad to do so, and took the local meeting schedule. She was pleased to see that there were meetings every day. She just go her license to practice.
• A counselor from Cincinnati OH said “we need more secular material out here, we need more secular groups.”
• A psychology teacher from Wright State University in Ohio, who has done outcomes research and is familiar with Motivational Interviewing, said he was very enthused to find out we existed. He will mention LifeRing in his lectures and keep our literature available in his office to let people know there are options.
• A counselor with the county mental health facility in Bakersfield CA (Kern county) perked up when she heard we were not 12-step but secular. She took the literature and said she would read it.
• A counselor in independent practice in San Mateo CA took our literature and said that secular groups are necessary.
• Tom Horvath, the president of SMART Recovery, dropped by again and we had another friendly chat about the issue of how to develop more group leaders.
• A counselor from San Diego wants to know, do we have a meeting there? He will send people if we do.
• A counselor from Las Positas college in Livermore CA had a long chat with Gillian E. (who joined me at the Lifering booth after lunch). He has a brother who is struggling to get sober in Ft. Bragg CA, and was enthusiastic to hear there was another approach besides 12-step. He took one of each of the brochures to give to his brother.
• Two students from Tampa stopped by, appeared a bit bemused by the whole concept, but said they would check it out on the web. They took some literature.
• A counselor from the juvenile drug court in Sacramento took our literature and wants to know when we’ll have a meeting in Sacramento.
• A counselor in private practice from Mineola Long Island NY took our literature and said she can refer people to our Deer Park and Smithtown meetings.
• A retired psychologist from Gillette NJ says she’s out of it herself but she sees much too much religion around and she’ll pass on our literature to her younger colleagues.
• A senior researcher from the Pearson Group, the huge publisher that owns the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), stopped to talk about his daughter who is having serious drug and alcohol problems. He asked many questions and took our literature and he will try to get his daughter interested.
• A graduate student in San Francisco who is beginning his doctoral research was very interested in LifeRing, chatted for quite a while, and took literature.
• A young counselor who is going to work on a reservation near Phoenix AZ was quite interested. She bought How Was Your Week and took other literature.
• A social worker from Rochester NY stopped and took literature.
• A counselor from a residential program for teens in Camarillo CA chatted and took literature.
• A counselor from Singapore Malaysia asked questions and took literature.
• The head of an alcohol recovery clinic in South Korea stopped, chatted, and bought a workbook.
• Two women from Texas Women’s University in Denton TX spent some time chatting, and took a lot of literature to give out to their colleagues.

As the exhibit hall closed and I took apart the display and packed the remaining literature, two more people came up, one of them breathless, and wanted information. I dug into the box and gave them brochures. After I disassembled the PVC pipe frame, I took a hard look at the cardboard display panels and tossed them into the trash. They’d taken a beating. For the next show we need to upgrade and freshen up the display.

I am very grateful to Gillian E. who gave me and the remaining display materials and literature a ride across the bay in her car.

-- MN.

APA Convention Journal (3)

APA Convention Journal (3)

LifeRing convenor and Board of Directors member Craig O. from San Lorenzo was already at the table in Booth 325 when I arrived at 9:25 a.m. on Saturday. I brought a fresh batch of brochures from the Service Center in Oakland, Craig stacked them, and we were ready for the day’s adventures. Once again, I spoke short notes on each contact into a small voice recorder directly after it took place. Without that device, all the day’s faces and conversations would have blurred into a fog by the end of the session. At various times during the day, Craig and I would take turns exploring the hall or just taking a break. Consequently my notes aren’t as complete as they might be. For what it’s worth, here they are:

• A counselor from Mishiwak IN said she was interested in alternatives to AA and took our literature.
• A college professor from Grand Forks ND who says she’s now in Sioux City IA teaches introductory psych and took our literature so that she can let her students know there is more than one way to get clean and sober.
• A professor from George Washington U in DC took some literature to bring back to his colleagues who teach addiction.
• A young woman from Bend OR who just graduated in psychology from the university there is quite interested to hear that secular alternatives exist because she knows people who are looking for that and she’ll pass the literature on.
• A professor from Adelphi University says she’ll take the literature to her colleagues who do substance abuse. She is on the board of an Asian-American Pacific Islander organization to protect families from addiction issues.
• A counselor from an agency in a small town in southern Ohio says there are quite a few people who don’t do AA and there is nothing for them, and there ought to be something for them. She will see if her agency can get something started. She took literature.
• A psychologist from the Netherlands was curious about us and took the literature.
• A counselor from “a federal law enforcement agency” in Alexandria VA says she refers clients to AA groups all the time but there are some who don’t cotton to the “higher power thing.” She’s looking for someplace else to send them and hopes we can get a meeting going there.
• A counselor from Columbus OH who does domestic violence expressed interest and took our literature.
• A student from Green Bay WI who is not interested in addiction as a career but has a friend who is struggling with addiction asked whether our literature is for clinicians or for clients. I told her we have a LifeRing meeting in Green Bay, listed on our web site, and she should tell her friend about it. She took a bunch of our brochures.
• A counselor from Oxnard CA came up and said, “So, you’re 12 step?” I said, “No.” He said, “You’re abstinence-based?” I said, yes. He said: “We need more of that in Southern California.” He took literature and left a business card.
• A counselor from a treatment program in Concord CA spoke with Craig at length and Craig gave me her business card, saying she wants to be contacted about a possible LifeRing presentation to staff there. A lot of her clients don’t like the “higher power concept” and are interested in an alternative. She was happy to hear we have meetings in Concord.
• A psychologist and her lawyer husband from Manchester NH took our literature. She said that 12-step works for some people, but some people have to sink pretty low before they are willing to go there, and other people want to approach abstinence from a different perspective. “I’ve had a lot of clients that go to 12-step programs and the sponsors that are available may still have their own mental health issues that they are still working on so it is not helpful for my clients and it turns them off prematurely.”
• A teacher from a community college in Napa CA (heart of the wine country) teaches a substance abuse unit and says she’ll include us in her lectures to students.
• A counselor with an agency in a small town on the border between KY and TN sees a lot of military guys and is very interested in an alternative to 12-step. She bought the workbook and How Was Your Week.
• “My clients have a problem with the strong religious focus in the traditional 12-step groups, AA and NA.” – Counselor from a practice group in Washington DC. He reported a lot of negative experiences by his clients with AA. Took our literature and asked to be notified when we have a meeting.
• The wife of a counselor from Meriden CT says she has a personal friend who started going to AA and could not relate to it at all because of “the God thing.” She has another friend who has been going to AA for years and has got so wrapped up in it that’s all she can talk about; she has no other life any more. She doesn’t think that’s really “healing.” She took some literature hoping to open that friend’s eyes.
• A counselor in private practice in Philadelphia says she had addiction clients and often they run into problems with AA because it seems very religious to them, so they don’t get any support, and she’s interested in having options available for them. I told her we have a meeting in Telford. She said that’s on the other side of town from her. She took our literature.
• A young man from the Lawyer Assistance Program in Los Angeles checked in and was pleased to her that LifeRing will be providing support to CA lawyers, at least in Northern CA. He says we need you down here also.
• A counselor from a VA hospital in the Tampa area had a long discussion with Craig and me. She says “lots of people” need the LifeRing approach and she is going to see if she can get our books into their program and get something started. She bought the workbook and How Was Your Week.
• A counselor in private practice in San Francisco took our meeting schedule and other literature.
• A counselor from Walden in Minneapolis MN expressed interest and took literature.
• A counselor from Middletown RI says her husband will be very interested in our approach, and took literature.
• The editor of a newsletter, National Psychologist, asked for “one piece of literature” that he could put into his paper.
• A counselor from Morehouse AL took our literature.
• A psychologist from Washington DC dropped his business card into our tray and asked that we send him information.
• A psychologist from Portland OR who is interested in pharmaceutical approaches stopped and chatted for quite a while, and took literature. He hopes that we can get some groups going in Portland.
• A counselor in family practice in Dearborn MI was interested to hear that non-12step abstinence approaches existed, and took our literature.
• A counselor from Waco TX has issues with alcohol and drugs in her own family and was interested in hearing about new approaches. She took literature.
• “For a long time in the treatment community, clients have been paying big money to get a Big Book and work the first three steps…. The treatment community is re-evaluating and moving beyond the 12-step approach.” That’s from a staffer at a newly opened residential treatment program in nearby Sausalito CA, which will emphatically not be based on the 12 steps, she said. She knew about us and wants us to come and establish contact and get a LifeRing meeting started there. We exchanged business cards.
• A counselor from San Diego asked us some questions and liked what he heard and took our literature.
• A counselor from Atlanta GA took several copies of our brochures to distribute. She says there’s a real need for something other than 12 step because a lot of people just refuse to do 12-step.
• A student from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was “just looking” and took some literature.
• A counselor from Oakland CA who works at a methadone clinic and also has a private practice knows about us, has referred people to us, and was glad to get new meeting schedules.
• A student who is interning at a clinic in Palo Alto was interested in hearing about our Burlingame meeting, and took our literature.
• A student from Santa Clara CA said there needs to be something more than 12-step and took our literature.
• A counselor from Ypsilanti MI says “We need some alternatives to the AA style. Good luck to you!”
• A counselor from Austin TX says our meetings in Cedar Park are fine but too far north, “you need more meetings in town.” But she says she will tell her clients about us.
• A reporter from Pacific MO who covers trade shows and conventions took some literature and said he might write about us.
• A man wearing the uniform of Moscone Center maintenance staff said he was just arguing with his sponsor about LifeRing and took some more literature and a schedule.
• A student from Argosy University in Phoenix AZ asked whether we did the 12 steps. When I said, “No,” she said, “Oh! I’m interested. Tell me more.” She took literature.
• A counselor from Humana Hospital in Napa was interested and took literature.
• A counselor who also teaches at University of California in San Francisco says she has a patient who is doing LifeRing and doing “excellently,” and she doesn’t know a thing about us. She took one of each and said she may buy the workbook.
• “People get turned off by the whole philosophy of the 12 steps and the higher power thing,” said a counselor from Honolulu HI. She spent quite a bit of time chatting with us and wants to know how to start a LifeRing meeting.
• A counselor from Modesto CA chatted with us and took literature. He says they’re building a new recovery facility to be finished in 7 – 8 months that’s going to have meeting rooms with bathrooms and outside entrances, and we would be a “perfect match” for that situation. He left his business card.
• Dr. Joan Zweben came by and introduced herself, and we shook hands. We had corresponded via email but never met. She is a senior member of the faculty teaching addictions at the University of California in San Francisco. She trains and consults privately with addictions counselors, and has included LifeRing in her lectures and consultations for quite some time. Her students are required to visit self-help group meetings and we see them with some frequency. She has been very supportive. We discussed the LifeRing demographic, and she took all of the literature.
• A counselor from Louisville KY, hearing that we were abstinence-based but NOT 12-step, eagerly took one of each of our brochures.
• A counselor in private practice from Silver Spring MD who has clients who “struggle with AA” is interested in our approach and took literature.
• “We have a clinic in the middle of the ghetto. We have 9,000 patients. And the few who we can get to go to AA will come back to us and will say, ‘Yeah, I gave it to God, and it didn’t do anything,’ and they’ll get angry at us, ‘Why did you send me to them, I thought you liked me.’ And we’re their primary care physician.” -- Psychologist and professor at a medical school in Miami FL. He left his card and would like to get LifeRing going there.
• A Ph.D. student at Lehigh U in Bethlehem PA was “thrilled” to find there was a non-step approach. She says frankly she hates the 12-step approach; she has a number of family members involved in it, and has had bad experiences. She doesn’t like the powerlessness aspect, or “the god stuff” and finds the whole thing “incomprehensible.” She is glad to find something else and took a lot of our literature.
• A couple of students from a college in Ft. Lauderdale FL stopped to get an explanation of what we did, and took literature.
• A top administrator from a psychiatric hospital affiliated with the University of California at San Francisco stopped to chat. She has a lot of substance abuse clients who don’t benefit from the 12-step approach, or don’t want to do it, and she hasn’t known where to send them. She said she was glad to find out about us. She took one of each. She talked about inviting us to do an in-service presentation to her staff.
• A professor who teaches substance abuse among other things at a college in central Washington State was interested, took literature, and said she will tell her students about us.
• A student from Western Michigan U in Kalamazoo stopped to chat, and took literature. He said he was attracted by the fact it was secular.
• A clinical psychologist from San Jose CA who works mostly with children was interested to know we exist.
• A graduate student working on his Psy.D. degree is going to be doing an internship at a treatment center in the East Bay and is taking our literature with him.
• “Where do I get in touch with you guys in South Florida? My practice is drug and alcohol abuse. I run alcohol groups. And I run individual therapy for drug and alcohol dependence. And I cannot find non-12 step groups.” Me: “If such groups existed, would you refer clients to them?” He: “Yes.”
• A counselor in private practice in Martinez CA works as a consultant for EAP programs at nearby major refineries. He says the refinery EAP programs are refusing to accept LifeRing participation on a par with 12-step group participation. He knows about our Martinez and Vallejo meetings.
• A young man who has a position in APA says he has an uncle who has had his life taken over by AA, and it disturbs him because his uncle no longer has any life outside of that. He took our literature intending to give it to his uncle. I advised him not to expect too much.
• A counselor from Lodi says she is going to do an internship in substance abuse and was glad to learn a secular alternative existed.

The hall closed at 5, and Craig and I walked to BART. I could barely keep my eyes open on the train home.

(To be continued.)

APA Convention Journal (2)

At 9:05 a.m. Friday the LifeRing booth was exactly as I had left it on setup day yesterday. Convention participants were getting their first look at the Exhibit area. I wasn’t even half through my coffee before the first ones stopped at the booth. They were from St. Petersburg FL. I told them there was a LifeRing meeting in Pinellas Park. They said they didn’t know that but were glad to hear it. They took two brochures and a copy of the Presenting LifeRing magazine.

When they stepped away, I recorded a brief summary of our contact into a small handheld voice recorder so that at the end of the day I would have a journal of our contacts. I did the same for most of the other contacts I had. LifeRing convenor David F. from San Rafael showed up after a little while. Former LifeRing convenor and board member Gillian E. joined us a bit later. My journal doesn’t record every contact we had between the three of us but I got a fair sample. Here’s a playback:

• A counselor in private practice from Berkeley CA. She says she has clients who will not do AA and is glad to get the information that there is an alternative. Gave her the local meeting schedule together with brochures.
• A professor from State University of New York at Rochester. He teaches the substance abuse course. He said he would have their library order our books, and he will work LifeRing into his lectures. He has students who are looking for an alternative to AA.
• The executive director of a recovery program in Alberta. He took literature and said this would be interesting to his staff.
• A Ph.D. on the staff of a residential program in Sonoma, CA. He told me about a client who has been through a 12-step program twice and is not improving. What did we do that was different? I explained the basics of our approach to him in a few words. He said that sounds interesting, and bought a workbook.
• A young man who does audiovisual hookups for the convention center stopped by to say he has a brother who goes to LifeRing in San Francisco and likes it a .lot better than AA.
• Another counselor from St. Petersburg FL said this looks very interesting and took some literature.
• Tom Horvath, the president of SMART Recovery, stopped by and we shook hands. I had corresponded with him via email on several occasions but we had never met. We had a friendly chat.
• A young woman, probably a student, stopped by to say she has a friend who is considering starting Alcoholics Anonymous. She took some of our literature to give her friend a choice.
• A young man from Florida said he is a Universalist Unitarian and was attracted by our “secular” name.
• A teacher from a community college in Galveston said she was very happy to see that there was a secular organization. Where she is, in the Galveston and Houston area, there is nothing but AA and that was not a good situation – it was terrible – and an alternative is badly needed.
• A counselor from Oakland CA said he is often sending clients to recovery groups and had heard of us but had not seen our literature. He took some.
• A counselor from an Air Force mental health program in San Antonio stopped. I asked her whether her people were interested in a secular alternative. She said that actually the Air Force is “highly religious” but that the clients need something different, and she took the literature.
• A teacher at a medical school in Oregon, who teaches the substance abuse section to medical students, said with a giggle that there were “a lot of atheists” in Oregon. She said an alternative to AA was very strongly needed there. She said she would build LifeRing into her lectures and make sure students knew about it.
• A counselor with a marriage and family practice in Tinsley IL took our literature, saying she “certainly” has clients looking for an alternative to the 12-step approach, and took our literature. She says 12-step works for some people but not for others.
• A man wearing the badge of International President of the APA, from Ireland, said addiction was not his area but he would take the literature and bring it back to his colleagues.
• [Across the way from our booth is a booth for an eating disorders program. They are giving away unlimited supplies of little chocolate bars. I kidded the operator: Giving away chocolate bars at an eating disorder booth is like our booth giving out airline bottles of vodka. He said, maybe, but it works better than green apples in getting people to the booth. LOL. ]
• A professor from the U. Mass in Boston who teaches psychology, including addictions, took our literature and said, yes, she does have people looking for alternatives there.
• People from Glendale AZ, Berkeley CA, and Morganton NC and a couple of others whose badges I couldn’t see came in a bunch and took our literature.
• Two counselors from the Seattle area. One of them knows LifeRing and uses our workbook in one of the programs she works for: Catherine Trestrail’s Positive Alternative. Catherine was our keynote speaker at a recent LifeRing Congress.
• Dr. Fred Rotgers stopped by and introduced himself. He is a well-known author of moderationist books and a godfather of Moderation Management. He told me that Audrey Kishline, the founder of MM, had been released from prison and had befriended the mother and wife of the girl and father Kishline had killed while driving in a drunken blackout a few years ago. Kishline was now lecturing on the evils of drunk driving, and no longer kept in touch with MM people. I told Rotgers that LifeRing was a hard core abstinence group, which he knew. We chatted cordially for a few minutes.
• A counselor from Warrensburg MO says that even in this small town she constantly runs into people wanting a secular alternative to AA.
• A counselor from Memphis TN. She says it’s “the buckle on the Bible Belt.” She works for a hospital that’s 12-step and so she has to do what she’s told, but she can see that there are people looking for alternatives and she’s very glad to find us.
• A Ph.D. from Raleigh NC who says he works with teenagers. Some of them did not relate to the 12 step programs at all. Took our literature. Wondered when we were going to start a meeting there.
• Counselor in solo practice from Austin TX. Told her we have two LifeRing meetings there and told her how to find the details on the web site. She was very glad to find there was something beside AA and said she would refer people to our Austin meetings.
• Three folks from Anchorage AL. One of them works with the U.S. Army. They were very interested and scarfed up piles of our literature.
• A counselor from Tucson AZ took our literature. I told him we would have a meeting in Tucson very soon. He said he would watch for it on the website.
• A counselor in private practice from San Francisco. She said she’d include LifeRing in her referrals and took literature.
• A counselor from a mental hospital in North Carolina who does dual diagnosis. She was very interested to hear our supportive attitude toward prescribed medications for mental illness, and took our literature.
• A woman from Union County NJ, a licensed drug and alcohol counselor, who showed interest and took our literature.
• A professor from University of California in San Francisco who wanted our current meeting schedule and took other literature.
• The head of a group practice in Wilmington DE who says “12-step does not work for everyone, each person needs to find their own way.” He’s interested in what we’re doing.
• A teacher at Argosy University in Dublin CA who is also a counselor at a federal pen near there. She had heard of us but didn’t know we had a meeting in Livermore (near Dublin) and took our literature.
• A counselor from Reno NV who says they have serious addiction issues there that are not being met, and took our literature.
• A substance abuse counselor at Regis U in Denver was happy to hear we had meetings in Denver, and took our literature.
• A psych student from Vermont who had just presented a poster session. She wasn’t sure what she was going to specialize in and was interested to hear that there something else in substance abuse besides 12-step.
• A woman from Westwood NJ who says her husband does addiction recovery, and took our literature.
• A counselor from Holland OH says an approach other than AA would make some people she knew very happy. She took our literature.
• A psychology student from San Francisco said she was very interested in a secular approach, and took our literature.
• A professor from near Pittsburgh PA says there’s a lot of things about AA that turn people off and he’s very interested in alternatives. He had thought Rational Recovery was the only thing out there. He said he would include LifeRing in his lectures.
• A guy who is on the board of California Consumer something-or-other, who leads continuing education classes for psychologists, took the literature.
• A counselor from Orofino, ID, took our literature. She leads a program with 12 clients and says quite a few of them have trouble with the 12-step approach, particularly the “higher power thing.” She says her program doesn’t push AA but makes other programs available to the extent there are any. She was very happy to see our stuff.
• A counselor in private practice in Atlanta stopped to chat. He is planning to take a SMART Recovery training and was very interested in LifeRing. He picked up the literature.
• A social worker from San Diego says she “all the time” has people who can’t or won’t do the 12-steps and are looking for alternatives. Women for Sobriety has good meetings there but there’s nothing comparable for men. She took our literature and wants to be notified when we get a meeting going there.
• A Norwegian man stopped by to say he is addicted to cod liver oil. He wants to convince American restaurants to carry it for putting in coffee. Norwegians have a great sense of humor.
• Another person from Tucson AZ took our literature and perked up when I told him there would be a meeting there soon.
• Two women working in a county drug treatment program in Santa Clara county (south of San Francisco) were interested in a non-step approach and took our literature.
• A counselor from Tacoma WA says some of his clients have had bad experiences with AA. Some get freaked out by the “higher power – spirituality” component of AA. He finds it useful to have an alternative to offer. Took our literature.
• A counselor who retired from a position heading up drug addiction programs in Davenport IA, still does referrals. Says without question there are a lot of people who do not get anything from the 12 steps and need an alternative. He says he has a room that he makes available to groups and if we wanted it we could have it. He took our literature.
• A psychologist who does substance abuse work in the federal prisons stopped by. He says they have their own program but was very interested in ours and took our literature.
• A counselor from Augusta GA took one of each our brochures and says AA works for some people but obviously doesn’t work for other people and she will let people know that something else exists.
• A counselor in solo practice from San Francisco had heard of us but not met us or seen our literature. She took some.
• A student from John F. Kennedy University said that she has “friends who have gone to both AA and LifeRing and LifeRing has the best rate of recovery in terms of both staying sober and preventing relapse.” She and her three friends took literature.
• An elderly gent from the nearby AA booth stopped by, picked up a brochure, and said that AA was a secular organization. We had a little discussion about that and he walked off.
• A couple from St. Petersburg Russia were fascinated with the Escher graphic on the cover of How Was Your Week?, and took some literature.
• A woman from a group called Families Anonymous took our literature. She said her group did the 12 steps “sort of” but was open to other ideas.
• A woman from the Wright Institute, a graduate psych school in Berkeley, said she was the guru of addictions at her school, and had heard of us and seen some of our literature, and took some more.
• A counselor who works for the VA in Birmingham AL said she has a client who is very bright and very turned off to AA and she thought our approach might work for him. She took literature.
• A staff member from a recovery program in Los Angeles had not heard of us but was glad to know we existed. I told him about our N. Hollywood meeting and he said he would let people know. He took literature.
• A counselor from Louisville KY bought a workbook. [Quite a few other people expressed interest in the workbook but didn’t want to load up their convention bags with heavy stuff.]
• A couple of students from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto CA were very interested, asked a lot of good questions, and took our literature.
• A counselor from Anniston AL stopped by, chatted, and took literature.
• A psych grad from UCLA who does neuroscience imaging was very interested and took literature.
• A professor at a university in Memphis who teaches psychology, but not substance abuse, took our Presenting magazine to pass along to his colleague who teaches the substance abuse class.
• A counselor from a VA clinic in downtown Oakland took our literature and said he would definitely put our meetings on the list for his clients to go to. He is going to have his library order our books. He has quite a few clients who say “I don’t like that god stuff, I don’t want to do that.”
• A student with an internship at Pepperdine U says she doesn’t like integrating spirituality with recovery, and took our literature.
• Another student from John F. Kennedy University chatted and took our literature.
• A counselor in solo practice from Holmden NJ asked many questions, seemed very interested, and took literature.
• A counselor from Raleigh, NC took our literature.
• A senior APA member who is a Departmental Representative (whatever that is) said his wife went through Hazelden and didn’t like the god stuff and when she went to meetings they had more god stuff and it really bothered her and he knows she will be very glad to hear there is an alternative.
• A young man from the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley took our literature and said he will suggest to the librarian that they acquire our books and write something about them in their interlibrary newsletter.
• A counselor from Seattle who does not have substance abuse clients but has friends who do, and this would be helpful to them.
• A counselor from Arden NC who came by carrying an AA brochure left also carrying a LifeRing brochure.
• A gentleman from Abu Dhabi asked questions, said it sounds very good, and took literature.
• A woman from St Louis MO says she is doing AA because it’s the only show in town but she doesn’t like it. She bought a workbook. Her husband is a counselor with a Ph.D. who agreed that an alternative was needed. He said that the people who don’t like AA and don’t benefit from it often times are just beaten over the head with it. He will pass the word to see if something can’t be started by way of alternative.
• A counselor in private practice from Pleasant Hill CA took our literature.
• A counselor from Lafayette CA has a patient who is attending LifeRing and doing well, though it’s early on, wants to know more about our approach. Took literature.

At 5 p.m. the lights were dimmed in the Exhibit Hall and people streamed out. I’m going to have to reload the table with LifeRing brochures for tomorrow.

(to be continued)

APA Convention Journal (1)

I must have looked something like a homeless man. I was pushing a folding
hand-truck. Mounted on it was a stuffed big olive-drab backpack, the kind
with an aluminum frame. It had half a dozen pieces of white PVC pipe
sticking out of it, one of them taller than my head. A beat-up looking
piece of white cardboard was stuck between the backpack and the handle of
the hand truck. The rig was top heavy and threatened to come apart any
minute. A couple of times it did. My rig and I took up two seats and a
wheelchair space on the BART train. Some people looked away. Some people
looked at me with pity.

Moscone Convention Center is only a few blocks from the BART station in
downtown San Francisco. There was no missing the huge sign over the door:
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION AUGUST 17-20. My tension rose as I
approached the glass façade of the giant complex. There was a reason for my
stuffed backpack. The convention rulebook said that exhibitors had to hire
union labor to transport their exhibit rigs and materials into the hall.
I'm a former union man myself, Machinists and Steelworkers, and I have no
quarrel with that rule, in principle. But LifeRing operates on a shoestring
budget. With my lawyer eyes on, I saw a loophole in the union rule. You're
allowed to bring in, with your own hands, any exhibit that you can set up
inside half an hour without tools. You're allowed to bring in any amount of
material, such as books and pamphlets, that you can hand-carry in one trip.
I was ready to dismount the backpack from the hand truck, collapse the
truck, shoulder the pack, and hand-carry the whole rig into the hall, like a
hiker on the Pacific Crest trail, if challenged. I hoped it wouldn't come
to that, but I was ready.

Several hundred folks were already gathered in front of the convention
center door, waiting for registration to open at 3 p.m. No fewer than three
security guards held them back at the door. Pushing my rig, I headed
straight at the door. I was hot and sweaty and I wasn't going to wait in
that line! The nearest guard scoped me and my rig in half a second. "Aha, an
exhibitor," he said, and waved me through the door. I guess I wasn't the
only booth tenant from a shoestring operation.

Everything went like clockwork at the Exhibitor Registration booth. The
nice woman there remembered that we had talked on the phone. She had my
name badge ready. She took down the names of the other volunteers who would
come later: Gillian E., Craig O., and David F., and said she would get
badges made for them. Then I coolly wheeled my rig toward the gate of the
Exhibits Area, where a gray haired guard stood watch. He didn't know or
didn't care about the union rules regarding hand-carrying. "Watch out for
the carpet," he said, pointing to a newly laid patch of rug with a plastic
cover. "Thanks!" I said cheerily, and wheeled on it.

There were fork lifts and men on bicycles and carts with crates and people
stringing wires and others laying carpet or carrying furniture all around.
They ignored me. I threaded my way past the construction zones and found
our booth, No. 325. It's a corner location, which is nice. It's near the
Cyber-Café and the restrooms.

It took exactly ten minutes to set up our PVC
pipe display (no tools required). A LifeRing member in Denver made the big banner. Wilbur W. in Richmond CA made the two cardboard panels. I made the PVC rack. I spread our literature out on the table. Then I noticed that our booth had no chair. I was a bit tired and a chair would have been nice.

The company that runs the exhibit floor had its booth not far away. I ambled over and asked a pleasant looking clerk if she wouldn't mind telling
me where I could get a chair for our booth. Instead of pointing me to a
stack of unused chairs somewhere, she dove into her computer screen and
announced that we hadn't ordered a chair. Or a table. Or carpet. Or
anything. The table that was in our space was there by accident and was not
ours. If we wanted a rightful table and chair, there was a charge. Oh, and
the carpet. We had to pay for a carpet whether we wanted one or not.
Company rules. I winced and handed her the LifeRing credit card. Ouch.

Only minutes later, two very nice union men in their late 50s came to booth
No. 325, cleared the floor space and laid down blue plastic carpet. One saw
me taking photos of them at work and joked, "We get residuals, you know."
They brought a chair. I said I wanted to bring in a second chair of my own
tomorrow. One of them said, "Just carry it in. Don't worry about it. We
can see you're not Microsoft."

Another union guy, maybe in his 30s, looked at our literature and said,
"what's 'secular' recovery?" I explained it to him. He said he was on
break. We chatted about recovery things.

Ours wasn't the only PVC pipe display rig. In the booth directly behind
ours, a woman was assembling another home made PVC display -- admittedly
much slicker than mine. It advertised a back pain remedy. I began a slow
amble along the aisle. The third booth to our left belongs to Alcoholics
Anonymous. They have a table-mounted commercial display with "Alcoholics
Anonymous" in large letters, and an array of Big Books and AA brochures on
the table. Their booth was set up but nobody was staffing it at the moment.


The younger union guy who had chatted with me earlier swung by the AA both,
saw me, and said "There's your competition!" I laughed. Tomorrow could be fun.

Two rows away, NIDA (National Institute onDrug Abuse) had a double sized booth.

Hundreds of booths were in various stages of construction. In the other
half of the huge hall, hundreds of blank poster-frames were neatly arrayed,
waiting for the flood of scheduled poster sessions. In the outer hallway, I
picked up a copy of the APA Addiction newsletter. It is put out by APA
Section 50, Addictive Behaviors. Section 50 has approximately a thousand
members. There is also Section 28, devoted to pharmacological treatment of
substance abuse. I made a note to check that out later. By now,
registration was in full swing. Looks like a relaxed, informal crowd. The
Exhibit hall will open to the public at 9 tomorrow morning.

On the way home, a call was forwarded to my cell phone from the LifeRing 800
line, from a counselor at a clinic in San Diego. She wanted the workbook,
she wanted How Was Your Week, and the CD, and she wanted to start a meeting.
She said she has an MA in Psychology and had attended the two most recent
APA conventions, but couldn't make this one. She wished me luck.

(To be continued).

Phil

I am a new convenor in DenverLife Ring. I will be asking questions about membership building and hopefully may be able to contribute to the blogsite. Thisis just an introduction.

Phil

Meeting Money: Two Cheers

LifeRing meetings regularly send money collected in the basket or from books sold to the Service Center in Oakland. A volunteer at the Service Center enters the information into the computer and issues a receipt.

Here is an example of a useful report from a meeting convenor about money collected. Note the following good points:

• The meeting number is given. This simplifies our computer entry.
• The money collected is broken down by meeting date. Good!
• The money is broken down between basket money and book money. Important for our bookkeeping!

There's only two small problems. One, the signature is illegible. This convenor's name and contact information probably aren't in our database. Consequently we can't send a receipt -- we sent a receipt anyway, but to another person in the meeting. Two, the amounts don't add up right -- the subtotals come to $186 but the money order is for $176.

Two cheers! We love getting detailed breakdowns of the money by date and source. Thank you! But please help us by spelling out your name and contact info so if there is a problem we can get in touch with you. Thank you.

Can Significant Others Attend LifeRing Meetings?

This email came in to the Service Center. I've edited it down to the essentials:

I have been clean and sober for 9 months tomorrow, and attend the meeting in __________.

There was a moment of friction in the meeting this morning which I may have perpetrated. I didn't mean to, and have apologized to the person to whom I had responded, according to some of the member presents, possibly inappropriately.

A woman who had never attended the meeting before, when her turn came, introduced herself and commenced to talk about her dysfunctional family--parents, sister, etc--including her mother who had used marijuana and alcohol, and her abusive yet needy father. She had recently taken a trip back to the Midwest to visit them. During the course of her talking, she never mentioned using drugs or alcohol, or them having been a problem, or her being in recovery.

I was unclear from her speaking whether she was in recovery or not, because she didn't really speak in the first person, or about herself much, but about other people she knew. Instead of asking about her recovery, I asked what her drug of addiction had been and how long she had been not using. She replied she would rather not answer that question if it were all right with me. I had been bubbling a bit with impatience about her speaking in generalities and not speaking about her own experience, and I said "no, not really", pretty civilly, I think. At that point, several members of the group pretty much jumped me verbally and said she wasn't obliged to say whatever she didn't feel like saying. I honor that. I was wrong. One of the members, whom I like a lot, said the forum (LifeRing) was for anybody who wanted to come, whether it be for addicted family members (like Alanon) or for, as I took it, for anyone who was experiencing any life issues at all relating to anyone using.

I apologized to the lady, saying that I had not understood the intent or the structure of LifeRing.

It is my understanding that LifeRing is for people in recovery and aspire to total abstinence.

If I am incorrect in my understanding, I would be interested to know, so I may shift my thinking about the role LifeRing plays in my recovery. I would prefer to participate in a group only of people in recovery, since I am feeling pretty vulnerable and wouldn't feel as safe or as free to share thoughts and feelings about my recovery experience with those present who were not in similar situations.

-- G.

I replied:

Dear G:

LifeRing meetings have always been open to any interested person, and we get occasional visits from students, treatment counselors, journalists ... and friends or relatives of people with alcohol/drug issues. Our charter and bylaws permit sober Significant Others to attend meetings, although you must be a person in recovery yourself in order to be elected to the LifeRing Board of Directors. My experience has been that SO's tend to learn and become more educated by attending, and that I, as a person in recovery, also learn and become more educated by their participation. That being said, few SO's attend meetings, and 99 44/100 per cent of meeting participants are themselves persons in recovery from a substance addiction. It sounds to me as if the incident at the meeting on Saturday was a small misunderstanding and should be forgotten. I hope that works for you and that you will continue to participate so long as you derive benefit from the meeting process.

With best regards,

- M.

Your comments?

Letter from a Counselor in Nebraska

Received at the LifeRing Service Center June 8, a letter dated June 6:

Dear LifeRing:

I was so pleased to hear your advertisement on NPR this morning. I came right home and checked out your website. Please put me on whatever lists you have to receive information about this organization. I believe it is something my clients and I have been looking for.

Nancy M.
Therapist
Lincoln, NE

Did anyone else hear "our advertisement on NPR"?

Room for improvement in our service

Last week at the LifeRing Service Center we received an email from someone, let's call him Clark, looking for a LifeRing meeting in a certain city, let's call it Gotham.

We don't currently have a meeting in that city but we have about half a dozen people on our mailing list who live there -- people who have bought LifeRing Press books or contacted us for other reasons. I asked Clark whether it would be OK if I asked the people on our list to contact him. Clark said "sure" and provided his phone number in addition to his email address.

I fired off a short email to the half dozen people in "Gotham" on our list and asked them please to extend their support to Clark. I provided Clark's contact information.

By the end of the week, the only person who had contacted Clark was an AA participant who told Clark where the AA meetings were. (We have many AA participants on our LifeRing mailing list.) Not one person contacted Clark to extend LifeRing support. Not one email, not one phone call, not one invitation to meet over coffee and talk.

Shame on us! If we're going to grow and become an established mainstream institution, we have to do better than that. We have to understand that the secret of empowering one's sober self is to connect with other sober selves. The engine of self-recovery is connections with others. If we don't take every opportunity to connect with others, our own sober self is bound to shrivel ... a dangerous course.

-- Marty N.

Getting the word out -- Alumni Newsletters

A good example of how to spread the word about LifeRing appears in the current alumni newsletter of a treatment program in Concord, CA. A PDF scan of the page is here.

The newsletter is mostly full of 12-step content. In fact, a typical 12-step testimonial appears on the same page as the LifeRing article.

The newsletter is not an organ of any 12-step organization. It is the organ of the alumni group of the treatment center, and the treatment center is officially neutral and unaffiliated with any particular support group. Thus, publication of an article about LifeRing in this newsletter does not violate any rule of 12-step organizations banning material about "outside issues."

The article's author, identified only as "Owen," is a graduate of that treatment program, a member of its alumni group, an AA old-timer, and an active LifeRing convenor.

Convenors, please read Owen's article. It is a model of how to talk about LifeRing to a mostly 12-step audience. There are other newsletters similar to this one. Let's take advantage of these platforms to get the word out about LifeRing.

Seven Reasons to Be a Convenor

People who become LifeRing convenors do it for a variety of good reasons. The following seven are the ones I hear most often. One: it helps their recovery. Two: it expresses gratitude. Three: it's a moral obligation. Four: it gives a higher meaning to their life. Five: somebody has to do it. Six: it feels good. Seven: for love.

It Helps My Recovery

Being a convenor can be helpful to one's personal sobriety in several obvious ways. For example, the convenor is expected to appear at the meeting on a regular basis, and any kind of regular sobriety practice is usually an effective recovery tool. (For examples, see Recovery By Choice, Ch. 3, Sec. 11, My 'Daily Do.') The convenor has a higher profile as a person in recovery than the average participant, and is therefore likely to have a larger and more active support network. Acting as convenor involves a deeper emotional commitment to recovery than the average person. Relapsing while in the convenor role would be a serious setback not only for the convenor (it would end their current usefulness as convenor) but also for others in the meeting who may have come to look to the convenor as a role model. For these and similar reasons, many persons who already have their personal recovery programs well launched choose to take up the convenor role for its ongoing supportive benefits. There is more discussion of this issue in the final chapter.

To Give Something Back

A second reason to become a convenor is gratitude. When I decided I had to do something about my drinking, I found a support group already functioning and available to me. A handful of convenors had arranged for the room, put out literature, and got the meeting up and running. I derived an enormous lifetime personal benefit from their effort. Most newcomers are in a similar situation. After one accumulates some sobriety time one begins to feel grateful to the group. The dollar or two that the average member puts into the basket falls far short of compensation either for the benefit one has received or for the effort that others expend to keep the group running. Donating one's time as convenor is one way to show gratitude and give something back.

Because of the Golden Rule

A third reason to become a convenor is similar to gratitude, but on a different level. It is based on the golden rule of ethics: what goes around, comes around. When I sowed addiction, I reaped addiction and fed on despair. Becoming a convenor is an ethical affirmation of one's individual responsibility for the messages circulating in the social network. The convenor sows a message of sobriety and prepares a harvest of hope and positive transformation.

For More Meaning in Life

A fourth reason to become a convenor is to reach a higher sense of meaningfulness in one's life. Meaning in life arises from connectedness with others. Drugs and alcohol led many people into social isolation, or into a set of phantom relationships with drinking/­drugging partners or codependents. Participating in a self-help recovery group over time means re-connecting with people (or connecting for the first time) and establishing authentic relationships. This is a great improvement, and it is enough for many people. However, some people seek a meaning in life beyond self-repair and self-transformation. Becoming a convenor is a way of dedicating oneself to a mission of service to others, and this can yield a deeper sense of purpose and direction in one's life.

Because Someone Has To Do It

A fifth reason why people become Life­Ring convenors is because they feel that something has to be done. Despite more than 50 years of nearly everyone being funneled into recovery on the twelve-step pattern, the drug and alcohol problem shows no signs of abatement. There is a great deal of room for improvement in the way we as a society approach the issue. Someone has to step in and help build another road. The Life­Ring convenor is the agent of an unspoken social consensus that it is time to give people a meaningful choice of recovery paths.

Because It Feels Good

A sixth reason why people become Life­Ring convenors is for the emotional rewards. The convenor's efforts frequently result in profound changes for the better in others' lives. To be a witness to so much transformation is already a privilege. To be a catalyst in such a process can stir one's feelings with indescribable force, bringing up tears of gladness. When I leave a meeting at which things have gone well, I feel a sense of warmth in my gut, unlike any other satisfaction I have experienced. Being a convenor not only does good, it feels good.

Because Convening is Love

A seventh and final reason why people become convenors is love. When people have been clean and sober for some time, they sometimes feel an upwelling of love pent up inside during the long winter of their addiction. Now it surges out of them and seeks an object. No flesh-and-blood person has sufficient magnitude to absorb this force. It requires a transcendent object. The role of convenor affords such overflowing love a worthy channel. Love the good in bad people. Nurture the health in people who are ill. Take people whose instinct is to hide and isolate, and bring them together. Connect them, protect them as they recover their self-respect and exercise their sober legs. Bringing people together in recovery is a transcendent embrace. To convene is to love.

In Appreciation of Convenors

The whole Life­Ring network exists so that people in recovery can come to the meetings, talk about their current recovery issues, get their sobriety charged up, help strengthen others’ sobriety, put a couple of dollars in the basket, applaud, feel good, and leave. This meeting process keeps people clean and sober, week after week. Thanks to their sobriety, people develop new lives, new relationships, new interests, new everything. They become transformed in diverse and wonderful ways that no one, not even they themselves, could have anticipated.

People can have perfectly satisfactory recoveries without becoming missionaries. We are a pragmatic organization, not an evangelical one. But there will always be some among our members who get inspired by what they see happening and leap up to get involved. Whatever their mix of motivations, when they see the need for a meeting, they step in and start one. When they see a lack of literature they get it or make it. When they see anything that needs to be done, they get down and do it. They are both talkers and doers, but above all doers. They not only dream, they convert their visions into nuts and bolts and make them work. They are producers, makers, shakers, people who move mountains. They are Life­Ring convenors.

Convenors are the core of our organization, and the bridge to its future. Those comfortable meetings with their friendly process, the week-to-week recharge of people’s sobriety energies, all the benefits that spin off from sobriety – none of that would have started, and none of it would keep going very long, without someone to found the meeting, set up the room, establish the meeting format, keep the conversation rolling, provide the literature, connect the meetings together, and perform scores of other services in and outside the meeting context. People emerging from the cave of alcohol and drugs need people who can bring them together. Recovery requires convenors and members who do convenor work. The convenors of yesterday and today need to pass on their accumulated experience and knowledge to the convenors of tomorrow, so that our network of hope, choice, and transformation may have continuity and growth.

-- From "How Was Your Week?" Ch. 2.

Self-Help and Service to Others

We had a good discussion at the Denver congress this past weekend about motivating more LifeRing members to take part in the organizational work.

Someone familiar with the Brand-A organizations quoted one of their slogans, "Don't ever say 'no' to XX," and someone else pointed to Step 12, which makes "carrying the message" an integral part of the core program.

So we talked about whether we should make "Service" the fourth "S" alongside Sobriety, Secularity, and Self-Help. (Not much support for that!) And we talked about how we might redefine Self-Help to build service into it. And we talked about whether guilting people to do volunteer work is a good policy.

Nobody in the discussion favored guilting people. Guilt is a nasty, undermining emotion and is as likely to drive a person into the arms of relapse as to keep them sober -- unless, of course, they're really guilty of something. In my experience, guilt is not only nasty, it also doesn't work very well as a motivator. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Brand A Hospitals and Institutions committee (which presumably knows how to push the guilt buttons) has a very spotty record at providing Brand A volunteers to cover important meetings and presentations; at venues with which I'm personally familiar, where we also have LifeRing meetings, they've been no-shows time after time. Apparently their membership has developed a thick skin to guilt appeals, as would be only natural.

The psychologist Albert Bandura at Stanford, after much experiment and study, has come to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that people remember negative reinforcement for a long time, but it doesn't change their behavior. What changes behavior is positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement changes people's behavior even when they're not aware of it and don't remember it.

Positive reinforcement is built into the core of our usual meeting format. The How Was Your Week format, with its inclusion of feedback (crosstalk), incorporates positive reinforcement as a central element. The whole healing model behind the motto "Empower Your Sober Self" is built around positive reinforcement. When it comes to applying this moving force to people's recovery work in the meeting context, we know what we're doing.

But how and where do we expose our members to positive reinforcement that motivates them to step forward and do service work for the organization? I don't see that we've developed an effective enough channel for it.

Maybe it would help if we had a convenor testimonials page, similar to the general LifeRing kudos page, where convenors could talk about how their own service work has helped their recoveries and made them feel good. Idea?

I'll post my own list in a separate article here, excerpted from How Was Your Week? Anyone with affirmative experiences can post a comment. Maybe the string of comments, after a while, can be set to print and circulated more widely, in an expanded edition of the "Give Something Back" brochure. It's a start.

What do you think?

More leadership roles in LifeRing

When the founding members wrote the LifeRing bylaws back in 2000-2001, we wanted to create as "flat" an organization as possible, and would have provided for no officers at all if that were legally possible.

However, in order to operate on a sound businesslike footing, we had to form a corporation; and corporations have to at least three officers. That's how we arrived at the triumvirate of CEO, CFO, and Secretary -- the only official officers in LifeRing. If you add the nine seats on the Board of Directors, you get a maximum of 12 people with recognized leadership responsibilities.

Now, "flat" is good and there's much organizational research that validates this concept. You can scan the past decade of Harvard Business Review to find a string of learned, researched articles dissing the top-down hierarchical bureaucratic megalith corporation and lauding the horizontal network-type organization with its short communication lines and rapid response times.

We definitely want to stay flat ... but flat also has its dark side, at least in our implementation. Given our current setup, if you show leadership ability and interest, your options are severely limited. You're either convenor of a local meeting (or of a chat or list), or you're on the worldwide Board of Directors or an officer of the corporation. There's a huge gap of nothing in between.

Having no recognized intermediate leadership positions is bad. There's no ramp for people to move up on as their vision grows broader and their dedication to service becomes firmer. Because there's no transition, convenors may get stuck in a local perspective and may even isolate from the rest of the LifeRing network. I think we're infected with that malady in a number of places.

We do have a number of convenors who take on broader responsibilities than a single meeting. Whenever there's a problem in one of the meetings in their area, they help out. If somebody needs a substitute, they get the call. If there's a talk to be given, they take the lead in doing it. If a meeting is out of literature, they take care of it. When there's an area workshop, they're present. And so on. That's great. What's not good is that we have no express way of recognizing the role they play. We ought to have a formal title for them.

It's unrealistic to expect that literally every LifeRing participant will take on a leadership role at some time or other. But it's also unrealistic to expect that LifeRing can grow and prosper so long as we have a whole lot of nothing inbetween the local level and the worldwide level. That's why the Congress in Denver took up discussion of intermediate leadership. We made a start on it: Robert (Itchy) Bradley is now East Coast convenor. Kathleen Gargan is now Colorado convenor. When everybody gets home and has a chance to look at their local situation with new eyes, we'll undoubtedly define a series of additional intermediate roles, with responsibilities broader than a single meeting but smaller than the universe of the board member.

The ultimate guarantee of organizational "flatness" is our Delegates' Assembly. Each meeting has the power to send one person who has one vote in the DA, and the DA elects the Board of Directors. The meetings through their delegates are both the bottom of the organization, in the sense that they are its foundation, and the top of the organization, because they hold the ultimate power. So long as that remains the case -- and nobody is advocating a change in that -- we'll remain a flat, anti-hierarchical organization. But without creating a ramp of intermediate leadership, and granting formal recognition to the intermediate leaders who are active now, there's a danger that we'll get flat in the bad sense, like a soda with the bubbles gone, or like road kill.

Your thoughts?

Intro to Workbook Study (Short Format)

The Recovery by Choice workbook is written mainly for individual home study (“bibliotherapy”). The new Short Format Study Outline is an effort to adapt the book for use in group study.

In theory, groups could work the book in the same way that an individual might: by considering each item, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, with group discussion of each point of interest. In practice, groups working the book in this fashion march so slowly – approximately a page or two per hour – that it might take three to five years to complete the volume.

The new Short-Format Study Outline provides a framework for completing the workbook in thirteen weekly sessions lasting one hour or less. The thirteen-week format allows four complete cycles of book study in a calendar year. It also approximately matches the fourteen chapters in the workbook.

As you will see as you track the outline through the book, a great deal of material had to be skipped or touched on lightly. One substantial chapter (Ch. 10) is omitted entirely. Study group members may want to work the omitted material on their own as “homework” between study meetings.

Each session in the Study Outline has a more or less set format.

• Opening Statement, setting out general purpose of the study
• A review question based on the material covered the previous week
• A short introductory statement for today’s topic
• References to worksheets or other exercises from the book, exploring the topic
• Reference to a closing exercise, usually for writing a plan that addresses the topic.
• A closing remark that points ahead to next week’s topic.

This format has been tested with an initial group of about 6 people, more or less, for one complete cycle of sessions each lasting 45 minutes. A 45-minute format respects the fact that most of the content is fairly intense and requires considerable concentration and effort. At this level of intensity, a full hour may be too long.

People who have done 12-step study groups may find the LifeRing study group format disconcerting at first. People tell me that the 12-step groups mainly do recitation (reading aloud) from the text, much like Bible study. The group leader may provide authoritative interpretation. The role of the average participant is to recite when called upon and otherwise be still and listen.

Here, the over-all purpose of the study is for each participant to build their Personal Recovery Program. Each person’s P.R.P. will be more or less unique, based on their personality and circumstances. Accordingly, it is important that each person participate actively in the group discussion, to get their issue out and get feedback. Although there is an occasional patch of recitation in the outline, and you may once or twice assert your superior factual knowledge, the main process is participatory and interactive. The nearest parallel is a graduate seminar in which each student is pursuing a personal research project.

Part of the convenor’s art in any meeting is keeping track of time. When convening a study group, you may find yourself constantly balancing between the imperative of group participation and the demands of the clock. It’s important to make time for the closing exercise, if the chapter has one, because the final (13th) session begins by pulling these closing exercises together, so as to make a master plan.

Working any workbook requires literacy. Many of the exercises in this outline call for writing. If some of your group members have difficulty in this area, one solution is to have them buddy up with people who are more fluent.

Access to a whiteboard or its equivalent can be useful in several sessions, particularly Ch. 1 (My Decision). You could write the session outline on the board before the start. You can jot key points of the discussion on the board to help the group focus and track the issues.

Nothing about this outline should be treated as if it were cast in stone. Some of the selections reflect nothing more than my hunch about what would work best with the particular group present. On the next go-round with a different group, I might [and did (Note added May 12)] select different material from the book. You should feel free to do the same.

The attached outline is a rough first draft. It reflects actual experience in a first study cycle, and is far from a polished final product. You may be confused at first which lines are meant as a suggested script for the convenor to present to the group, and which lines are editorial asides to the convenor. In future drafts the presentation should gradually rise to a clearer format and higher polish.

Your experiences in leading workbook study groups is valuable. This is a pioneer venture -- really an adventure -- in recovery self-education, and other people can benefit greatly from knowing about the trail you have blazed. Please post your experience in this blog and become a member of the LifeRing convenors’ email group (if you are not already) and post your experiences there, in as much detail as possible, for the benefit of others who will follow behind you.

View the Short Format Study Outline (PDF)

Dealing With People Who Relapse a Lot

--- In convenors@yahoogroups.com, "fibejebe" charli883@i... wrote:

"...The truth sometimes hurts but it is still better than a load of bullshit. Any comments?" -- Fiona.

Not long ago, on LSRmail, one of our members who's been struggling with repeated day-1's since first becoming involved with LSR late last year, in referring to the response from Ellesarians to his latest slip, put up a post which included this line:

"...When I drank 9 days ago a lot of lsr's said don't worry about it, get back on your feet, move on. Should I still take that attitude?"

My response is copied here:
___________________________________________________

What attitude makes the most sense to you, XXXXX? It seems to me that somebody who's made a sincere decision to end the admittedly devastating, suicidal lifestyle of active addiction would not take lightly any episode of drinking, regardless of the circumstances.

Addiction is serious business, and the only known way to arrest it is abstinence. Lapses in abstinence, if dismissed too casually, can become seen as inevitable, or "no big deal". The danger in that attitude, of course, is that the lapses will become more frequent and last longer.

When does one cross the line from being committed to recovery and really making a concerted effort to change, back over to being resigned to a life of struggling with alcohol?

When does a pattern of slips become nothing more than active alcoholism in the form of periodic or binge drinking? I'm not sure there's a clean line there. I'm very sure the danger exists, because that's exactly what I did some years ago.
So, when I hear people suggesting that one "Don't worry about it, get back on your feet, move on...", what I hear is "Don't spend a lot of time wallowing around in guilt and embarassment, by all means stop drinking immediately, and redouble your efforts to attain stable abstinence."

What I don't hear is "Hey, no big deal, forget about it." It is a big deal. It's a failure to achieve what you set out to do. It's a disappointment, a frustration, a bummer. It's an indication that you've more work to do, that there are things you might consider doing differently. It should not be forgotten about, it should be looked at very carefully to see what can be learned to prevent it from happening again.

I guess I'd say the worst attitude one might assume in the midst of, or in the wake of a slip would be, "See? I can't stop drinking. I'm a failure. Screw it, it's too hard, I can't do this, the hell with sobriety." A much better attitude might something like, "See? I'm human, I'm not invincible, I let my guard down and got bitten hard. But I'm not beaten, I'm going to learn what I can from this and do what I set out to do for all the reasons I know in my heart I must, if I'm to live a meaningful life."

I would find it a bit worrisome that after a damn good period of sobriety you drank, then about a week later you drank again...that's a disturbing trend developing. Time to get serious, if you're serious about sobriety. And I believe you are.
_________________________________________________
And that about sums up my personal view on the question, except to add that the better I know an individual, the better feel I have for what attitude to take in my support of them. I, personally, am likely to pay more attention and actually think about what's being said if I get some straight, no BS talk (and maybe a slap or two) from someone I trust and respect. At the same time, I realize people react differently, and it takes time to get to know what's the best way to get through to somebody. When in doubt, I'll lean toward the "gentle" approach.
Rick Booth 5/30/03

LifeRing Service Center, Press, Move to New Office

A Place Of Our Own
Marjorie posts temporary door sign on our new home.	Gillian gets high on the ladder to brighten up the ceiling.	Chet makes like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence.
Chet and Marjorie assembling the rubber-like steel shelving.	Ta-daa! Ready to hold boxes of LifeRing Press books.	Syl fights off the great white cardboard box shark.
Lloyd, George and Ellen get down with the shipping desk.	It got pretty chaotic sometimes but, heck, we're used to that!	Chet prepares to tape Mark.
Lloyd, George, Marty (in rear), Chet pile the wagons high.	Laurie and Mark ham for the camera..	Marylou helps put things back together the next day.
	During the week of April 7-13 '03, LifeRing Press and the LifeRing Service Center moved to new office space. Lots of volunteers made the move short work and a good time. The new space is bigger and more versatile, and more important: it's all our own! Please mark the new mailing address: LifeRing 1440 Broadway Suite 312 Oakland CA 94612-2023 The phone number, fax, and email remain the same: Tel: 510-763-0779 Fax: 510-763-1513 service@lifering.org (Service Center) publisher@lifering.com (Press) Come to the Office Warming Party May 23, 2003
Caroline gets the shipping desk ready for action. She also repaired the supply cabinet.

People Develop Commitment Through Having Choices: A Lesson From Harvard Business Review

Somehow a copy of Harvard Business Review landed in my office and I started reading it on my commute train. The following article caught my eye and I want to pass along some points it makes.

Richard Chase and Sriram Dasu author a cover article titled "Want to perfect your company's service? Use behavioral science." (HBR June 2001, p. 79, click to read it online). They try to apply decades of behavioral research to illuminate what the service experience feels like to the customer. Here are some main points:

(1) People remember the start and the end of the experience more than the middle, but they remember the end most of all. Therefore, to bring customers back, service providers should end on an upnote. Can we learn from this principle in our context? Many of our local meetings end with a round of applause. This is a feel-good experience and provides an upbeat ending. Score one for us.

(2) If there is bad news, get it out of the way early. At a recent meeting it was known that one member had had a relapse. When the opening statement was done, the meeting convenor could have started the check-in ("how was your week") to his left or to his right. Instead he went straight across the room to the member who had relapsed and asked him to start off the discussion. Good move. The meeting processed the bad news early and ended strong.

(3) People desperately want things to make sense and will concoct an explanation when none is available. In the recovery context, the atmosphere is filled with "explanations" derived from the religious/spiritual 12-Step movement. If we don't step in with our own secular explanations, people will fall back on what's available, even if it's counterfactual or meaningless under scrutiny. Lesson: convenors who study and develop a deeper theoretical understanding of secular recovery principles can fill the vacuum and help people make sense of their experience in a rational manner.

(4) People develop commitment through having choices. "A fascinating study found that blood donors perceived significantly less discomfort when they were allowed to select the arm from which the blood would be drawn. The lesson is clear: people are happier and more comfortable when they believe they have some control over a process, particularly an uncomfortable one. Often the control handed over is largely symbolic (as in the choice of arm). In other cases, it's very real: the medical profession has long recognized the value of allowing the patient to make an informed choice about alternative treatments for cancer and heart disease. These are extremely important, high-stakes decisions, and great value is gained by including the patient in the decision. He or she feels less helpless, less hopeless, and more committed to making the process work." (p. 83).

In a nutshell, our approach of telling the person new in recovery that they have a choice and that they have the power to construct their own personal recovery protocol is sound in principle, with clear support in motivational research. The contrary approach -- telling people that they are helpless and have zero power to choose -- is a substandard, unsupportable practice. Our approach develops and reinforces the most important single ingredient in a person's recovery over the long term: the inner commitment to succeed.

It's always good to learn that we're on the right track, even if the stroke comes from such an improbable source as HBR.

Literature Racks Can Offer the Person in Treatment a Choice of Support Groups

On any given day an estimated 900,000 people in the U.S. are in treatment programs for substance abuse. Most of those treatment facilities have literature racks for their patients/clients. Most of those literature racks carry only one kind of literature -- the 12-Step kind. It doesn't have to be so. Literature racks in treatment programs can offer the person in recovery a choice, and can bring people to our LifeRing meetings who would otherwise never have known about us.

Here are some photographs of literature racks in treatment facilities where LifeRing brochures are available. The rack at the right is a standard commercial 12-pocket plastic wall display, mounted in the dual diagnosis ward at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley CA. A small selection of the omnipresent AA literature is in the top row. The five main LifeRing handouts are in the bottom row. Do you recognize them by sight? They are from the left, the San Francisco Bay Area meeting schedule (ivory), the unhooked.com brochure (blue), and then the "3S" trilogy: Sobriety Is Our Priority (green), Secular Is Our Middle Name (gray), and Self-Help Is What We Do (pink). This rack has an empty pocket just waiting for our next brochure.

The next picture shows a custom-made wooden wall rack mounted in the Merritt-Peralta Institute, a 28-day inpatient program, on the 5th floor of Summit Hospital in Oakland, CA This rack was built for full-sheet (8 1/2 x 11) handouts, and standard trifold brochures like ours pretty much sink out of sight into its pockets. Staff assigned us the top rack, and our handouts were all but invisible until a clever friendly patient stuffed a towel into the bottom of the bin so that our pieces would be seen. There isn't enough room to display all the brochures, but it's better than nothing. As in most treatment facilities, the meeting schedules are the fastest-moving items. This rack generally presents a somewhat messy appearance, and I can proudly say that our own shelf usually gets tended to more often, and is more up to date, than that of many of the other organizations with whom we share the rack. Some of the other bins have literature three years out of date, and some have stood empty for months. When we run out of LifeRing meeting schedules in this rack, I usually hear about it immediately, and if I forget to bring a resupply some week, I get raised eyebrows.

The next rack is at the Chemical Dependency Recovery Program of the Kaiser Permanente HMO in Oakland. It's a clear plastic six-pocket commercial rack, available at office stores, that is designed to stand freely on a table. In this treatment facility, AA has a large wire literature rack with space for about 24 different brochures, but there is no place for that rack other than down on the floor, where it's hard to see and presents a trip hazard. For a while we stuffed our brochures into some of the empty pockets in that rack but this didn't seem right. Finally LifeRing member Syl S. hit on the solution of buying our own rack, the cost of which she generously donated. Syl originally obtained a wall rack similar to the first one shown above, but staff denied permission to mount anything on the walls, citing fire regulations. But staff had no problem with a table rack. The display is positioned on a side table within easy view and reach of patients seated in the waiting area near the reception booth of this outpatient facility. Syl made a bright neon label for the front. We use two pockets for meeting schedules here because of the heavy demand for that item. Having our own rack, and such a nice looking one in such a favorable position, is a very pleasing thing, and the literature in it moves at a steady clip into patients' hands.

Last is a single-pocket standup rack -- also a standard office supply store item -- that holds meeting schedules. A label on the rack tells what is in it and gives the Service Center phone number to call for refills and information. We are experimenting with placing these racks in churches, coffee houses, grocery stores and other appropriate sites, wherever someone volunteers to keep them refilled. If you want one of these racks and are willing to keep it supplied, call the Service Center at 510-763-0779.

Literature racks can reach people when you're not present. They never sleep and never go on holiday. They offer their freight of wisdom and support without commentary or attitude. But they are only as good as the hand that fills them and tends them. A literature rack reflects on the organization. A rack that long stands messy or empty bespeaks an organization that has stopped caring or has sunk into chaos. A rack that regularly gets tended and refilled testifies to an organization that has its act together and that cares about people and wants to be approached. Getting our literature into literature racks in treatment facilities is not always easy. In many cases, permission to stock literature comes along with permission to hold a meeting on the facility, and not before. Thus the literature in the rack helps bring people to the meeting, and the people in the meeting help resupply the rack. But in other cases, we can get literature into a facility before we have a meeting there, on the ground that the patients are looking for meetings anywhere in the community and have an interest in our area-wide meeting schedule. A number of patients in treatment facilities do not obtain any benefit from the traditional 12-Step approaches, and live in a state of frustration or despair because they are unaware that there are other roads to sobriety. A well-stocked literature rack with LifeRing handouts in it can be their first news that other choices exist. I know people who say that they are still clean and sober today because they found LifeRing from a handout in a literature rack. Getting LifeRing literature into treatment center literature racks presents many patients for the first time with a choice of recovery paths, and saves lives that might otherwise be lost.

A Sample Letter to Local Referral Sources

This sample is based on a letter that Sue G. sent out to substance abuse treatment providers in the Buffalo area when she opened the meeting. It has generated a good response, and the meeting receives referrals from some of the providers. It proves that letters of this type needn't be complicated. It probably didn't hurt that Sue G. is herself a social service professional with name recognition in the local service provider community. -- Ed.

Dear Service Provider:

I am writing to introduce a new self-help group to your agency. SOAR (Secular Organization for Addiction Recovery) is a local group for people suffering from addictions, which is based on the principles of LifeRing Secular Recovery.

SOAR is an alternative concept that doesn't use the twelve-step philosophy in addiction recovery, rather, it is based on individuals using self-help and learning through experimentation. Steps to recovery are not the focus, but total abstinence from the addictive behavior is the goal. This philosophy recognizes that there is no set pathway to recovery, that no one approach will work for every person. Group members are encouraged to share with each other what works for them, and members can pick and choose their own approach to staying clean and sober.

I have enclosed some more detailed information for your perusal. Please feel free to copy anything that you would like to post or hand out, and to call me at the number on the flier if you have any questions.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Susan J. Gibbons, Convenor

Posted 11/26/00

Announcing Our Third San Francisco Meeting With a Mailing to Local Treatment Providers

On Sept. 27, the LSR Service Center in the persons of Gillian E., Marjorie J. and Marty N. got out a mailing to 110 San Francisco treatment providers announcing the opening of our third San Francisco meeting.

The mailing consisted of a cover letter (PDF copy attached), a flyer suitable for posting (PDF copy attached), a flyer promoting the forthcoming new book, Presenting LifeRing Secular Recovery: a Selection of Readings for Treatment Professionals (PDF copy of flyer attached), and a copy of our local area meeting schedule.

We used the mailing list previously downloaded from SAMHSA as described previously.

It took the three of us about two hours to produce the mailing from composition to mailbox. Total cost around $65.

-- Marty N.

A Targeted Mailing From the Service Center to Rochester MN Treatment Facilities

The Service Center yesterday sent out a mailing to licensed chemical dependency treatment facilities in the Rochester, MN area, in an effort to bring referrals to the new Rochester meeting. The mailing included a cover letter, a copy of the new "Presenting book" in photocopy format, and the four basic LifeRing brochures. It was an expensive project, see below, but it seemed worth doing.

In an earlier article, I described a mailing the Service Center sent out to treatment providers in the city of San Francisco. The data source for that mailing was the online Substance Abuse Facility Locator created in January 2000 by SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In the earlier article I complained that the SAMHSA database was posted in an elaborate screen format that made it laborious to download the data. Since then, SAMHSA has posted its database in raw table format, which makes it almost a breeze to download the data and use it in a mailmerge project, such as this one to Rochester MN.

To access this database in computer-readable format, point your browser to

http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/ows-bin/owa/DASIS$.startup

This is the start page for the Drug and Alcohol Services Information System. From there, click on

State Recognized Substance Abuse Providers

which gets you to http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/ows-bin/owa/NFRFTP$.Startup , a listing of databases in .zip file format, by state. Click on the state you want. Up comes a screen that invites you to click to download a .zip file. Click and save the file to your disk in a location where you can find it again. Then use PKZIP or any functional equivalent, such as WinZip, to open the .zip file and extract its contents to your disk. The contents of the .zip file (for Minnesota) consist of three separate files:

mn_rpt.txt

mn_dat.txt

readme.txt

The file you want is mn_dat.txt. This contains the facilities data in plain text (ASCII) format with fixed-length records separated by a vertical line | as delimiter. Either the fixed-length format or the delimiter would have been enough, but I guess SAMHSA wanted to make sure, so they gave us both.

Next I imported the dat.txt file into Microsoft Access. Probably any other database will handle the information equally well, and you might even be able to use the dat.txt file directly as a Mailmerge data file in your word processor, if you massage it a bit. I used Access. If you are using Access, the procedure is this:

Create a new blank Access database. On the File menu, click on "Get External Data" and then on "Import." In the file browse box that opens, set the file type to "Text files." Find the directory where you stored the mn_dat.txt file. Click on it. Then click "Import." When the "Import Text Wizard" opens, click on "Delimited." Then click "Next." Where it asks you to "Choose the delimiter," click on "Other" and enter the vertical bar | in the field next to "other." Also click "First Row Contains Field Names." Click "Finish." You should in moments have a new Access table named "mn_dat." Open it and you will see a listing of 312 facility names and addresses.

Next, create a new Access query on the table, so as to pull out the Rochester records. If you know the target zip codes you could query by that field. I simply entered "Rochester or Winona" in the "address" field. (A quick spot check showed that the smaller towns in the vicinity of Rochester had no listings.) A short list of 20 facilities resulted. Inspecting the data showed that the street address field in one record was blank. I manually copied the "mailing address" data into this field so as to create a usable record. (If you run into a lot of data problems of this kind, more complicated methods of massaging the data are available.) I saved the query as "RochesterMN" and closed Access.

It was then a straightforward process of creating the form letter and a mailing label in MS Word, linking to the new "RochesterMN" query as data source, and running the job on the printer. After that it's collate-stuff-and-lick, and it's done.

A word about the economics of this project. This was an expensive mailing. The "Treatment booklet" in photocopy format, tape bound, costs $4.40 each. Add 40 cents for the 4 brochures, plus about 30 cents for the envelope, cover sheet, and mailing label. Add $1.65 for postage. Total $6.75 each. Total cost for this small mailing: $135.00, labor donated. I thought it was worth doing because of the long-term importance of gaining a toe-hold in Minnesota, the bastion of the "Minnesota Model" -- and to back up the excellent work that the local convenor, Roger L., has done in obtaining a room, getting local press coverage, and distributing flyers.

If the treatment providers send their clients to the meeting, and if the clients put money in the meeting basket, and if the meeting treasurer sends the basket surplus over local needs to the Service Center, then the Service Center will be in a financial position to continue this kind of service indefinitely. I am more than happy to donate my labor to the extent practicable, but I hope people understand that the Service Center cannot at this early point in our development afford to do this kind of mailing for each and every locality where a new meeting gets underway. I am posting the how-to instructions here with the thought that computer-savvy local convenors can use local initiative for similar efforts.

One measure that will cut the cost of this kind of mailing substantially is to get the "Treatment booklet" printed commercially. The LifeRing Board of Directors have approved a proposal to print this item as a paperbound book, half-sheet format, with glossy cover and spot color. This will reduce the cost per copy from $4.40 to $2.04 each, and make for a more attractive and professional presentation besides. The postage should also be slightly cheaper, and we can use a more attractive half-size envelope. Look for the announcement that the print edition is ready around mid-September.

-- Marty N. 8/5/00

• View the Rochester cover letter (PDF).
• View the data file used for this mailing.
• View the photocopy-format "Treatment booklet" (PDF).
• View a page proof of the booklet in paperback format.
• View the earlier article on the San Francisco mailing.

"One More Arrow In the Quiver"

Report on a presentation to staff and patients of a 12-Step treatment facility

By Marty N.

This morning (1/27/00) Marjorie J and I presented the LifeRing approach to a "doctor's hour" meeting of patients and some staff at the Merritt-Peralta Institute (MPI) in Oakland. The MPI is a unit in Oakland’s privately owned Summit mega-hospital located on Pill Hill in midtown. About 30 persons were present, seated around a long table in the board room. The MPI has a reputation for being a hard-core traditional 12-Step treatment facility. Knowledgeable sources have described it without malice as a Step-Nazi citadel. It is one of the largest inpatient facilities and is, after Kaiser, one of the largest outpatient programs in the S.F. Bay Area.

In the reception area on the fifth floor there is a placard containing the 12 Steps in red letters about 2 inches high; this is framed behind glass in a wood case about three feet by four feet. The frame is bolted to the wall with ¼” thick carriage bolts. You can’t miss it. The literature rack is filled with AA and NA schedules in messy profusion. There is an MPI alumni newsletter that contains nothing but 12-Step homilies.

How, you may ask, did we get invited to present our program to this staff? The bottom line answer is: patient demand. The medical director of the facility told us that they were constantly encountering patients who did not want to have anything to do with the 12-Step program, and he, the director, did not know where to send them or what to do with them. So, if you are ever a patient in a treatment facility and you have problems with the 12-Step approach, be sure to register your concerns. You may not see immediate changes, but the cumulative impact of your pressure over a period of time may eventually create an opening for change, as in this case. There are individual treatment professionals in every facility I have had contact with who, like this physician, are driven by a desire to help the patient, over and above any personal 12-step affiliations, and who realize from daily professional experience that the 12-Step approach just does not cut it for a number of their patients. Patient demand is driving these professionals to look for alternatives. Patient demand combined with staff professionalism is what got us invited to this citadel of traditionalism. As far as I know, we are the first and only non-Step group to ever be invited there.

Our host told us before we began that he did not want to polarize the issue into Us v. Them, and did not want to have the session turn into a debate. He wanted us to be seen as a complement and an adjunct to their traditional program, one more arrow in the quiver, not as a rival or a competitor. This is a situation with which everyone who advocates for a secular alternative has to deal. It’s all a lot of fun to polemicize with faceless dodecamaniacs on the Internet, but when you’re talking to a staff meeting and your objective is to win approval to hold a meeting on the premises, the word is: be positive. Our experience in talking to the Kaiser groups in Oakland over the past three years came in very useful here.

In this case, I began by telling about my own recovery. I said that I had 7 years 3 months and 25 days clean and sober, all of it in SOS/LSR, and had never attended any 12-Step meeting. I described LSR/SOS as a supportive, tool-rich environment where people are encouraged to build their own recovery programs, taking what they need for their individual recovery. Then, by way of example, I outlined my own personal 1-2-3 program (do something every day, go to meetings, use the Sobriety Priority as a decision-making tool) along the lines I’ve written in my story in the Handbook. The audience members could see nothing objectionable in this approach, which is in its secular way quite traditional, and it seemed to reassure them at the outset that we were sound.

Then, I explained the concept of the drunk self and the sober self at war in the user/abuser. By drawing cartoon heads on the whiteboard, I was able to show the small, weak, sober self becoming empowered by interaction and support via the meetings, and becoming dominant within the person. This is a plausible, intuitively correct model of recovery, presented in an entirely positive way without polemics. Only later will some in the audience realize that this simple and sensible recovery model requires no Higher Powers. Like Occam's razor, it has no need of the God hypothesis. I concluded with a few words of gratitude toward the LSR/SOS program for being there for me to get sober in, and with appreciation for my new sober life.

Marjorie then took the floor and told very movingly of finding SOS/LSR on the Internet, and how the sosmail list helped her pull herself out of drinking and isolation and helped her get sober, and how participating in LifeRing positively changed the quality of her life.

We then took questions. The first question was to describe what goes on at an LSR meeting. I read the opening statement for our SF Bay meetings out of the Handbook, and briefly described the check-in format and the topic format, emphasizing our use of crosstalk, and our practice of closing meetings with a round of applause.

I don’t remember all the questions in detail, but one of the next ones was about crosstalk. I said that we felt the process of drunks talking with drunks was central to making the sober place inside us stronger (pointing to the whiteboard and the diagram I had drawn), and for that reason we encouraged crosstalk and allowed it in either all or part of each of our meetings. Marjorie pointed out that sometimes we asked a person whether they wanted crosstalk to their share, so that a person could be protected if they felt crosstalk would threaten them. This set the questioner (a person who introduced himself saying “I’m Joe (or whatever name) and I’m an alcoholic”) grumbling to himself but without a comeback. (You need to know that AA, even though it has made an icon out of “drunks talking to drunks” does not allow crosstalk in its meetings.)

Another question was, “do you have mentors or sponsors?” I said that if a newcomer in our group felt attracted to another person’s recovery program and wanted to learn from them in particular, they were free and encouraged to approach that person and form a closer relationship with them. But we had never formalized these relationships. The reason is partly historical. When AA began, meetings were underground and you had to be invited; the person who brought you was your “sponsor.” But today meetings are publicly announced, so there isn’t any need for this role, really. Besides, I said, formalizing the relationship scares us; sponsors have a lot of power, but there isn’t any exam, or any standards, or licensing board, and that worries us; so we’ve kept mentoring strictly informal. The questioner did not pursue this and seemed satisfied.

One person wanted to know the history. I told briefly of how the founder got sober in AA in 1978 but then felt he had to start on a new foundation, and began SSG, and so on. Another questioner (another one who began “I’m Joe and I’m an alcoholic”) took off on this and asked a very interesting question that I had never heard before. He said, what was it the founder could not handle in AA? What was the thing that made him finally decide to leave?

I said the thing that gave the founder cold sweats and finally made him leave AA was the thought “what if God wants me to drink?” He realized in that case he would have to tell God to go to hell. And when he thought about the implications of that, he realized he had to start a program that was not God-based, but was based on the Sobriety Priority. The questioner took this answer very seriously and did not argue with it.

Someone asked whether we were just for atheists and agnostics. I explained that we were not atheist/agnostic but secular, meaning that people of all faiths and none were welcome, and that neither religion nor anti-religion were business that came up in the meetings. I said that people with very definite religious beliefs felt comfortable in our group because our process did not require them to amend the beliefs they came in with.

The same questioner who had asked about the founder then volunteered that he had attended a couple of our meetings and found that, as far as religion goes, in our program “you get to keep what you have.” I think this is a very good expression.

Another questioner asked, skeptically, “is this some kind of experimental program? Have there been any studies done as to whether it works or not?” I answered that as to studies, there was the 1996 study by Connors and Dermen, a copy of which was included in the presentation packet we put together and handed out. Admittedly, I said, this was not a comparative study with a control group, which was the only way to really find out anything scientifically. But then, scientific studies with control groups had never been done for AA or NA either, except in rare instances and with mixed results. If anyone in this room would like to study our group in a scientific way, I said, I’m sure we would be glad to cooperate; please to talk to me afterward. As for being “experimental,” I said we gladly copped to that, we were still learning and developing and trying things out, and I hoped that we would always be listening and learning and developing, and that if we ever got to the point where we thought we had the final answer on how to get you, you, and you, and everyone in the world sober, we would become obnoxious. (I had sense enough to stop there and take another question.)

A questioner wanted to know about our history locally and our name change, and where did we have meetings. I dealt with the name change very briefly: we got involved in litigation with another group that claimed rights to the name and we lost and the court made us change our name. End of story. As to history, I pointed out that our first local meeting was on March 17, 1988, and this meeting was still going, and in fact Marjorie was the current secretary of it. At this time, we have meetings in the area seven days a week, and you can do “seven in seven” in our organization. This made a strong impression on the group. I pointed out we had meetings at the Kaiser in Oakland, at Kaiser in San Francisco, at Kaiser in Richmond and at Kaiser in San Rafael, as well as at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley. This also seemed to impress, as Kaiser is the biggest chemical dependency outpatient program around here, the implication being that if Kaiser hosted our meetings, we must be OK. Also, I said, at Kaiser Oakland on Saturday morning, the patients have to attend a support group between the hours of 10 and 11, and Kaiser has AA and NA and LifeRing going side by side during this hour, patients’ choice. Several heads nodded approvingly at this concept.

When they ran out of questions, our host thanked us and again said, as he had earlier in introducing us, that he frequently had patients who resisted the 12-Step programs and he did not know what to do with them. He felt that an alternative group would be a useful addition to the program, “one more arrow in the quiver.” That seemed to express a consensus. They gave us a good hand. What happened next was completely unexpected to us. The whole group, patients and staff, linked hands and recited the Serenity Prayer, followed by some kind of rah-rah chant along the lines of “keep coming back, it works if you work it,” like at an AA meeting. We took it in stride.

Several patients and staffers talked with us afterward to express interest and support. The physician who was our host said he was pleased with the way it turned out. He joked that he hoped he still had a job after hosting our talk. He looked relaxed and upbeat. He introduced us to the program coordinator, a younger man, and the two of them agreed in our presence that we should have an evening LifeRing meeting at the facility. They would consult their calendar and get back to me. With cordial shaking of hands and thank-yous, we parted.

We left 15 copies of the Professionals’ Packet and a bundle of meeting schedules. One of the staffers said he would personally see that the schedules got into their literature rack. I will follow up about the meeting. I have been looking for a way to get a meeting at this facility for more than three years. From time to time people who have gone through their program manage to find us, and it’s always the same story: 12-Steps rammed down one’s throat, many patients not happy, looking for an alternative. Hopefully they’ll have one soon.

Credit our member B. for providing a key information link to make this happen. A little before Thanksgiving B. had a major relapse, and managed in one weekend to check himself into, and get thrown out of, both the Herrick crisis unit and the MPI unit. When he sobered up and told the story at a meeting, he happened to mention that he saw the same physician, Dr. C., at both places. That was how I learned that the Dr. C whom I already knew from the Wednesday morning Herrick meeting was also on staff at MPI. I had had no idea. The very next day I buttonholed Dr. C at Herrick and asked him whether we could start a meeting at MPI. I nagged him by phone and by letter over the holidays. Last week finally came the invitation, on five days' notice. We were ready.

###

P.S. I got the call today (ten days later) that we are invited back for a second presentation, this time to staff only, on 2/24. -- MN.

Edited 3/3/00 MN.

A New Year's Message

Before the odometer makes its memorable four-digit click into the next thousand years, let's pull over and reflect where we have come from and where we are going.

I.

We are a collection of individual lives, each fiercely separate and unique, yet drawn together by profound shared life experiences: the trauma of chemical dependency and the drama of our recovery. There is no one exactly like each of us. Yet without the prior work of others very much like ourselves, none of us would be together here. When I got sober, there was already a meeting for me to go to, and my case manager at my treatment facility already knew about it and referred me to it. That would not have happened but for years of hard work by people like Karl S. and Mike B. and Janis G. and numerous other local people who started SOS in this area while I was still an active drunk, not to mention people like Tom S., Paula B., Dudley A., and many others who did the same in other cities. And they, in turn, were only picking up a thread started nationwide by Jim C. and the other members of the founding generation. And these, in turn, were part of a Zeitgeist that saw the founding not only of SOS but also of Rational Recovery, and before that, Women for Sobriety, and other alternatives to the Old Order in recovery. We are individuals, but the thread of our lives is part of a larger fabric. The little speck of color that is our autobiography takes its enduring significance from its connection with the broader weave of the times we live in.

Where we go with the thread of our lives in the years ahead is, of course, up to us. Once we are sober, we have choices. We have choices not only about our personal road, but about the way we are going to relate to one another; not only about the face we present to the world as individuals, but also about the kind of group portrait we appear in.

The number one priority for us as individuals is, necessarily, to stay sober. Personal sobriety is the foundation of everything else. Whatever we may wish for ourselves in the new millennium -- health, friends, romance, family, revolution, career, money, freedom, education, success, peace of mind, travel, excitement, whatever -- it all requires sobriety as its necessary precondition. If we have our sobriety, we can make progress toward our goals. If we lose our sobriety, all our dreams go down the drain with it. That's why I hope everyone will join me in resolving above all to make this next stretch of time a sober one. Let's all be in a position to say, and keep saying, that "I've been sober this entire millennium."

Personal sobriety is also the foundation of progress for us as an organization. Here in my home town, we have achieved a modest measure of success as a group because our members have a track record of successful long-term sobriety. Our core group consists largely of people who have never attended a 12-Step meeting and have done their entire sobriety the secular way. The long-term stable sobriety of our core membership has, over time, gradually eroded the skepticism and resistance of portions of the local treatment community, and this in turn has opened new doors to us and brought us new opportunities and a steady stream of new participants. Because of sobriety, we have built the first local meeting schedule in the history of our organization where a recovering person can do "seven in seven" -- a secular recovery meeting every day of the week. Because of sobriety, we have a continuing stream of new convenors with the requisite sober time and enthusiasm to start new meetings. If we continue making sobriety our priority, and take care of our organizational homework, I don't doubt but that our local chapter can double in size in a few years and become a part of the recovery mainstream in this area, as well we deserve to be.

II.

Anyone who surveys our organization from a nationwide perspective will come to the conclusion that we still have a long way to go before we live up to our potential. The concept of secular recovery is an immensely powerful one. It is in harmony with the advance of science in practically all other areas of human knowledge. Much of the chemical dependency field is an isolated backwater in the social sciences, a place where faith-healing rules, where the scientific method is viewed with disdain, and where the theoretical foundations cannot bear scrutiny -- a Kansas of therapeutics. Eventually this citadel of medievalism must crumble. However, our organizational development still lags woefully behind the manifest sweep and power of the secular perspective. In many major metropolitan areas, where populations are traditionally receptive to secular approaches, we have no meetings at all. We have no meetings in New York City, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Seattle, Birmingham, and many other big urban areas. In Chicago, we have only one; in the whole Los Angeles metropolitan area, after fourteen years, we have only five. Clearly, we have work to do. As an organization, there is no more important strategic priority for us than to build more meetings.

My experience in advocating for SOS and now LifeRing in the San Francisco metropolitan urban area for the past few years, and in print and on the Internet, convinces me that progress in building meetings hinges on our ability to present our approach in a positive way. When we tell our audiences how our program works, they respond with interest and approval. When we tell them how the other programs don't work, attention fades. Of course, in explaining how the LifeRing Recovery approach works, we inevitably have to draw clear boundary lines between ourselves and other perspectives. But with practice it becomes possible to do this also in a positive manner. The better we understand what we do and how it works, and the more confidence we ourselves feel in our own method, the more effective we are before the public.

III.

One of the things that we have to explain again and again is that the basic difference between ourselves and the traditional approach is not about God, but about people. Do drunks have it within them to recover? Is there a base to build on within the addict? The traditional approach tells us, no, there is not. We are a defective, hopeless and helpless lot -- there is not one spark of recovery power within us. We are one hundred per cent zero. Therefore, recovery can come only through outside action, only through a power beyond ourselves, only through divine intervention. The psychology of absolute powerlessness requires theology; or, perhaps, it is theology.

We see people more accurately. When we look within the typical alcoholic and addict, we see a person in conflict. Part of them is committed to the addiction and is dedicated ultimately to death by drinking and/or drugs. But another part of them is in rebellion against that and wants to live. There is the sickness in us, but there is also the health; there is the dying, but also the survivor; there is the will to drink, but also the will not to. If the survivor were not there, we would have drunk ourselves to death long ago, and no desire to get clean and sober would be manifest in us. I have talked to hundreds of alcoholics and addicts in various states of wetness or recovery, and one of the great common experiences we have all shared is this recurrent inner war about drinking or using, and quitting.

If there is within each living alcoholic and addict a place that wants to get sober, then the road to recovery, in the most general terms, lies in finding and enlarging that place. If there is a voice inside that wants to get healthy, then the task is to hear and to answer that voice, and to help it speak louder. If there is a life force inside, opposed to the deathbound addictive force, then the strategy is to link up with that force, give it ammunition, and make it powerful.

My younger son is fascinated with professional wrestling, and sometimes I think about the inner struggle of the addict in this vernacular. When I drank, my 300-lb Boozer was the king of the ring of my body and mind, and my inner Sober Guy was a 90-lb runt. But when I got into a self-help support meeting, all us runts started doing pushups and learning moves and ganging up on the boozers, and eventually my Sober Guy got smarter and bigger and stronger and kicked Boozer’s butt.

Some people are more comfortable with a medical metaphor. People who suffer from invasive diseases, such as AIDS, know that there is a war raging in their bloodstream between the virus and the T cells that kill the virus. They measure progress, and life itself, in their daily T cell count. Recovery means to bring up the T cell count. If the T cells are able to maintain a stable high level for a long period of time, the disease goes into remission. The person can lead an almost normal life.

Others prefer the simple mechanical metaphor of the balance beam scale. In the active drinker, there are many weights on the side of drinking and few on the side of sobriety. Recovery means to add weights to the dry side and remove them from the wet side. At first, nothing seems to be happening. Eventually, one more small shift causes the whole balance to tilt in the other direction.

All of these images locate the source of recovery within the person. To see people this way is to say that no one alive is one hundred percent zero. No person, no matter how low they have sunk into the addiction, is entirely powerless. The power to get clean and sober may be small, it may be uninformed, uninspired, unskilled and unconscious, but it is there. Using this vision, people can find a place to start within themselves. People can begin to see themselves as inherently worthy and redeemable. People can find hope.

When we locate the potential to recover within the individual, we offer a simple path to recovery that is comprehensible to anyone, no matter what their degree of education or how recent their sobriety. Empower the sober self within you, disempower the inner addict. Avoid doing those things that lead you to go back to drinking or drugging. Do more of the things that reinforce your sobriety and lead you to a healthier life. Don't drink or use, no matter what; all else will follow.

We offer an approach that, from day one, aims to build the person's sober self-respect and make them fit to live a sober life in the world as it is. We are honest with recovering people and tell them from day one the sobering truth that they, and they alone, have the responsibility and the power to keep themselves sober.

We know from experience that addiction strikes people of all cultures, classes, religions, personalities and other categories. No ready-made therapeutic formula can ever fit everyone. Nor is there benefit for most people in merely following a cookbook recipe. Recovery comes from the process of struggling with the particular elements of one's own life, and of rebuilding oneself, piece by piece, as a sober person. The "magic" is not in the program, but in the fact that the person puts effort into working it. We encourage people to construct their own recovery programs, not because there are no good off-the-shelf programs, but because we know that really deep learning comes only from working it out yourself.

We have observed that recovery arises from the survival drive within a person. We therefore stress methods that give encouragement and support to the person's positive sober qualities and efforts. We avoid methods that increase a person's sense of powerlessness, shame, guilt, fear, or other paralyzing emotions. We believe that development of a strong and resilient sober ego is essential to maintaining long-term sobriety and to developing a healthy personality.

Not only a strong sober ego, but a strong sober pleasure system and a healthy body are helpful to a successful recovery. We encourage people to take part in pleasurable activity, to pursue hobbies, recreation, friendships, music, dancing, sports -- anything that rebuilds the system's ability to have fun without chemical crutches. We encourage attention to good nutrition, with special attention to chemical deficiencies typical of addiction-ravaged bodies. We encourage people to examine their smoking and we give them support to quit when they are ready. We see exercise and health generally as supportive of long-term sobriety.

Although many people recover on their own, we believe that group support can be a beneficial engine that makes the self-help process quicker, more effective, and more fun. We believe that group support -- one human leveling with another -- is the active healing ingredient in all organized recovery programs no matter what their ideology. The group process is central to what we do. We don’t try to overlay the healing power of human interaction with supernatural or metaphysical explanations. We get a cleaner burning flame that way.

We focus on people as they really are -- complex, conflicted individuals torn by contradictory passions, with the power not only to deploy and destroy, but also to huddle and heal. When we look at people in this light, then the “God” or “not-God” issues fade into the background. Our psychology can explain recovery in its own terms; it requires no theology to make it work. When we are able to articulate positively how our process operates, the public will gradually be weaned off the mistaken belief, so limiting to our development, that we are only a group for atheists or agnostics or people with secular humanist convictions. Once we can articulate how the recovery process works, people will see that the distinction between theological belief and unbelief is unimportant. You can participate and benefit no matter what your religious or spiritual philosophy. Those issues don’t matter here. Progress in building meetings over the next stretch of time will depend in great measure on the extent to which we are able to communicate this basic message.

IV.

Although the most important part of our audience is always the person seeking recovery or in recovery, we urgently need to pay more attention to the professional treatment community. I am well aware that this profession in its majority is something like an alter ego of the 12-Step movement, and often not the more enlightened part of it, at that. One could probably fill a book with horror stories of "Step-Nazi" atrocities committed in the name of treatment; in fact, I understand that a publisher is working on just such a volume.

However, we would be making a big mistake if we failed to approach the profession at all, expecting automatic rejection. One of the most salient trends in the profession in the past two decades has been an influx of academically trained clinicians with a knowledge of the scientific method and coursework in modern psychology. The stereotypical counselor whose qualifications consist of working the Steps plus perhaps a weekend crash course for a pseudo-certificate still exists, but is by no means the only player. In the better treatment programs, the supervisory staff have M.D. and/or Ph.D. degrees and all the full-time staff have licenses that require the equivalent of a master's degree in graduate school plus more than a thousand hours of supervised clinical experience. Some of those people are still quite closed-minded or fearful, but many are the opposite. They are quite willing to hear us and, in many cases, are willing or even eager to open their doors and refer their patients to us. In many cases, the absence of a secular meeting from a treatment facility is no one's fault but ours. In many cases, the doors have not opened because we have not knocked on them.

Our experience in the S.F. Bay Area underlines the tremendous value of good relationships with professional treatment providers. The good relationship we enjoy with many providers is the simple secret of our ability to sustain "seven in seven" here. When we are able to obtain the approval of a treatment provider to hold a meeting on its premises, we gain three important benefits.

• Number one, we gain physical proximity to our primary constituency, the recovering person. At Kaiser Oakland and some other facilities, the LifeRing meetings are right across the hallway from the treatment meeting, and not by coincidence, the LifeRing meeting starts five minutes after the treatment session ends. The people don't have to travel far to find us. Many of our members came to us first because we were conveniently located, and stayed on because we gave them tremendous support for their sobriety. This translates into good word of mouth among program participants, and that translates into more attendees, and so on in a positive loop.
• Number two, we gain a constant source of referrals. One of the principal sources of the numerical strength of the 12-Step organizations is the fact that virtually every treatment program refers its patients to them. When our meetings convene in the facility, we tend to get included more often in the referral loop. In the best facilities, the incoming patient is issued an orientation kit that includes meeting schedules of different support groups, including ours. Some of the counselors still won't refer to us, but more and more of them do. The fact that we meet right there where staff can glance in as they walk by, and that they can see how our members are doing in the program, erodes the barriers. In the past two or three years I have seen a sea change in the reception we receive at one such facility. We used to be barely tolerated; now we are accepted. We used to be on the margins; now we are part of the mainstream. As people graduate from their treatment cycle and look for longer-term support, they seek out and find the other LifeRing recovery meetings in the area, so that the benefits of the referral relationship gradually spread through the whole organization.
• Number three, approval by a treatment facility translates into economic benefits. There is no rent to pay, and the collection basket can be invested directly in more literature and promotion such as our Yellow Pages ad, our phone message machine, and the like. This is not the most important thing, but it is certainly a factor to keep in mind. The treatment facilities are also big consumers of our handout literature; in some places, keeping the literature racks replenished with our brochures is a weekly job.

One of our tasks in the coming period will be to popularize this local experience and to encourage its replication. Just as the adoption of SOS by the Texas prison system in the summer of 1996 was a breakthrough for secular recovery in the penal setting -- a breakthrough one hopes will be replicated -- the growing acceptance that LifeRing is enjoying in parts of the SF Bay Area treatment community is a landmark achievement.

One of the practical ways by which we intend to replicate this experience is through the publication of what we currently call the "Professionals' Packet." This is a collection of articles and book excerpts about our approach, with a cover letter. I made up this packet in the form of a presentation folder for a talk to a treatment provider in '98 and it worked so well -- we got the meeting -- that I've made up several dozen of them meanwhile for various similar occasions. This ought to be bound into a booklet and popularized via LifeRing Press.

A much more ambitious effort to pave the way for greater acceptance of our approach in the profession is the proposed National Secular Treatment Survey (NSTS). The basic idea here is to quiz substance abuse treatment providers nationwide about their openness to secular recovery modalities. The survey aims not only to get the information, for use by people looking for secular treatment options, but also to make providers more aware of the issue and thereby promote the concept, so what when we come knocking on the door, there will be greater readiness and acceptance. We have made a very small start toward a secular treatment referral list on unhooked.com, but still have a long way to go before it approaches comprehensiveness.

Greater rapport with the treatment community also means working harder to enhance our own toolbox. We have a modest start toward equipping a real sobriety workshop, but a great deal more needs to be done. We should visualize ourselves as gradually evolving into a Big Tent for all kinds of abstinence-based secular treatment methods. The Miller-Hester Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches gives a catalogue of many of the possibilities; see the review on unhooked.com. Our approach to recovery is consistent with the most modern scientific investigations into the nature of alcoholism, other addictions, and the healing process. Treatment programs with the best outcome statistics are those that embody flexibility and diversity, and that encourage self-efficacy and choice. Those are our principles. We are in tune with the emerging, modern, professional trend in the treatment industry, which looks at the problem with secular eyes and sees merit in scientific methods. Participation in our self-help support groups is compatible with the broadest range of abstinence-based therapeutic regimes.

One of the most welcome developments in this direction is a greater participation in our process by professionals in the treatment community. The participation of Doug Althauser, program director of the Kaiser CDRP in Hawaii, at our convention this past September was, hopefully, a sign of things to come. The pressures and concerns treatment professionals face are not identical to those that drive us as a recovery support organization, but we have a tremendous amount to gain from understanding the treatment world better and from doing what we can, within our principles, to respond to the profession's concerns. In the coming months you may see some experiments, in writing and/or in the form of a pilot meeting, aimed at packaging our own free-form "do-it-yourself" approach in the manner of a treatment program, inspired in part by Althauser's book (reviewed on unhooked.com). Who knows, one of these years we may even launch the California Method to compete with the Minnesota Method. I heartily invite all treatment professionals who are interested in our approach to come closer and become part of our development.

One day every community will have not only one brand of recovery meeting, but several. Alcoholics and addicts who have a sincere desire to get sober will have a choice of services, just like other consumers. Each approach will stand on its merits, rather than on its monopolistic position. The promise that we are good people who need help, rather than bad people who must be punished, will be honored. We believe that where there are more roads, there will be more travelers and where there is more choice, there will be more successes.

v.

Five years ago, a modest and seemingly insignificant initiative set forces in motion that are profoundly changing our organization. I refer to Tom Shelley's commencement of the SOS email list. Up to that time there was no regular communication channel between members in different cities, unless one counted the quarterly newsletter, to which few subscribed. We were in the dark. In that climate, some people believed grandiose claims that we had 1000 meetings and 20,000 members, while others responded with cynical rumors that we had no meetings and no members at all. No one had good information because no one had good communications. Tom's list began to change all that. Gradually, bit by bit, over many months, we began to peel away the candy and the dirt and uncover the reality. We found that we have far fewer meetings than some claimed, but a great many more than others feared. The most important thing is that now we have a grip on reality, and we are rebuilding credibility.

And so it has gone in just about every other area of our organizational life. Where once darkness reigned and where hyperbole and its flip side, cynicism, flourished, we now have a better-illuminated, more realistic and more practically useful understanding of where and what we are. Along with the new unofficial flow of information came new surges of energy and power. The founding of www.unhooked.com, the UU in the Pines event, the Sobriety Handbook, and ultimately the September '99 convention were fruits of the new, instant, direct, person-to-person cyber-communications channels that Tom had opened years earlier. All of this was unofficial and from below. Thanks to the Internet, we are a much better-informed, more cohesive, more spirited and energetic bunch than we were in 1994, not to mention a larger and more active one. There is no question but that our internal culture is becoming more than ever one of participatory democracy, independence, and service-oriented activism. The Keepers volume well captures this spirit; can I put in a plug for it here?

The most precious asset we have as an organization, besides our reputation for sobriety, is our unity. We have a huge potential to change our corner of the world. We have an excellent philosophical foundation: sobriety, secularity, self-help. Secular recovery is an immensely powerful concept. I feel that we may be on the brink of tremendous breakthroughs in public acceptance. However, before we get there we are going to have to make some constructive adjustments in the way we are organized.

Our most pressing problem by far is name unification. The adverse court decision regarding rights to the SOS name has left us in a confusing situation, name-wise. Having alternative or dual names (SOS, LSR) is unsettling. Many of our own members don't even understand it. How could we expect the public to? We need name unification so that the public sees us as one organization that has its act together, and not as two organizations, or one organization in schism. Names matter, and if we want one organization, we need to unite around one name.

It is a great comfort to know that, as a consequence of the ’99 convention, there is a Study Committee dedicated to investigating this and the several related issues. We have much work to do in the area of internal democracy and organizational autonomy before we can realize the potential of our concept. In the coming year, I pledge to do my utmost to promote a peaceful, harmonious resolution of our organizational problems, to avoid stirring up gratuitous antagonism, and to put principles ahead of personalities. I see many reasons for confidence that we will put this difficult chapter behind us and have our hands free for the many constructive tasks that await us.

VI.

One of our major challenges in the coming period will be to explain ourselves and our approach not only to people looking for recovery, and to the treatment community, but also to the general public.

Alcoholism and addiction are public health problems of major proportions, and everything that is done in this area is ultimately of public interest. I see us as one effort among many to respond to the public's growing impatience with the long-term lack of progress on the alcoholism and addiction front in our country. We do believe that we have a better mousetrap, and we want the public to know about it. Moreover, we are in harmony with the strong and clear views of the courts of appeal, which say that where the government is involved, the constitution mandates that a secular recovery option be offered. We resonate with that part of the American ethic that values choice, cooperation, hard work, and self-reliance -- "God helps those who help themselves."

I also believe that we owe a duty of honesty not only to ourselves and each other, but to the public. Wherever the public is willing to accept us as recovering alcoholics, without prejudice -- as the law requires -- we should have the personal choice of disclosing our own status and our personal affiliation with our recovery group. For persons in positions of public trust, where the politics of alcohol or alcoholism are involved, I believe such disclosure should be the rule rather than the exception. In the long run, I believe that the status of the recovering alcoholic will gain in public respect from a policy of less anonymity and more honesty. I also am among those who believe that it is good for our recoveries to be as open as our life situation realistically allows.

<