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!