An Outline for Workbook Study

Lloyd E., who just began a Tuesday night workbook study group at the Kaiser CDRP (Chemical Dependency Recovery Program) in Oakland, has drafted a short study outline that I want to pass along, below.  The Recovery by Choice workbook was written mainly for individual study, and the convenor who leads a group through the text needs to select a few issues out of the many that the book contains, or -- experience shows -- it may take a group several years to complete the book.  There are several outlines in existence, and more will probably be created.  Lloyd's outline is short, but it touches on every chapter in the book.  He's based it on a review exercise in the Relapse chapter.  Here it is:

Recovery by Choice

Weekly Topics of Conversation

1.  Decision:          Do we remember why we originally wanted to get clean and sober?  Have we found additional reasons?  How do we make sobriety our priority?

2.  Body:                 Can we make progress in addressing concerns about our bodies and our mental health?

3.  Exposure:        Have we done the best we can to minimize our exposure?  Or are we being reckless about getting into trigger situations and neglecting our reminders?

4.  Activities:         Can we make progress in learning to do life’s activities clean and sober, and in starting up new activities that interest us?  Or are we barely functional or doing very little different from when we were drinking/using?

5.  People:             Have we worked out who are the friends and who are the opponents of our recovery, and can we make progress in improving our relationships?  Or are we spending too much time with people who are a drag on our recovery, and not enough with people who care for us as sober persons?

6.  Feelings:          Can we succeed in building more clean and sober pleasure into our lives.  Can we identify and deal with our trigger feelings, and do we feel better about our emotional lives?  Or are we treating recovery as a punishment or retreating into numbness?

7.  Lifestyle:          Can we pinpoint our major lifestyle issues and can we make progress in repairing damage that addiction did to our lifestyle?  Or have we resigned ourselves to the way things were and given up trying to solve real-life problems?

8:  History:             Have we reviewed our personal history and come to an understanding of what part of our life was us, and what part was our addiction?  Do we have a clearer sense of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

9.  Culture:            Can we recognize the sources of support and the problems areas for our recovery within our culture, and have we begun to figure out our roles in it?

10. Treatment:    Have we made the necessary decisions about treatment and support groups, and do we know how to get what we need from these resources.

11.  Relapse:         Do we understand the structures of relapse and do we recognize what might undermine our recovery?  Do we have a better sense of ourselves, .and do we monitor ourselves frequently for early warning signs.   Have we prepared ourselves to eject immediately in case of relapse?

12.  Plans:              How do we develop our Personal Recovery Plans for the short and long term?

My only quibble with this outline is that it has 12 -- count them -- 12 points.  Inevitably people will start to refer to this as the "12 Steps of LifeRing."  (Sigh and groan.)  Apart from that, I think it's a great starting point for a workbook study group.  Initial reviews of the opening session were raves.  It took more than five years of nudging and begging to get a room at this facility for a workbook study meeting, and this one looks like it's going to be a big success story.  Congratulations, Lloyd!

Shining Model in Walnut Creek CA

Carola Z. writes:

Just a quick note with some good  news:  The meeting we started at Kaiser CDRP in Walnut Creek [California] celebrated its first anniversary today.

The meeting is every Wednesday from 12:15 to 1:15 pm in Room 3D at 710 Broadway 3rd floor.  It's still going strong and we had a nice large group of regulars and newcomers today.

 I had made a commitment to convene this meeting for a year, and I am especially happy to be able to announce that I handed it over today to two very capable members of that meeting as the new convenors.

Way to go, Carola!  Starting a new meeting and then passing on the convenor role to other members of the meeting is a shining model of how LifeRing takes root and expands.

Carola makes it sound so simple, as if there were nothing to it.  But there's a lot to it.  First, you have to get the room -- sometimes a battle of years with an entrenched and obscure administrative bureaucracy.  Then, you have to create the positive LifeRing atmosphere in the room:  safety, openness, honesty, freedom, humor, caring ... the environment that empowers the sober self, and keeps people coming back.  It's only then that you get regulars who build up sober time and learn the ropes of the LifeRing process.  And it's only when you begin to have such a core group that you have your pool of future convenors to whom you can hand the clipboard and the basket, give a friendly hug, and move on to start another meeting somewhere else.

The core message of the LifeRing convenor handbook (How Was Your Week) is "Pass it on!"  The "it" here is the convenor role.  When convenors remember that message and put it into practice, as Carola has done, then LifeRing thrives and grows.  There are, unfortunately, also some negative examples.  Last week at the monthly convenor workshop at the Service Center, I learned that a certain meeting that I had started fourteen years ago, and passed on long ago, was now without a convenor.  People had gone to the room, sat and waited, and no convenor had showed up. So, I went and acted as pinch-hitter tonight. There were ten participants, and we had a great meeting. A member of the meeting told me that the regular convenor had convened this meeting for more than three years.  No one knew what had happened to him, and we had only sketchy contact information for him in the database at the LifeRing Service Center. I enjoyed pinch hitting and I'll do it again next week; but I shouldn't have to.  Convenors who fail to develop other convenors and pass the meeting on will eventually burn out, and risk taking the whole meeting down with them.  That's not a recipe for a healthy, expanding organization.

So, congratulations and a shining gold star to Carola and the other convenors who "pass it on!"

Letter to My Addiction

One of the exercises in the Recovery by Choice workbook -- and it's an old exercise, widely used, not invented by me -- is writing a letter to one's addiction. You write a "Dear Jane" letter to the addiction, then you write your addiction's response to the letter, and you conclude by replying to the response. In the framework of the "A" (addict self) and "S" (sober self) metaphor, it's a dialogue between the S and the A.

Mark J. did this exercise last month and read it out loud to his group. So many people commented on it that it came to my attention, and with Mark's permission I'm reprinting it here:

Dear Jane,

I am writing you this letter in regards to discontinue our relationship altogether. I want to be forthright with my stance on this. We have spent a time in our lives that for life safety reasons I realized needed to be ended. I ask of your acceptance of this as I need to move on and pursue a life that is productive to my development and responsibilities. There were good times, yes. However the damage to my well being both physically and emotionally has caused me to seek recovery and I’ve found it to be a life worth living. Let me not leave out the fact that I have caused damage to others as well when we were together. Let me state again that I am taking action at this writing to cease relations with you permanently.

Sincerely,

Mark

Mark,

I have read your letter and think you maybe need a break for a while and I am more than willing to let things cool off (or until you finish your phase). But let’s be serious, you know we are meant to be together. A break from this relationship is fine with me, but to consider never seeing each other again is not like you. You are the one who sought me ought and wooed me with your words, touch and actions in all situations when you felt the need. You came to me! Through those times we produced the best sensations and moments of true genius that you demonstrated to others. The music on computers you made was untouched in individuality. You were afraid of talking to the people you really wanted to talk to until we were together. When we were together you consciously new it was better than sex and you ignored sexual advances with the thought that sex would get between you and I. We had mystique. It was I with you the greatest spiritual moment in your life happened, and you dare wonder if it was real or imagined. Of course it was us. Do I need to go on? I think you know the answer to this question. So now after all I have given to you, this is suddenly something you would never consider again? I know you romanticize about me and you think you can shut out or use your bullshit recovery techniques to stop yourself from me. However, I’m always here and that makes you wonder doesn’t it? You can’t forget about us can you? I understand you are going through some voluntary brainwashing to delude yourself from our relationship, however to think you’ll leave me for good is not something I’m worried about.

In remembrance of old times,

Jane

Dear Jane,

I have read your reply and cannot overstate the fact that you and I together is life threatening to me. I will die and hurt others along the way. While it is true that there were times together that still bewilder me, I am working towards moving into the now and there is evidence that this is happening. I simply enjoy being sober more than the ups and downs of being with you. The adventure of life is unfolding and I know in my heart that I can always find a way sober no matter what may happen. The past experiences with you brought a change in how I wanted to live. I don’t want to shut my memories out and accept that I will remember the “good times” as well as the bad. This is not a war and I will not fight you. I just simply will not take you. The things that I thought I needed you to do with me I now am doing myself and I don’t need an audience to tell me when I know something is right. From this moment on I choose a life worth living.

Mark

LifeRing in 2010 and Beyond

The LifeRing Service Center in Oakland was humming and buzzing last week with the Expansion Committee mailing.  In a few days, every LifeRing convenor in the world should have the committee's proposals in hand. (If you didn't get one, it's probably because we don't have contact information for you in the database.)

The committee of eleven worked long and hard to produce these proposals, and they deserve a full and detailed reading.  The time for membership discussion is from now to March 15.  You can send feedback via comments on the LifeRing-10 discussion blog, or via email to service@lifering.org, or via snail mail or phone to the Service Center (1440 Broadway Ste 312 Oakland 94612; 1-800-811-4142).

Growing in Dublin

This email came in to the Service Center this week from a counselor in Dublin, Ireland:

I am writing to you in the hope that I may receive information about facilitating LifeRing meetings within our organisation. We are a community based organisation based in Dublin 12, we work with both problematic alcohol and drug users. We have at the moment A.A meetings being held each week, but it has come to our attention that the amount of people attending these meetings is far less than the amount of people who need help. When we put the question to the people who don't attend, their response is that they believe it was themselves who chose to drink or take drugs and that it should be themselves who chooses and has the power to stop. Since finding out about and from reading your web-site,(which I really enjoy and agree with) I have mentioned it to some of our service users and they seem excited at the idea of attending these meetings.
I understand that there are 2 meetings being held in Dublin, but I am hoping that maybe we can facilitate them here also. Is there any possibility of this? Or can I receive some information please about training myself to become a convenor of LifeRing.

Dennis S., the LifeRing convenor who founded the first two LifeRing meetings in Dublin, promptly contacted the writer and offered his assistance and cooperation.  It's very likely, from the looks of it, that Dublin will soon have three LifeRings.

Note that this email comes from a counselor at a program that so far is exclusively 12-step oriented.  If you looked at this program from the outside, seeing only the surface, you might write it off as a stone 12-step program, beyond hope.

But the clients on the inside have different ideas.  The amount of people attending the 12-step meetings, the writer observed, "is far less than the amount of people who need help."  That's just about a universal condition in every 12-step program.  As we know from AA's own triennial membership surveys, reported in Don McIntire's journal article (covered in my book Empowering Your Sober Self), out of 100 people who approach AA, at the end of 90 days, 90 per cent have walked away.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there's a gap here.  To its immense credit, the staff at this program in Dublin actually asked the people who don't attend AA, why don't they?  This is almost revolutionary in a profession that's very strong on talking at clients but not so good at listening to clients.  But the client-centered spirit of Carl Rogers is penetrating even into substance abuse treatment, the most backward province in the kingdom of mental health treatment, and the result is what you see:  clients who insist that they're not powerless to get free of alcohol and drugs, and who want support groups that acknowledge that power and reinforce it.  In short, clients who want LifeRing.

Even in Ireland.  Or perhaps: especially in Ireland.