Just over four years ago, in the first weeks of the great pandemic isolation of March, 2020, I wrote Let’s focus the recovery community on hope, connection, and purpose. In those first days, it was clear that recovery community could do a great deal to save lives and build community resilience in that most uncertain time. Action was necessary. History shows us that necessity is a key driver of change. Not just in those days, but across our rich and diverse history.
People and whole communities face what are in essence two options when under extreme duress. 1) Give up or 2) try harder. Resilience is born out of the latter, and the former is not an option for so many of us, because it could mean the end of our very lives. It is why, as I have written about repeatedly, recovery always finds a way. To do so effectively, we need to sustain hope, purpose, and connection, to fill the sails of our boat, but we also require a strong keel, jutting down deep into the waters of our movement to sustain stability and control over our direction of our travel. Where is our keel? Often it can be found in simple concepts, broadly asserted as sayings to keep us on course.
“Stay in our own lane” was a saying in the new recovery advocacy movement born a generation ago to keep us from straying from our lofty objectives. History shows us we are vulnerable to being impeded in this way as I wrote about in Coopted and Colonized – Lessons from the Washingtonian Movement. The Washingtonians were thwarted by outside political interests. In our era, we have a myriad of academic groups, government entities, foundations and others feeding at the trough of bounty that came from the overwhelming death and misery visited upon our communities. Bounty from our suffering to outside groups instead of focusing resources to support healing by us and for us.
A great deal of money has come into the SUD space in recent years. Those resources have attracted a host of interest groups. Their agenda is not ours. They are not grounded on the focus of long-term addiction recovery foundational to our movement. These groups often crowd us out. Our lane has become a high traffic zone. They are adept at getting money from governments and foundations, as money and influence are their primary objectives. They place us at risk of derailment for other goals not centered on recovery, and not the healing of our own communities as a central focus.
As across society, there is a great deal of fracturing within the recovery realm. Division is an age-old strategy to undermine marginalized communities, including our own. Areas of focus are mixed in ways that foment division and reduce the efficacy of focus on substance use recovery. No open discourse is encouraged to explore what this means. No focus on reducing unintended consequences. We must pay close attention to these dynamics.
In this way we are losing one of our other primary stances that helped form us a generation ago out of the crisis in that time, “people in recovery are the experts in recovery.” The irony is that the resources have gone to nearly everyone but the impacted communities. It clouds the expertise of our experience. We are largely becoming passive service and knowledge recipients. Everything about us without us. Defined by groups with other areas of focus and other agendas. The epitome of stigma that shifts our communities from one of having the requisite skills and talents to support our own healing into a paternalistic process from which resources are extracted. A group to be serviced rather than supported authentically. This is not a new lesson, but one repeated across the millennia.
We are now in no less of a crisis than we were a generation ago. A crisis that may not register with many in ways that create the same sense of urgency as it did a generation ago as the damage being done is less evident. Unlike that era, often the erosion of our movement is presented to us as gains, while the core of our focus withers. To refocus our efforts, we need the steering capacity created by a deep keel that keeps us on course.
Recovery is increasingly being presented as any incremental change from any behavioral health condition in any setting under any circumstance. The focus on an SUD Recovery Oriented System of Care is being shifted to a broader behavioral health model. The concept of recovery capital is being retooled to expand to any behavioral health condition. When our tools and concepts are culturally appropriated in this way, we functionally cease to exist. This would be impossible to view as anything other than colonization and cooptation of core addiction recovery concepts and strategies. The work of a generation to lift up persons and communities who are able to heal from our most stigmatized condition through hope, purpose and connection is now being lost as it subsumed by other groups for whom these concepts and related tools are useful for their own ends with little concern for the impact it has on us.
If one looks back 25 years, the decade in which the new recovery advocacy movement rose up was founded on key concepts that helped people of diverse communities who had experienced severe substance use conditions and had found healing across the nation came together. Once together, these same concepts helped steer them on the path forward. Our keel, our foundational and steering concepts of the era.
Our Keel – Foundational and Steering Concepts of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement
- To be heard, we must carry the same unified message – One People, Many Voices, One Message. This does not mean a lack of diversity of perspectives. It does mean we work those differences out among ourselves in order to carry a message we all agree with so we can move it forward together. Without a unified message, we fail to move onwards. Outside interest groups eat our lunch. We require a unified message that unites the chorus of our voices.
- People in recovery are the experts on recovery – Recovery springs forth from us, produced by us, for us. Other entities in the space must be inclusive of us for robust talents to effectively move forward. Failure to do so leads to being defined by external groups not grounded in our community. Entities fail to fully grasp our diversity, our ingenuity, and our capacity. The history of treatment and recovery history in America is strewn with the wreckage of such strategies that failed to center on the inclusion of authentic recovering communities in all our diversity.
- We stay in our own lane and ask others to do the same – We have within our affiliate groups those who have allegiance to other agendas beyond our own. What William White called double agentry, those whose interest are not ours. Who came into our space to “help us,” but instead wreak harm under the guise of assistance. They wear our clothes and portray their focus as recovery even as they undermine our cause. To move forward effectively, we require a core group focused solely on our own goals and others to respect our space.
- We are all equal – The letters behind our names do not make any perspective more important. This foundational concept links back to people in recovery being the experts on recovery. Increasingly, we see an army of researchers and governmental institutions interested in measuring and understanding the continuum of healing from a substance use condition. To understand what this looks like over the lifespan of an individual and at the levels of family and community. This is vital to our forward progress. But as articulated in William White’s recent keynote to the inaugural Conference on Recovery Research, he warned of cultural appropriation of our concepts and the lack of direct recovery representation in policy and research efforts. Such institutions are particularly susceptible to pruning out the voices of all beyond those without the recognized academic disciplines. We cannot cede the measuring of our wellness to groups not directly informed by authentic recovery community or we will lose our way.
- Everyone is a leader, no one is a leader – Our history is replete with examples of charismatic leaders who are drawn into the intoxicating properties of fame and influence and who inevitably fall. We also know it is unwise to rely on a few leaders as this centralizes influence in ways that run counter to our purpose. We also risk implosion as elder statesmen of movement age out. We must build a broad base of servant-oriented leadership to sustain our efforts.
- People in recovery are part of the solution – Authentic recovery community involves us doing things to improve our own circumstances and those within our own communities. Building our own recovery capital. By and for people in recovery, not simply paid services to these communities for external profit. A service orientation robs community of its own vitality. We become passive recipients of services and not active agents in our own healing. We must be engaged in authentic roles to heal our own communities and not just as tokens of false inclusivity. Dynamics that William White warned us “can inadvertently undermine indigenous supports for recovery, shift the focus of a movement from experienced knowledge to second-hand knowledge, and shift the service relationship from one that is enduring and reciprocal to one that is time-limited, hierarchical, and commercialized.”
- We must own and understand our own history – In my work to understand and write about the formative era of the new recovery advocacy movement, one of the key factors in its development was that a majority of leaders across the space understood how vulnerable we were to fracture and decay. The timely release of the seminal history of addiction and recovery in America, Slaying the Dragon that people had read and broadly understood. A shared understanding of our history. We are losing this. We see revision of our history by outside groups colonizing and coopting us. We must understand and control the recording of our own history to move forward.
Are these steering concepts still valid in our own era? Are they our keel, allowing us to control our own direction of movement and avoid being buffeted about by the crosswinds of other agendas? If so, are our communities insisting that we move our systems of care forward grounded in these concepts in ways that support authentic recovery community engagement? If these steering concepts do not fit, which ones replace them? If they still work for us but are not adhered to, what do we do to get our efforts back under these foundations that served the first generation of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement well.
What is our keel, our grounding concepts? Are they built strong enough and thrust down deep enough into the waters of our communities to take us where we need to go? Together we will decide, or others will do so for us, and they will control our helm and eventually, our destination.
Sources
Stauffer, W. (2020, March 27). Let’s focus the recovery community on hope, connection, and purpose. https://recoveryreview.blog/2020/03/27/lets-focus-the-recovery-community-on-hope-connection-and-purpose/
Stauffer, W. (2022, September 6). Those Who Control the Teachings of a Movement’s History Control Its Future. https://recoveryreview.blog/2022/09/06/those-who-control-the-teachings-of-a-movements-history-control-its-future/
Stauffer, W. (2024, January 13). Coopted and Colonized – Lessons from the Washingtonian Movement. https://recoveryreview.blog/2024/01/13/coopted-and-colonized-lessons-from-the-washingtonian-movement/
Stauffer, W. White, W. (2020, September 20). Chestnut Health Systems. https://www.chestnut.org/Blog/Posts/365/William-White/2020/9/Reflections-on-Recovery-Representation-Bill-White-and-Bill-Stauffer/blog-post/
White, W. L. (1998). Slaying the dragon: The history of addiction treatment and recovery in America. Chestnut Health Systems/Lighthouse Institute. https://www.chestnut.org/store/products/5/slaying-the-dragon-the-history-of-addiction-treatment-and-recovery-in-america-second-edition/product-details/
White, W. (2013). Selected Papers of William L. White State of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement Amplification of Remarks to the Association of Recovery Community Organizations at Faces & Voices of Recovery Executive Directors Leadership Academy Dallas, Texas, November 15, 2013. https://www.chestnut.org/resources/5cd82f5d-f9cb-4e50-8391-7eadb9700e34/2013-State-of-the-New-Recovery-Advocacy-Movement.pdf
White, W. (2019, August 8). Chestnut Health Systems. https://www.chestnut.org/Blog/Posts/324/William-White/2019/8/Toward-a-New-Recovery-Advocacy-Movement-2000-Redux/blog-post/
White, W. (2024). Frontiers of Recovery Research. Keynote Address, Consortium on Addiction Recovery Science (CoARS), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), April 24-25, 2024. https://www.chestnut.org/resources/bebff546-a338-4aac-8720-8cb8639be9f5/2024 Frontiers of Recovery Research.pdf
White, W.L. & Kleber, H.D. (2008). Preventing harm in the name of help: A guide for addiction professionals. Counselor, 9(6), 10-17 https://www.chestnut.org/resources/1b909a63-5bf5-41c5-90ca-408b77bc948f/2008PreventingHarmintheNameofHelp.pdf
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