“. . . the individual, family and community are not separate; they are one. To injure one is to injure all; to heal one is to heal all. – from The Red Road to Wellbriety, 2002” – as quoted by William White, Recovery Rising Perhaps the most important insight in recent recovery history is that … Continue reading 2022’s #8 post: Headwinds for Recovery Community Self Agency

“I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” - Wendell Berry We need to change how we think of recovery community organizations across our … Continue reading Holding Space for Healing & Resiliency – What We Know and Yet Still Fail to Apply

Recovery from addiction has two significant facets. For centuries, it is centered on a dynamic that is relatively unique in respect to medical conditions. The power of one person, as part of their own journey of healing helping another to also find their way into recovery. This dynamic has then been repeated over the eons … Continue reading To Move Forward, Our Institutions Must Take a Hard Look at Their Internalized Stigma Against Us

Forward – I have been thinking for some time about the linkages across recovery history. We don’t always do the best job at recording and teaching our own history. It is vital to the future that we understand our own past and how it has shaped our current environment. We must understand where we came … Continue reading The Birthing of the Modern Recovery Movement & Marty Mann Recovery History Interview with Bev Haberle

“Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and … Continue reading Cannabis: Demon Drug or Miracle Medicinal Plant, the Dilemma of Binary Thinking 

“A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another.” ― Wendell Berry One does not have to look very hard to see there is a … Continue reading Developing Narratives of Healing to Overcome Deaths of Despair

How we think of addiction and recovery has changed in America, largely due to the New Recovery Advocacy Movement (NRAM). The future of NRAM and SUD Peer Services are inseparably intertwined. SUD Peer Services originated out of NRAM as a primary objective. In An Open Letter to SAMHSA and the SSA’s On Inclusion – Our … Continue reading Those Who Control the Teachings of a Movement’s History Control Its Future

Originally posted in June 2021 reposted with minor edits and hyperlink updates What color dress do you see? There was this thing going around the internet a few years called “the Dress,” millions of people around the world saw it and chimed in on what color that they perceived the dress to be. It has … Continue reading The Recovery We See

There have been devastating impacts on our entire helping systems workforce over the long siege of the COVID Pandemic. Recently, I read the Ohio PHP Executive Report, the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Health and Well-being of Ohio's Healthcare Workers. The report summarizes data collected from 13,532 respondents across 13 of Ohio’s Professional … Continue reading Embracing Recovery Capital Within Our Care System to Save It

SEAN FOGLER AND WILLIAM STAUFFER - AUG 15, 2022 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op-ed Today drug overdose deaths will claim almost three hundred American lives — thanks to stigma. The labels and stereotypes so many of us use are stigma in action, and separate us from those we mark as inferior, people to avoid. We judge and discriminate, … Continue reading Sean Fogler and William Stauffer: How to help people who use drugs stop