Finding Your People in Recovery
In my 38+ years in recovery I have remained active in my recovery community, including helping other people who are trying to find their way. When I look back at coming into recovery as a transitional age youth, with my family relationships deeply estranged, the people who helped me are a large part of how I understand what happened afterward. Their willingness to be of service and meet me where I was at with purpose gave me the opportunity to build a solid foundation for my own recovery. Today, peer mentoring is central to my work in the recovery continuum, and I believe the quality of those relationships deserves a lot of attention.
How we help someone develop the willingness to let other people know them remains vital. There can be a lot of shame about what happened during their using, along with fear about what people are going to think when they find out. Being sober puts us in a position where we have to begin dealing with that. We can take it to a sponsor or other peer mentor and start working through it, and we can begin building friendships where people have some understanding of what we are going through from having been through their own version of it. My concern is that we give someone encouragement to reach out and then assume they know how to do that. I think we have a responsibility to help them get started and follow up on how it is going.
One of the articles in the Recovery Research Institute's September bulletin looked at family relationships among people living in 42 Oxford Houses over a two-year period. People with regular contact with an important family member who was abstinent were doing better in terms of recovery-related functioning. There was also a finding I thought was particularly helpful: people with limited supportive family relationships did better over time when they developed strong ties with housemates who were doing well in recovery. This was an observational study of how these things developed together. It gives us something useful to consider when we are helping a person work out who they can turn to while their family is still trying to heal.
I find that encouraging, particularly for someone waiting for things to get better with their family. There is plenty they can begin doing in their recovery community today. A family may have spent years frightened about what was going to happen next. They may have helped financially, tried to arrange treatment and heard promises that fell apart. Each family has its own circumstances. Getting sober gives us an opportunity to start taking responsibility for our part, and our family's trust belongs to them to give when they are ready through earned experience in recovery.
That can be difficult when we finally feel ready to change and want the people we love to see it. A sponsor and other recovering peers give us somewhere to talk about how we feel while we continue doing what we have committed to do. I believe there is a lot of recovery in being willing to follow through with something even when the response we hoped for takes longer than we wanted. Other people get to have their own experience of our recovery.
A second study, involving 79 members of The Phoenix, looked at 723 relationships in their support networks. Participants reported more frequent support from mentors, fellow Phoenix members and other people in recovery. Longer membership in this sober active community was also associated with greater reported support. This study asked about support at one point in time. It adds something useful to the discussion about the people someone has around them and the roles those people play.
For me, part of choosing people to learn from is looking at how they live. How do they treat someone who is struggling? Are they willing to acknowledge their own mistakes? When they say they will do something, do they follow through? Those are questions worth asking about ourselves as well. Giving advice puts a responsibility on us to consider what experience we have to share and when a person needs help from a credentialed professional. A peer relationship needs enough respect that someone can ask questions and speak honestly about a suggestion they are finding difficult.
At Awakening Recovery we provide year-plus, abstinence-based recovery housing with a daily peer-mentoring house process that runs alongside residents' 12-Step work. People learn from fellow residents, alumni and staff as they participate in the life of the house. Clinical services come through outside licensed professionals according to each person's needs. The Oxford House and Phoenix findings concern those settings; I see them as a reason to keep examining how well we are helping people connect in ours.
Living together gives us a chance to discover quite a bit about ourselves. We share responsibilities with people who have their own ideas about how things should be done. We have to learn to listen, accept feedback and repair a disagreement while continuing to live in the same home. I believe having time to work through those things with guidance is valuable preparation for the responsibilities we are going to take back on in our lives.
Over time, a person who needed help getting started has something to offer someone coming in behind them. They can make an introduction, invite them along to a meeting or take the time to listen. My own recovery has kept service to others at the center of my life, and I want people coming into recovery to have the opportunity to experience that for themselves. Helping someone find their place in a recovery community is work we can begin as soon as they arrive.
