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drinkanddrugsnews
| November 2012
Recovery |
Community support
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
I
took a call from a friend in December, who had been contacted by the
desperate mother of a 43-year-old daughter. The daughter, who we’ll call
Rachel, had been out of a residential rehab for a couple of weeks and
was back in a full-blown alcoholic episode, drinking around the clock and
falling in and out of taxis and in and out of hospital.
The physical repercussions were immense, but the obsession to drink had
turned Rachel into an emotional and mental wreck. Her behaviours swung from
aggressive and arrogant to those of a frightened child. Rachel’s partner had had
enough and was taking their daughter away to stay with family for the duration
of Christmas. All concerned knew it was crunch time for Rachel and that this
A Calderdale-based service is
combining treatment provision with
hosting an emerging recovery
community.
Michelle Foster
explains
the ‘warrior down’ concept
FIGHTINGRESPONSE
period could decide whether she would live or die.
This call to us was nothing new – a cry for help, sometimes by a loved one,
sometimes by the addict. For an organisation like The Basement Recovery Project
(TBRP) the question is how can we respond, and how did we respond?
My own journey into this world has been defined by the Pennines, especially
the Calder Valley. I was born in Todmorden and brought up in Burnley. My life
became unmanageable and my recovery journey started back in the hills of
Todmorden, but it’s only in retrospect that I can look on these hills and valleys with
fondness – a sense of belonging and of how their presence creates small
communities that become families supporting each other. Our response to an
addict who is struggling – like Rachel – has been happening for years, in
communities just like this.
The basement operates in an unusual environment of being both service
provider and host of an emerging recovery community and this dual responsibility
requires careful management, not least in maintaining appropriate boundaries in
how we respond to someone like Rachel’s mother’s request for help. It’s not our
place as a provider to outreach someone who hasn’t asked for help, but as a
recovery community we can adopt the ‘warrior down’ approach to reach out into
the community and provide assertive support.
What do I mean by this? Adopted from a peer-to-peer programme originally
designed to provide support and community referrals for Native Americans in recovery,
‘warrior down’ is the cry to signify that a warrior has been wounded or incapacitated
and needs help. The warrior down initiative creates a response team to provide support
and finds the resources to get that person back into their recovery process.
*****
Recovery isn’t just staying sober
– it’s a way of experiencing life through new eyes,
new thoughts, and a new spirit. Re-establishing one’s life following treatment for
alcohol or substance abuse or incarceration requires a community effort. Without
the support of a knowledgeable family and community, many who try to return to
healthy, productive lives find themselves frustrated by the need for a job, training,
education, housing, mental health care, medical support or connections with
others who value sobriety and healthy behaviours.
Throughout the evolution of the UK recovery movement there has been close
liaison with colleagues and friends in the USA, and it was in 2011 that Phil
Valentine came to the UK and told us about the White Bison Warrior Down
Program. The whole warrior down ethos and philosophy had an immediate
resonance to those in recovery communities in the north of England, where small
but influential groups of addicts have come together to create abstinence-based
recovery communities.
They have done this most obviously in NA and AA – many got there via prison
or simply stopped taking methadone and dropped out of treatment. It’s very rare
to find people in abstinence-based recovery who got there via community
methadone treatment and, similarly, the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous have
facilitated peoples’ recovery and been the driver for them to reach out to those
who are still in battle.
Given the numbers of people entering recovery it was only a matter of time
before people started to relapse, and we asked ourselves how we should respond.
This really is brand new territory. Treatment professionals are not used to
assertively reaching out to people who relapse – people in 12-step fellowships may
respond with comments like ‘God or drink and drugs will bring them back – one
way or the other’, but neither standard treatment assertive outreach or benign 12-
step fellowship felt like the right thing to do.
The people who had relapsed had become our friends and allies. They were