Following Recovery Day Savannah May 25th, 2024 and ahead of Secular AA Roundup Langley B.C. July 13th, and ICSAA (International Conference of Secular AA) September 20-22 in Orlando, I'm talking about CHIME with team-Emotional Sobriety. Allan couldn't make it, so I am sitting in with Thom and Patrick
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In 2011 Mary Leamy published “Conceptual Framework for Personal Recovery in Mental Health” because “no systematic rereview and narrative synthesis on personal recovery in mental illness had been undertaken.” Five Recovery Processes were identified, from a systematic review that started with 5,200 papers on recovery and mental health:
- Connection Hope Identity Meaning Empowerment
David Best, the world’s first professor of Addiction Recovery (Leeds Trinity University), wrote about the Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR) that combines established Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorization Theory. David Best’s motivation was that, in 2015, a definition for recovery from addiction was not agreed upon. He started applying Mary Leamy’s CHIME model for mental health to recovery. I first learned about this at the Recovery Capital Conference in New Westminster BC in 2017 when he spoke just before his book on the subject came out Pathways to Recovery and Desistance: The social contagion of hope. (CLICK to view book)
Why do I care so much about this? I’m in AA and other 112-step2 step organizations where I hear people credit their recovery pathway to the 12 steps where nothing before worked. That’s wonderful, but we know - I certainly have observed - some work the12 steps exactly as described in whatever basic text in wha12-steptever 12 step program, others pick and choose, othersrecovery i,gnore the steps entirely and All—steps, no steps hybrid approach--are still shining examples of recoverey from addiction. I have never seen a bad recovery.
I am part of a larger recovery community beyond 12 step groups that include people who credit their recovery to CBT, an Eight-Fold Path, positive affirmations I read about in She Recovers, and other approaches that use asset-based, not deficit-focused, positive psychology approaches, from Life Ring, SMART, Women for Sobriety, medically or clinically assisted recovery, et al. When the 2013 SAHMSA report on people in recovery from alcohol and other drugs came out, they reported 23 million Americans self-identified as being in recovery and only one million of these 23 million are AA members from the USA, according to AA’s one million membership survey at the time.
[As of January 2021, USA AA members were 1,438,253; total AA members (GSO estimate) 2,138,201]
So the 12 steps of AA work but over 21.5 million Americans found another way. What is the common experience of recovery for all of us? CHIME is an evidence-based, defendable framework that since I’ve been looking at it over five years describes to me, a shared experience for all of us in recovery. I am interested in what are the commonalities of people who thrive in recovery, share in common in the way they enjoy post-traumatic gains and CHIME answers a lot of these questions for me.
Connection from Johann Hari’s famous conclusion to his TED talk, “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection.” It’s a little more complicated, we hear, “Meeting-makers make it” is what these academics and the Rat Park experiments are identifying. But also, I can find connections at the local bar “where everyone knows your name,” or crack house provides shared identity. Connection as a recovery process is the sense of belonging with people who demonstrate not antisocial alcohol-using behavior, but sober pro-social behavior.
Hope is contagious; we catch hope from other people in recovery, and having caught hope, we can’t help spreading it to others.
Identity, Labels, Identity politics, stigma, and how identity changes through life. Many AA meeting rituals include people identifying themselves: I’m Joe and I’m “an alcoholic,” “in recovery from addiction,” “a person with substance use disorder.
The Social Identity Model Of Recovery (SIMOR) applies the Social Identity Approach to the process of recovery from addiction. This model frames the recovery mechanism as a process of social identity change in which a person’s most salient identity shifts from being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values revolve around substance abuse to being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values encourage recovery. This emerging sense of self is shared with others in recovery, thus strengthening the individual’s sense of belongingness within recovery-oriented groups.
This social identity gradually embodies the norms, values, beliefs, and language of recovery-oriented groups. This, in turn, helps shape and describe the result of a 12-step approach, or better put the millions of individual approaches to 12-step rooms. Also, we understand all other modalities - peer-2-peer, clinical, and self-motivated approaches. Our sense of changes in substance-related behaviors, and reinforces a new social identity [David W. Best et al., Overcoming alcohol and other drug addiction as a process of social identity transition: the social identity model of recovery (SIMOR), 2015]
Meaning is more critical to long life than lifestyle choices, food, exercise, and vices. Meaning from life in recovery is found in most recovery pathways. Organizing an event like Secular Ontario AA Round up or coming here offers meaning to life.
Empowerment, 12-steps, as an example, enables and encourages the 12 stepsability to handle situations that used to baffle us, suddenly realizing, and so on. Even AA literature says we “Were” powerless, it’s not learned helplessness. Our poisonous relationship with alcohol may not be extracted but powerlessness can be.
Notes:
David Best et al (2017) Recovery Movement
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1455072517691058
Mary Leamy et al (2011)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22130746/