The Recovering Peer is often essential as Role Model and Coach to Another in Recovery

The Recovering Peer is often essential as Role Model and Coach to Another in Recovery

  By David H. Kerr                              March 5, 2016

Those of us in the field of addiction recovery for many decades have seen how valuable the recovering person is as treatment program counselor and coach.  Unfortunately the political and funding systems have created expensive barriers to peer counselors' advancement, including costly higher education degrees.  This necessary requirement has eliminated many if not the majority of effective experienced recovering counselors from moving up the ladder in the workforce.  Many if not most recovering people just don't have the money for these degrees but their skills and life experience are invaluable and have been serving others in recovery for decades!  Is there another way to qualify these excellent counselors with long experience in recovery and proven supervised experience? The article below from Health Inc. entitled "Shortage of Addiction Counselors Further Strained by Opioid Epidemic," reports that the call for more counselors is now more urgent than the need for additional treatment beds.  Amelie Gooding, Director of Phoenix House in Keene, N.H. says that "she's been short a full-time counselor for a year and a half!"  She said:"Everybody thinks, 'Oh, there aren't enough beds!'  But there's not enough treatment staff to open more beds." (See article below.)

There's an additional problem as reported by the article below:

"The problem isn't just burnout, other addiction counselors say, though the job entails many late nights and loads of paperwork. The biggest problem, they say, is the low pay — addiction counselors earn an average of about $40,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

When I retired as CEO of Integrity House in March 2012, recovering counselors with experience and certification (CADC) were making less than $30,000/year.  Yet students coming right out of school with a master's degree and little to no experience could earn between $40,000 and $50,000/year at the same job.  Sure, a degree is worth additional money in the workplace but in the field of addiction treatment, the long-term proven supervised experience of a certified recovering counselor can be equally important and in fact essential, and should be paid accordingly. 

Many recovering people come in to treatment right from prison or from the streets and their credibility and abilities as a potential counselor must be tested by their progress and skill as shown in a long-term treatment program followed by aftercare support, over a minimum period of five years[1].  Regular unannounced urine testing must be administered as well throughout their treatment and after they leave.  Many recovering peers who complete their treatment will make excellent counselors and should be reimbursed at least at the level of a starting staff counselor with no experience and a master's degree.

I began work with addicts in Newark, NJ in 1965 and was immediately impressed by the knowledge and experiential learning of addiction peer counselors.  They just seemed to have a natural positive influence over other addicts coming in for help.  In the 1960's, my recovering peer colleague and I would listen to the addict tell his/her story.  After a few minutes of a dramatic portrayal of years and even decades of addiction experience, my peer colleague in recovery would begin to smile.  I would ask why he was smiling after hearing such a desperate tale and he would say "ask him."  Then it was often the case that they would both smile.  They both knew "the game" and what to say and this was a bond of knowledge and experience that no degree could match. 

From that point on in the conversation, my recovering colleague took over and the truth of their conversation was evident.  The new addict in treatment felt comfortable in the "house" of his "street brother."  He knew he had met a person he trusted; a person with whom he could identify; a person who cared and who wouldn't tolerate the BS and manipulation. 

My recovering peer colleague would say: "It won't be easy for you here but how easy has it been for you in the past?  Let's see, you are separated from your wife and your four children; you missed nearly all of their birthdays over your 20 year "run."  You now have liver disease due to your "street dope fiend ways."  No friends except your dealer who wants your business.  You've learned much about the criminal justice system, or should have since you've been down for 15 years[2].  You've lost the friendship and respect of your former friends and family due to your habit of borrowing money and never paying it back.  Am I getting warm?  "Yeah says the new addict.  You're right.... You're exactly right.  How'd you do it" asks the new admit?  Says my recovering colleague: "Some days I wake up in the morning with some bad thoughts...you know what I mean.  I just look at those bad years and I tell myself, I can do it today.  I am somebody now and I can help others like you, while I'm helping myself. 

Right now you feel a little better just knowing that 'I know' and that I've walked in your shoes and there's nothing good there; nothing but sadness and regret" and the tears flow.  "You know I feel for you man...you know that!  Don't play any more games with your life.  You will change if you stay here and not because of me.  No, it's because you will 'get it' and you will see yourself as a powerful person who can overcome this illness and your past ways.  Your will and resolve will be your new backbone and you know what...you will begin to like yourself and others will see your change and give you positive feedback while not allowing you to slide back into your selfish, self-pity former self.  Are you feeln' me?"  Through tears, the new addict peer says "yeah man, I'm feeln' you."

"With time, much time, and lots of experience, and trial and failure you will finally 'get it' and your new personal resolve plus your new friends will help prevent your return to that 'death spiral' of heroin addiction.  You have me now man; your new friend that don't take none of your old lies and BS.  Come on man, let me give you a hug.  You gonna do this and you gonna do it right!  So toughen your gut, look up and walk straight ahead...don't look back.  Pattern your future after the many role models you'll meet right here in this program.  Some had it much worse than you and they've 'turned it around.' Most of us around here who are staff have been clean and sober a minimum of five years."

Once clean and sober for a minimum of five years including treatment, most recovering people can become powerful role models.  In the Therapeutic Community, student members have similar learning patterns as that of a child.  They often model their behavior and attitude and eventual lifestyle after those staff they respect as role models, particularly those who had a similar addiction journey and can share some very similar life experiences. 

Summary Comments and Advice to Those in Recovery:

Staying clean and sober is a 24/7 exercise with continuing dialectic interplay between the fear of relapse and the promise of a new drug free lifestyle.  Your peer coach and mentor becomes one of the most important role models and guides to help you to develop your new lifestyle.  But in recovery, you can't be too dependent on any one person since the job of returning to or developing a clean and sober lifestyle ultimately belongs to you.  No one can do it for you.  After your above mentioned five year process of recovery including coached lifestyle change and treatment, you can become a valuable asset to the treatment system as a counselor, peer role model and an advocate for the critical role peers must play in the recovery process.  Hopefully our systems of prevention and treatment will one day recognize that your long supervised experience clean and sober, your life skills and your natural people skills, are for most, on a par with that of degreed counselors and therefore should be rewarded with equal pay.  

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 Health news from NPR

HEALTH INC.

 Shortage of Addiction Counselors Further Strained by Opioid Epidemic

Updated February 26, 20166:19 PM ET Published February 24, 20164:57 AM ET by Emily Corwin

FROM

To listen, click on the following link:

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=467143265&m=467914439

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/02/24/467143265/shortage-of-addiction-counselors-further-strained-by-opioid-epidemic

Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Corbis

As the drug-related death toll rises in the United States, communities are trying to open more treatment beds. But an ongoing labor shortage among drug treatment staff is slowing those efforts.

Each year, roughly one of every four substance-abuse clinicians nationally chooses to leave the job, according to recent research. And that's not just turnover — leaving one job for another in the same field. As an Institute of Medicine report documented in 2006, there's been a shortage of addiction workers for decades. And the demand is only increasing; the Affordable Care Act and other federal laws have given millions more people insurance to help them pay for those services. If only there were enough counselors to treat them.

Amelie Gooding runs Phoenix House in Keene, N.H., and says she's been short a full-time counselor for a year and a half.

"Everybody thinks, 'Oh, there aren't enough beds!' " Gooding says. "But there's not enough treatment staff to open more beds."

Because she's understaffed, Gooding has to leave three of her 18 residential beds empty, and she cut her outpatient groups down to 50 percent capacity.

So where have all the counselors gone?

"For me, it got to be too heavy," says former counselor Melissa Chickering, who used to work for Gooding at the Phoenix House and still lives in the area.

Clinical directors would give their right arm to hire someone with Chickering's long resume, Gooding says. She has a master's degree in social work and 10 years of experience. Instead, the valued counselor now spends her days teaching courses in psychology and health sciences at local New Hampshire colleges.

The problem with addiction treatment, Chickering says, is you take on your clients' pain. Plus, she says, she found the lack of funding and coordination from the state criminal Justice System.

She remembers a particularly bad time when she was running an addiction program for teenagers.

"I had open beds," she says. "But a girl came in and was on the waiting list — she just didn't have the right funding." Because of the rules, Chickering had to reserve empty beds for clients who had a different kind of health insurance than the girl in front of her had.

"So she died while she was sitting on the waiting list," Chickering remembers. "And I went home that night, and I was like, 'I had an open bed!' How do you sit with that and be OK the next day?"

The problem isn't just burnout, other addiction counselors say, though the job entails many late nights and loads of paperwork. The biggest problem, they say, is the low pay — addiction counselors earn an average of about $40,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Anne Herron leads workforce development for the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration — the agency that oversees services for the treatment of substance abuse. Federal officials are well-aware of the counseling shortage and are working on it, Herron says. Her agency is reaching out to high schools and colleges, developing training curricula.

Those initiatives are a start, she says, adding, "We would like to see more."

[1]  Recovering -"the process of resolving, or the status of having resolved, alcohol and other drug problems.... While recovering conveys the dynamic, developmental process of addiction recovery, recovered provides a means of designating those who have achieved stable sobriety and better conveys the real hope for a permanent resolution of alcohol and other drug problems. The period used to designate people recovered from other chronic disorders is usually five years without active symptoms" (White, 2002, p. 29).

[2] This means he has spent 15 years in state prison