Recovery Month in Action

As we come to the end of another National Recovery Month, I found myself reflecting on the insane number of events that I had participated in over the past few weeks, in my home state of Minnesota and beyond.

On September 12, I joined hundreds of groups and individuals at the state capital in St. Paul for the Walk for Recovery, where we advocated for better funding, treatment and visibility to lawmakers and other movers and shakers.

On September 15, I threw on my baseball cap and gathered with thousands of others at the Minnesota Twins major league baseball game in Minneapolis for Rally Caps for Recovery Night to express the joy of healing and spread the message that recovery is possible for anyone.

On September 18, a colleague and I spoke at the Missouri Behavioral Health Conference in St. Louis, presenting the fabulous work our school has done implementing an alternative pathway for admission for individuals without a bachelor’s degree.

On September 19, I joined dozens of other people at the Hazelden Betty Ford St. Paul campus to celebrate a Sober Tailgate, which included a BBQ, family-friendly activities, recovery resources, fellowship, and community connection.

And on September 24, I got to give the keynote speech at Minnesota Recovery Connection’s Gratitude Breakfast, celebrating all the Recovery Community Organizations in the area.

The Intersection of Personal and Professional Recovery

On September 28, I celebrated 11 years of sobriety. However, my journey in recovery is much, much longer. One of the interesting things about my recovery journey is that, even with almost 11 years of sobriety, I’ve still spent more time in Twelve Step Programs as an active user.  I’ve got 11 and a half years living on that side of the coin. My journey into addiction happened at the same time that I was building up a career as an addiction psychologist, becoming first a mental health practitioner at Hazelden Betty Ford’s adolescent and young adult facility in Plymouth, and then a professor and counselor educator at the Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School. And let me tell you, this creates a special kind of hell to live through. But I’ve come through it. And I did it with the help of many, many amazing people.

Why Words Matter

As I moved through the events of this past Recovery Month, at times participating and at times observing, I found myself musing along a very interesting theme. It involved an exploration of a couple of words that have been floating through my consciousness and career, and the origins of them. If you will indulge me, I’d like to describe them to you, because I think they encapsulate everything National Recovery Month is about. I’ll try not to geek out on language too much, but I assure you I will bring it all together.

I came into a psychology career completely sideways. My undergraduate degree is actually in Classics, with a specialty in Latin. Many people think these two fields—classics and addiction psychology—have absolutely nothing in common. But one of the things that drew me to classical studies was its focus on word etymologies, or the origins of words, especially in seeing how word stems had travelled over the centuries up into our modern language. In other words, both fields see that words matter. This is a key message that most of us in addiction treatment carry. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this this month.

Vulnerability and the Risk of Being Wounded

I thought about the etymology of the word “vulnerability.” In our field of addiction counseling today, we know that being willing to be vulnerable is often the key turning point for many of our clients. Learning to ask for help, and share our true thoughts, feelings, and fears, all require us to take off our mask of invulnerability. Through the groundbreaking work of Brene Brown, we learned that vulnerability is actually the only doorway that leads to true connection and joy. All other doorways, it seems, are false fronts.

So, here’s where the word geekiness comes in. The word “vulnerable” comes from the Latin word “vulnus,” which means wound. It’s actually one of the first words you learn in Latin, because in beginning Latin you read a lot of ancient works about wars, and people getting wounded in battle. The literal meaning of “vulnerable” is “able to be wounded.” I thought about this a lot this past month. It’s true that being vulnerable requires opening up, sharing, and while it allows us to connect, it also puts us at risk of being hurt. Being rejected. Let down. I thought about this this month because I had a powerful experience of this in my life.

What Recovery Really Means

Many of us who live in recovery spaces have family members who do not. I had an experience at the beginning of this month where I was going through something difficult, and was totally vulnerable with some family members about it. Where I needed love and compassion, instead I received rejection and judgment. In short, I was vulnerable, and I got wounded. It took me by surprise, because I was not expecting this. And I felt deeply wounded. For a couple of days, I hurt. I literally ached, deep in my soul.

But then, something interesting happened. Once I returned home, I surrounded myself with my community of recovery. While I’d been aware of the etymology of “vulnerability” for decades, I wasn’t as aware of the etymology of the word “recovery.” I decided to do some digging. I’d known the prefix “re” means “back,” or “again,” but the “c-o-v” part actually comes from the Latin word “capare,” meaning to take or seize (“c-a-p” became “c-o-v” when the word traveled through French). That means the literal meaning of “recovery” is “to take back” or “to seize again.” But in modern times we combine the two-word fragments to create the meaning “to restore,” “to reclaim.” We see this easier in another English word made from these same two fragments, “recuperate.”

Learning How to Heal

As I was attending all these Recovery Month events, and as I was coping with what was happening in my personal life, I had a slow realization. What was happening to us while we were active in our addictions wasn’t living a life of invulnerability, with all our masks, deception and shields, and that coming into recovery meant learning to be vulnerable as something new. We were always constantly vulnerable. We were constantly being wounded. But we didn’t have a way to deal with it. At its heart, this is what drove many of us to use—as an attempt to deal with constantly being wounded.

When we come into recovery spaces, what happens is not that we stop being wounded. We continue to be wounded. Actually, we learn to become even more open to it. But what is different is that we learn a way of living that allows us to “repair,” to recuperate, to heal from the wounds that hurt. We learn recovery.

Sometimes people think that there is a before/after paradigm in recovery. We lived one life before, and we live a different life after. And there is some truth to that. We did engage in life one way before, and we learned to engage in life a different way after. But buried within these overarching changes are a million little micro changes.

The truth is that life doesn’t change. We keep getting wounded. But where once we dealt with these wounds by hiding, or pretending they weren’t there, or attacking back, paradoxically just making our wounds deeper, coming into recovery means we learn how to repair ourselves when we get wounded. To really heal with each little new wound. And now that we are no longer inundated with all our wounds, we are able to access the joy, the connection, the freedom of authenticity that recovery brings.

The Gift of Recovery

As I cross the 11-year sobriety threshold, my gratitude extends to the impact that recovery has had on my own life. I am grateful that I have entered a space in life and a way of being that doesn’t prevent me from being wounded but teaches me that being able to be wounded is a necessary part of life. Without it, I would not have access to joy, to connection. But it also does put me at risk. And a life of recovery teaches me that I can heal when those types of injuries happen.

What Counselors Help People Learn

Addiction and mental health counselors are part of the macrocosm of this wholesale shift in a way of living. I further recognize that what my job as a counselor educator really entails is to train students to understand that ultimately this is the job of a counselor: To use our evidence-based practices to teach our clients that it’s okay that life deals us wounds on occasion, and to give them the tools and strategies needed to heal them. We teach people not how to not have wounds, but how to accept that the best parts of life come from being vulnerable, and how to recuperate from the inevitable wounds that do occur.

A Reason to Celebrate

In short, I celebrate recovery. I celebrate the possibilities that are created when we learn it’s okay to be vulnerable. I celebrate the access to joy and connection that we gain when we learn to take care of our wounds. I celebrate the counselor’s ability to teach others ways to do this. I celebrate the thousands of successes I’ve seen in the people our graduates have helped.

One of my absolute favorite quotes comes from anthropologist Margeret Mead, and I will paraphrase it here: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

I am proud to be a faculty member at the Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School, where I work on a team that embodies this statement every day.