Random Thoughts from the Past to the Future

As I have been reworking this website to reflect the needs of the newly reformed Coalition for Behavioral Health-Houston, I can not help but reflect on the many memories that I have from the years of volunteering with this organization. I don't remember who invited me to the very first meeting that I attended, back when it was the Coalition of Substance Abuse Services. I just remember being excited at being accepted as part of an organization where everyone was working hard to educate the community on the value of helping people achieve and maintain sobriety. (We didn't know it was Recovery in those days.) Many of in the group were alcoholics and/or addicts, and we were happy to be involved in a venue where the professionals in the group (the ones that weren't addicts or alcoholics) actually seemed to accept us as equals, or at least nearly so. None of the language had begun to change. There was no "Recovery," "Lived Experience," "Peer Support," or any of the other terms that we freely use now. We were addicts or alcoholics, and if we had achieved a "CADAC" and were grandfathering into the new "LCDC" we were kind of grudgingly accepted into the greater healthcare community as having some limited value of working with "those people" that most doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists didn't really want to work with anyway, as the success rates were so low. After all, "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, Once an addict, always an addict" and even with years of sustained sobriety there was never really any hope of being fully recognized as a complete human being if one had ever been thus categorized.

Fortunately, some very astute doctors, psychiatrists, and nurses somehow didn't fully accept the idea that only a very few would ever recover from severe addiction and mainstream in the community. This group emphasized the value of the individuals who were regaining their lives from the grip of the substances, by recognizing the agencies that served the addict or alcoholic and helping to give the people who worked at those agencies a venue to learn, to commiserate, to discuss and to reinforce each other with the idea that we were doing something worthwhile. Then, came the days of identifying "dual disorders," "co-occurring disorders," and finally, "behavioral health." Each of these terms was a progression in identifying that people could have more than one issue in their life, and the fledgling concept that an individual could recover from any or all of the concerns. Probably the most important part of this transition was that if a person had multiple concerns, those concerns had to be treated concurrently to be the most effective. Hopefully, we helped to educate people that you could give people their psych medications while they were in detox, or that one could continue on their medications and still achieve "sobriety." Possibly around this time, people began to embrace the term"Recovery," with an emphasis placed on the concept that "A person is in recovery when they say they are." That last statement seemed to really trouble many people from the "abstinence-only" world.

Of course, with many embracing the concept of "Recovery," came the idea of "Recovery Coaches," and eventually "Peer Recovery Support Specialists." These terms came from the teachings of Willaim White, and the development of "Recovery Oriented Systems of Care." Sandy Olson was one of the original members of the Houston ROSC, which is now known as the Houston Recovery Initiative, along with Leonard Kincaid, Kay Austin, Dillon and Dorothy West, and others. I joined that effort at its second Houston meeting. Two things I remember fondly from those days. First, I was incredibly angry that I had spent two years in classes and had been in countless education sessions for continuing education and I had never heard of William White even once. The second thing was that I had to take vacation time from the agency where I was employed, because "This whole "Peer support" thing is a fad." Obviously, I listened to that advice well.

It was about this time that the Coalition began to develop the Symposiums, which we continue this year with FIRES, Faith in Recovery Expo and Symposium. The first was the C12C, Communicating with the 12-step Community. That symposium only opened up the idea that we need to include more of the greater community in recovery and that there were "many paths to recovery." The symposiums have progressed over the years, with a different focus and acronym each year, and have hopefully encouraged many discussions about recovery over the years.

As part of the Coalition, I have become involved in more and more of the Greater Houston Community, and in the continuing development of my life in recovery. I hope that the revitalization of the Coalition will continue to encourage ordinary individuals to advocate and encourage others to embrace recovery with all their strength, and set out to find the value of those of us who spent some years in the grip of a deceptive and destructive illness, that could have easily killed us. However, one of the things that I have learned in this recovery journey, is "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Those of us who have lived through the darkness and have moved into the light, not only can thrive in this realm, but we have knowledge and skills that individuals who never had to fight those demons may never develop. We are strong, innovative, creative, determined and capable of building a more equitable world for those who follow. We can be the change that we dream. In the words of William White, "Let's go make some history."