Addiction | Montana's Peer Network

Recovery Month 2024

Every September, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) leads the nation in celebrating Recovery Month, a time dedicated to promoting awareness and understanding of mental health and substance use disorders, celebrating those in recovery, and highlighting the effective treatments available. Recovery Month has been a vital part of SAMHSA’s efforts to combat the stigma associated with mental health and substance use disorders, and in 2024, the initiative continues with renewed energy and focus on the theme, “Hope, Healing, and Health.”

A Word on Harm Reduction

Harm reduction involves guiding individuals toward recovery and giving them a second chance at life. The United States’ integrated recovery system claims responsibility for the healing process. The disease model suggests that addiction is a natural allergy, and having the condition for life means that people are encouraged to participate in a 12-step healing process, which offers a legitimate path to recovery. This involves regularly attending meetings, working through the 12 steps, and helping other individuals with alcoholism to keep their addiction in check. On the other hand, the harm reduction model takes a different approach to treating individuals struggling with addiction. Harm reduction is a public health model in which the goal may be abstinence. Still, there are smaller steps that one could take to approach the intersection of addiction and recovery. Embracing harm reduction enables peer support specialists to connect with their peers.

A Life of Recovery

Recovery is the story of my life. Textbook Psychology explains why my thoughts, behavior, senses, and emotions function without cause. That is, until you dive into the ocean of the heart, exploring love’s complex and hidden world. Recovery helps me know that the only person I can truly change is me. Still, I can positively affect the world if I am willing to make that change. I have learned that recovery is vital in life and will positively influence the future.

Peer Support Career Found Me

I used to believe I had no unique gifts or talents to offer the world. I lamented the belief that happiness could not be found in my work; it had to be uncovered in my hobbies. Work was to be something I trudged through to get a paycheck utterly separate from my authenticity. As I forged a path through the business world, I gained many external accolades from my professional environment that fulfilled a sense of accomplishment but did not replenish my heart.

Navigating Parenting in Recovery

I grew up between Helena and Great Falls, after my parents split, when I was around 3, and my brother was 9. I got the gift of seeing two very different parenting skills. My mom hovered and made sure I did what I was supposed to, and when I didn’t, there were consequences. My dad was very trusting and comforting, but very enabling. They both were amazing, and did the best with what they had, but I had one person in my life that gave me consistency, and that was my stepdad. My mom remarried when I was 7 years old. He was a teacher and coach in this community for over 50 years, and treated me and all my family, as if we were blood. What he was one day, was what he was the next, and when he said he would do something, he did it, and he did it with integrity.

Radical Acceptance Opens the Door to Self-acceptance

Radical acceptance comes in moments of clarity, where denial transforms into connection. The test of my commitment to radical acceptance shows up when I try to fix, control, ruminate about the past, predict the future, or avoid pain.

Radical Acceptance

When I think of radical acceptance, I think of when my only brother passed away. I was in Montana’s Women’s Prison and didn’t have a chance to go to his services. It hurt, and I was sober for the first time since I was a teenager. I was sober, but I wouldn’t say I was in recovery, because I was still living in a way that had many, many character defects.

Forgiveness is Freedom

If I could give another word for recovery, it would be forgiveness because if resentment is the blind spot of addiction, then forgiveness is a corrected vision. Forgiveness is an inner connection versus an emphasis on the crisis. In other words, resentment is fear, and forgiveness is love.

Gritty Spirituality

Spirituality is gritty. I spent many years trying to find God, sitting in meditation for hours a day attempting to make her something separate of myself that would give me a golden ticket into heaven. Attempting to be good enough to achieve unlimited access to worth, making up for lost time in meditation and prayer, life could be good if I said the right words and did the right actions.

The Art of Recovery

Recovery allows me to reframe the artwork that is my life. My addiction took that piece of artwork and buried it in the basement of my soul. Through the years, I piled boxes of trauma over the top of it, it gathered dust and lost all its value.

Tag: Addiction