Recovery Coaching and Newslettering
Two things to talk about this week. The role of the peer recovery coach and the challenge of writing a newsletter in that role.
The role of a peer recovery coach, at least for a Peer Recovery Coach in the State of New York, is pretty simple. In fact, we’re defined more by what we don’t do than anything else. We don’t provide counseling. We don’t give advice. We don’t steer the people we coach into any particular program for recovery. The job is to walk alongside the person in recovery and give support by listening and sharing our own experience. While on paper it sounds pretty difficult for me to not give advice, as I’m very opinionated, it’s pretty easy for one good reason: our experiences that got us into a place where we need recovery are all quite different.
Sure, there’s a ton of commonality and shared experience, and that’s why community is so for many of us getting and staying sober . We’re not alone. Others have walked this path and come out the other side. But we all have different traumas to address, some with a capital T and others perhaps less obvious. We have different contexts; we grew up in different places and at different times. Our current situations are different.
Because of this, different approaches to getting sober work better or worse for different people. It seems obvious to me now, but I think that growing up I saw that AA or the Betty Ford clinic were the two ways that people got sober. I didn’t know of or understand the myriad ways people get and stay sober.
Peer recovery coaches exist for a few reasons: one is that we literally have to study the various modes and interventions that can help people. I’ve heard more than one coach say that they wish they wish they had trained as a peer recovery coach before getting sober because we learn so much about what’s out there. But the learned experience of recovery is key to being a coach; the book learning is important but only part of the training.
We learn to listen better. We learn to be curious about the people we’re with. We learn how our experience is unique to us and can be a useful catalyst for learning more about another person.
The newsletter is an odd complement to my coaching, and ultimately it’s its own thing. I’m obviously not listening when I write this, and while I “listen” to you when you write emails to me or comment on my Instagram and Facebook posts, it’s not the same thing at all. The newsletter is my effort to share my story and experiences to a larger group, a small part of telling a lot of people that you’re not alone, I’m in it too; here’s what happened to me this week or years ago; here’s something I did that was useful. And because I’m not coaching per se when I write this, I can cheat and slip into some advice once in a while. I hope I don’t do it too much, and writing from my own experience frames everything I say as “this is what worked (or didn’t) for me.”
Some weeks I don’t know what to write. Nothing jumps out to me as “I want to share this sobriety-related story” or “here’s something new I learned.” But just living sober is different, so I write about that. When I was growing up, it seemed like everyone watched “The Brady Bunch.” I didn’t. So when people talked about that time when Marcia broke her nose or whatever, I was left out. (It wasn’t a big deal, and it wasn’t a little-T trauma to miss out on it.) I imagine that not having a television or not having access to a car or, I don’t know, not having access to the internet would be a more extreme version of this. There is a whole shared experience that is closed off. For me, sobriety is more like not knowing “The Brady Bunch.” There’s an aisle in the grocery store that’s not for me anymore. There are ads on TV that are not targeted to me. There is a canon of jokes and tropes about hangovers and hookups and embarrassing moments that are no longer for me. And that’s actually pretty awesome, and that’s something I try to share, too.
I just spent ten minutes trying to come up with a clever Venn-ish diagram of what this is like, but it got too complicated. There’s a world for people who drink, and a world for people who don’t drink, and a lot of overlap in between, and then there’s a whole other set of experiences for each group. The more time I’m sober, the more that the experiences of drinking fade into the background, and the more that the experiences of being sober glow and brighten.
For me, not drinking is fundamentally not a lack. FUNDAMENTALLY. I don’t miss it. The positive experiences I had, like having drinks with my friend Joe when he found out we were having a kid and wanted to commemorate my coming fatherhood, would have been better without the booze. I really believe that. For one, I would probably remember what he said, for better or for worse. The lovely brunches I had at the pub around the corner would have been the starts and highlights to countless Saturdays and not the beginnings of a shitty, long nap.
The lack of drinking has instead opened up a completely new world to me. Getting up early and having the time to be creative at the height of my powers and abilities. Not stressing myself about my work performance, my attentiveness to my family, my health, all that stuff. I come to each day with a cleaner sheet.
I used to think that once I got sober, I could check that box and get on with my life. Done, problem solved. But I don’t feel that way. I want to stay part of this community. I know that staying active with my sober friends is important to my ongoing sobriety, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s sharing all this good stuff, too. We’ve been through a million different hells, many of them quite different, but we get to share this heaven together. Sorry about that last one, as obviously it’s not all puffy clouds and sunshine, but I hope you understand what I’m trying to say.
So that’s part of this newsletter, too. I’m a sober person living a sober life and while it’s not always awesome, it’s a lot better than it was, and I want to share that with you. I’m also learning new things about myself and how I process that past hell and my present heaven, and I want to share that with you. Maybe something I write touches something that you’ve experienced, too, and we strengthen this community through that.
I love you,
David
