Strengths-based recovery practice in chemical dependency: A transpersonal perspective

Moxley, David P

CHEMICAL DEPENDENCY RECOVERY

Abstract

Given the tremendous damage chemical dependency can inflict on the human spirit a transpersonal perspective is relevant to the recovery process because It assigns Importance to the development of personal meaning and life purpose. The use of a transpersonal perspective can foster hope for both providers and consumers of services, particularly during periods of recovery when people are struggling with relapse and despair, and when it appears almost impossible to surmount barriers to recovery. During these challenging times people may look to a higher power for strength and fortification however they may conceive of this power (Franid, 1997).

A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO SOCIAL WORK practice recognizes the legitimacy of a transpersonal perspective and its contributions to serving people in need (Imbrogno & Canda, 1988; Washington & Moxley, 2001). A transpersonal perspective values the nonsectarian expression of spirituality on part of people the profession serves and it encourages people to construct personal meaning, particularly during periods of adversity (Thayne, 1997). The transpersonal encourages individuals to become deeply reflective about their situations and the action they wish to take to address these situations (Canda, 1995). Transpersonal practice encourages people to find meaning in even the most arduous of circumstances (Dunbar, Mueller, Medina, & Wolf, 1998) while it encourages social workers to move beyond an exclusive reliance on rational approaches to change in helping people they serve to search for and find personal meaning (Canda, 1991).

The transpersonal can offer social workers opportunities to gain insight into how people think and believe, into how they conceive of their sources of support during periods of crisis or turmoil, and into how they construct personal meaning without advocating a particular sectarian perspective (Canda, 1988a, 1988b; Thayne, 1997). Enabling people to construct a sense of purpose greater than themselves may contribute to resilience, a resource essential to the achievement of recovery, and to the mobilization of strengths recovery requires of individuals coping with arduous circumstances (Goldstein, 1997).

The purpose of this paper is to frame recovery from a transpersonal perspective and to identify how this perspective can facilitate the recognition and use of strengths by practitioners and by the people they serve. The authors articulate a transpersonal framework of recovery and offer four strategies that practitioners of recovery can incorporate into their practices.

The use of a strengths perspective has several advantages in working with people coping with chemical dependency. It offers practitioners alternatives to labeling, to the reliance on diagnostic categories of dubious value, and to the attribution of responsibility for chemical dependency to the faults and deficiencies of the individual. Labeling, diagnosis, and blaming the victim can introduce into the process of treatment and into the treatment relationship itself a cynicism about the potential for change that can contaminate the thinking of both helpers and recipients and, as a consequence, limit their willingness to engage in the transformational process of change the practice of recovery demands (Saleebey, 1997). In the context of chemical dependency, a strengths perspective challenges practitioners to perceive the strengths of people who often find themselves in untenable situations, to engage people in the identification of their strengths, and to encourage people to use their strengths as tools useful to the achievement of recovery outcomes (Rapp, 1997).

A strengths perspective does not deny the very real damage that chemical dependency can inflict on people although the very experience of trauma can produce strengths in individuals, groups, and communities (Saleebey, 1997). It does not ignore those forces that imbue people with certain characteristics, particularly people who experience considerable social oppression, into careers of chemical dependency and it does not deny the need for what Freire (1998) calls critical consciousness about these forces and how they disempower.

The Transpersonal Domain as a Source of Strengths

The Transpersonal Domain

The transpersonal domain is a particularly important area of life in which strengths can be found and supported. The transpersonal is the "fourth force." It moves practitioners and clients beyond the instinctual, behavioral, or self-fulfillment foci of psychoanalytic, learning, and humanistic theories, respectively to the pursuit of meaning in a universe or world larger than themselves. The fourth force reminds people of their ethical responsibility for nurturing life, both human and nonhuman, protecting the natural environment, and preserving resources and opportunities for future generations (Quinn, 1995). The transpersonal suggests that people learn to be stewards of a greater good as they awaken to an altruistic compassion for others in the present as well as in the future (Thurman, 1998).

By transpersonal, the authors refer to that realm of life in which a person finds a greater purpose and personal meaning. Such purpose and meaning can come in many different forms whether in the practice of spirituality, adherence to a moral philosophy, one's relation with and responsibility for the natural environment or one's responsibility for the well being and rights of people (Gil, 1998). Although chemical dependency can stifle if not damage the development of such purpose, a transpersonal perspective assumes that it does not prevent people from awakening.

The transpersonal offers individuals a sense of their own development as part of the evolution of the greater cosmos without limiting it exclusively to their search for security, comfort, or even self-actualization. The transpersonal links the self to a higher order of nature or universe through the recognition that maturity comes from an individual's commitment to the advancement of peace and harmony (Thurman, 1998). The vows of the Buddhist Peacemaker Order are instructive here since they demonstrate commitment to a greater good: "I vow to be oneness/I vow to be diversity/I vow to be harmony"(Glassman, 1998, p. 47).

Three Qualities of the Transpersonal Domain

The transpersonal dimension incorporates teleology, metanoia, and praxis, concepts suggesting the fulfillment of human purpose, the use of positive values, and daily practice, as essential to the higher development of human beings. Teleology suggests that people whatever their background, experiences, or deeds can achieve a positive life goal while metanoia suggests the importance of positive human values to the achievement of such a purpose. Praxis underscores the importance of the integration of self-reflection and personal action on a daily basis.

Teleology

Human beings, no matter what their set of circumstances or history, can strive for the fulfillment of a greater collective good. In other words, the purpose of any human being is to fulfill a life goal that is constructive and vital to the advancement of humankind, of the environment, and of the universe. It is the purpose of each individual to find freedom. That is, "the individual's opportunity to choose anew, each generation, his or her vocation for life, how to spend his or her creative energies" (Thurman, 1998, p. 283). From a transpersonal perspective, each person is moving towards a positive life-affirming outcome although social forces that are counterproductive can threaten or disrupt its attainment. A transpersonal perspective suggests that people can overcome these forces with assistance, facilitation, and resources, and resume their journey towards the fulfillment of their life purpose.

Metanoia

The transpersonal perspective also recognizes that human beings are essentially metanoic. That is, they naturally adopt values that serve a higher order and that infuse a life with constructive and prosocial purpose. They are inherently ethical. As Thurman (1998) asserts: We fail to respect the power of positive conditioning, to systematically develop openness of mind, altruistic compassion, and joyous love. We are happy when people are generous, peaceful and loving, but we think it a surprise, an aberration from the norm of self-concern. (p. 40)

Of course, social and individual circumstances can disrupt these values, restrict their formation, and prevent people from fulfilling their greater purpose. Yet, even though transpersonal practice recognizes these possibilities, it underscores the importance of helping people to restore their inherent positive values so they can fulfill their purpose as human beings who are inextricably tied to the realization of a greater universal good.

Praxis

Transpersonal practice helps people to embrace a praxis in which they bring into their own daily lives the pursuit of a higher good, recognizing that although life is a journey fraught with danger, challenges, and setbacks, people can overcome these to achieve a higher consciousness of purpose. The transpersonal emphasizes that no matter how arduous this journey becomes, people can stay the path. They can move to higher levels of service to others, what social activists refer to as "a creative sense of civic duty"(Bonhoeffer, 1959).

Christianity encodes this precarious journey in the life stories of saints or holy ones while Judaic and Islamic thought illuminates such a journey through the life stories of prophets. In Buddhist thought, the idea of journey comes in the form of daily practice that is linked to an expanding awareness of the self as part of a grander natural condition that unifies all living and nonliving things into a universal whole (Matthiessen, 1998). Nonetheless, all of these traditions subscribe to the idea of praxis that essentially links the mundane experience of daily life to a grander intelligence guiding the universe. The individual finds the greater good by performing humble acts and performing good deeds on a daily basis, ones directed toward the self, toward others, and the environment. We can think of transpersonal practice as the mustering of those strengths that commit the individual to the greater good and stimulates a natural propensity to assume responsibility for attaining it (Schneider, 1993).

The Jouney of Individuation

In Jungian psychology the essential core of the person is the daemon, an inspiring inner spirit that pervades the individual's cognition, affect, senses, and functioning (Hillman, 1997). Individuation requires the spirit to seek a unique expression in the world which, in turn, requires a person to become aware of one's interconnection to the world, the universe and to the collectivity of humankind, both in the present, as well as in the past and future. Individuation calls for a person to connect inner life with outer action, linking contemplation and reflection to productive service and action (Fordham, 1966). In the real world these reaction patterns are hallmarks of the mature character.

A person's individuation can be derailed at many different points and times. But people can overcome oppressive social and cultural conditions to achieve individuation as distinctive and vital human beings (Schneider, 1998). Jungian psychology offers a "mentor archetype" suggesting that other people can serve to guide and assist the person along a journey of individuation (Kugler, 1989). Persons in recovery from chemical dependency may require such help to initiate their journey and to maintain it.

The heroic journey involves descent and decline as well as ascent and ultimate triumph (Schneider, 1998). People engaged in recovery from chemical dependency will likely relapse, decline, and make irrelevant choices that feed the use of drugs, but these events are pedagogical. These events can help the person to learn how to engage effectively in recovery practice and sensitize them to the pattern of their own recovery. The transpersonal practitioner has faith in reformation and even redemption in the face of adversity. There is always the possibility that the hero will emerge triumphant and discover or rediscover the path of recovery. The daemon influences the individual's journey through life but this journey can be compromised by the shadow, that part of the psyche, whether good or bad, that remains unknown to the person (Sharp, 1991). Bringing the shadow into the light, that is, into the consciousness of the individual, contributes to the success of the person's journey and to the fulfillment of teleological purpose. Social and cultural forces can shape the shadow and isolate it even further from selfawareness and self-understanding.

A woman of minority status may be unaware of how social factors, such as sexism, racism, and classism, influence her career of chemical dependency and she may be unaware of the accommodation she has made to these forces. She may invoke self-incrimination to explain her use of drugs and, as a result, focus on her own personal inadequacies as reasons for her career of chemical dependency. She has not been awakened to those forces that move her away from harmony with herself and others (Hahn, 1999) since they reside in the shadow. In this case, the emergence of the shadow into the light of personal awareness, which requires the illumination of these social forces, their dynamics, and their negative consequences, may be an essential step in the process of recovery. The illumination of the shadow can, in turn, illuminate the accommodation the person has made and, paradoxically, reveal numerous strengths.

The process of recovery requires individuation. The individual must overcome those social forces that foster accommodation and the negative consequences they produce. Mourning, grieving, and catharsis may precede constructive action (Kast, 1988). Eventually the process of recovery may require an interplay between grief and optimism since there are many times in the journey when one is reminded of loss and deprivation and when one finds hope.

Framing Chemical Dependency From a Transpersonal Perspective

Chemical dependency contributes to the expansion of the shadow and likely makes consuming drugs appealing to the conscious appraisal of the individual. It can push awareness of recovery into the shadow requiring pre-contemplation and contemplation to illuminate the possibility of recovery.

A career of chemical dependency can isolate individuals into social networks that reinforce use while it lowers their aspirations and expectations for themselves and for others. Chemical dependency can narrow a person's scope of vision, preventing them from even recognizing their connection to a higher purpose and higher order. People coping with chemical dependency may come to think of themselves and others as less than human relating to the self and other people as merely instruments to obtain the drugs they desire. A person can abandon hope, finding comfort in continued drug use and in the career that reinforces it. They can confine themselves to circumstances that reduce their functioning and their connection to the outer world of action, task, opportunity, and responsibility. Chemical dependency can damage the spirit and feed the shadow making self-destructive behavior almost inexplicable even to the most skilled therapist.

Yet, practitioners must recognize these as symptoms that are negative consequences of greater social forces. Symptoms can represent the accommodation people have made to social forces. So it is not surprising that considerable levels of stress, deprivation, and despair can make the use of substances attractive, particularly when people are coping with poverty, or coping with alienating conditions that can induce hopelessness even among the most successful individuals in a society. The absence of opportunity induced by discrimination, stigmatization, and social marginalization can set conditions in which a career of chemical dependency can become a likely alternative. Institutionally induced racism, sexism, and poverty create environments in which chemical dependency thrives and in which the numbing of oneself against deprivation and abuse through the use of drugs may be perceived as a logical means of coping with chronically negative circumstances. The actions of the society can foster both the individual's accommodation and the individual's shadow.

A strengths-based practitioner will likely marvel at the resilience people who are coping with chemical dependency often demonstrate in the face of adversity while they mourn the personal toll these forces exact. It is not necessary to categorically view symptoms as deficits since many people coping with chemical dependency have acquired and groomed as strengths the routines, skills, abilities, and competencies that have proven useful in their careers of drug use. Practitioners should not moralize either symptoms or strengths, nor blame the victim for the consequences of vicious social forces. Strengths emerge and express themselves under many different conditions. A person's accommodation can contain many strengths.

A Transpersonal Framework of Recovery

Bringing Recovery Out Of the Shadow

Increasingly recovery is becoming a focus of health and human service work in a variety of fields, particularly in those areas of practice once pervaded by pessimism and the absence of hope. The fields of domestic violence, developmental disabilities, physical disabilities, mental illness, HIV/AIDS, cancer, and chemical dependency to name only a few are invoking the idea of recovery as a heroic journey and as an individual struggle of change. Individuals move through horrific experiences that threaten life and soul. Such experiences can change a person both deeply and permanently.

The introduction of new service strategies, the use of social supports, and changes in professional attitudes and paradigms foster the use of the construct of recovery as the possibilities of longevity, health maintenance, and social integration and participation expand in areas once thought impervious to amelioration or improvement. Recovery from a transpersonal perspective suggests that despair can yield to hope, and that hope can create substantive changes in a person's situation and outlook on life.

Recovery as a Heroic Journey

Recovery as a construct has undergone its own transformation. It is increasingly difficult to define recovery exclusively from a medical perspective in which a return to a pre-morbid state is seen as the only if not the most important outcome. Recovery is a journey that is deeply personal and subjective and the movement through recovery can transform a person's sense of self and meaning (Moxley, 1994).

Recovery is not a linear process but evolves through advances and setbacks. Miraculous cures suggest that recovery is more than a product of professional intervention and involves people in transformational processes that incorporate a transpersonal element. The recovery process itself can be circuitous as it takes a roundabout course that is punctuated by forward movements, setbacks, and pauses. A person in recovery may alternate between active periods of change and progress and periods of stasis of varying length. The transpersonal perspective suggests that people will discover patterns of recovery that work for them although practitioners may suggest interventions such as harm reduction or resistance training to manage behavior that can jeopardize self or others.

Discovery or rediscovery of personal meaning and making sense of one's life may be critical healing factors that promote recovery. Jungian psychology suggests that recovery can be framed as a process of individuation. People in recovery link solitude, internal reflection and contemplation to involvement in external action whether in the form of consumer activism, self-help, and mutual support, or vocational, avocational, and social involvement achieving an inner and outer balance that fits their own process of individuation.

The recovery process itself is a heroic journey. The recovery process requires people to change the self and the world through their own action, typically found in service to others, or to the confrontation of those social forces that sustain the very issue from which they seek recovery. It is not surprising that many people in recovery seek to serve others who are struggling with recovery and it is not surprising to find that people in recovery assume the role of advocate. Service to others, constructive action, and prosocial acts may stimulate further recovery and can be relevant outcomes of the recovery process.

The Teleology, Metanoia, and Praxis of Recovery

Perhaps one of the most salient and revealing insights people in recovery and the practitioners who serve them can gain is to respect the pattern of recovery each person takes and experiences. From a transpersonal perspective, each person's career of recovery will possess its own teleology, metanoia, and praxis.

Recovery requires a vision that animates human commitment and human energy. Recovery requires individuals to find their essential meaning so that they can respond effectively to the challenges of relapse, impasse, and setbacks. To paraphrase Victor Frankl, "I can live with any how if I only know why"(Frankl, 2000). Meaning requires vision and aims and offers individuals a destination. The words destination and destiny share similar roots. Both words suggest the idea of "purposeful direction" and both words are consistent with the transpersonal concept of teleology. Recovery requires practitioners to focus on the positive developmental course a person can learn to take emotionally, behaviorally, spiritually, and physically.

Practitioners may need to undergo their own recovery so that they increasingly incorporate positive perspectives about the potentiality of each individual no matter what their history or background or their deeds or actions. The metanoia of recovery suggests that the individuals who engage in recovery can be honored as sacred, particularly as they increasingly adopt constructive values to guide their process of personal transformation. Individuals in recovery can be valorized as heroes who undertake what in medieval society was known as the viaticum, that is, arduous journeys people undertook in the face of uncertainty or even life threatening conditions that demanded the very best of them and the individuals who lent them support.

The Latin word viaticum meant traveling or voyage into the unknown. But it also referred to the supplies, resources, and provisions people needed from others in order to meet successfully the demands of a voyage and the challenges they would face along the way. Recovery is like the viaticum. The journey is uncertain and challenging demanding resources and provisions. Perhaps metanoic values are the most necessary and powerful of these supplies since they can stand as reminders of what constitutes constructive action. And, during times of adversity, these values can serve as a compass guiding thought, behavior, and action. They can clarify what is most cherished by the person undertaking the viaticum of recovery.

Ultimately, metanoia requires the individual to find and reconcile inner truth with outer action. The internal ethic of recovery must be practiced in the outside world. Buddhist activists suggest that this integration of inner and outer truth is the essence of a mature being.

Chemical dependency can cloud if not diminish inner truth and it can prevent its expression in the outer world of action. It can push inner truth into the shadow and, as a consequence, make it unknown to the individual. The heroic journey of recovery from chemical dependency requires the uncovering of this inner truth, and its positive values and it requires the use of this inner truth to sustain the path of recovery.

The praxis of recovery requires the integration of selfcare, social support, and professional assistance to address one's needs and enable individuals to act in the external world to find and fulfill the purpose that animates their lives. Praxis requires the care of self, care of others, and care of society. How individuals in recovery undertake this integration is based on their intuition, insight, and wisdom, qualities that the transpersonal practitioner seeks to bring out of the shadow of chemical dependency.

Although for some individuals this integration seems to occur at a time of decline and despair, it is preparatory to the advancement of their transpersonal development through individuation. The story of St. Francis highlights his own struggle to balance solitude and action in medieval society; many times alternating between the two in order to move forward his mission and quest. As a young man of a wealthy merchant, St. Francis engaged in a life of excess, only to relinquish this life style to embrace service to the poor. This change was unexpected and paradoxical as he advanced his evangelical commitment by alternating periods of engagement and disengagement, attachment and detachment (McMichaels, 1997).

Similarly, quiet, solitude, and isolation can help people to prepare to act in the outer world. Even at the level of societal recovery, individuals such as Malcolm X (Malcolm X & Haley, 1989), Martin Luther King (2001), Nelson Mandela (1994), Gandhi (1983), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1997) in their pursuit of social justice took opportunistic advantage of periods of imprisonment to contemplate and reflect in anticipation of future social action.

These periods of isolation, whether enforced by outside authorities or self-chosen, made these individuals more mindful of their purpose, values, and destination. Contemplation, meditation, prayer, and reflection can be important tools in any recovery process since they can prepare people for sustained action. They help integrate the physical, cognitive, behavioral, motivational, and spiritual spheres of functioning in anticipation that a person will face and must resolve important personal challenges that lie ahead.

Recovery and Personal Transcendence

Ultimately, from a transpersonal perspective, recovery is transcendent. The practice of recovery, by bringing together teleology, metanoia, and praxis, combine to help individuals to rise above the conditions that foster despair. The person in recovery can transcend the conditions that foster addiction, illness, abuse, disability, or deprivation. The social circumstances that perpetuate these problematic circumstances can emerge out of the shadow into the full awareness of the individual. People can gain insight when they come to understand the forces influencing their chemical dependency and when they realize that while they can blame these forces, they must also confront them and overcome them. In Buddhism, such an awakening anticipates the full development of the individual as the word Buddha itself can be translated as "the awakened one" (Thurman, 1998).

Sudden intuitive insight into one's recovery can come like a lightning bolt. For the individual, this sudden insight may seem like an accident, yet for the transpersonal practitioner it is synchronicity. Many forces are coming together to move the person forward in his or her recovery. Awareness of these forces may emerge after periods of decline and despair that are juxtaposed with periods of precontemplation, contemplation, and preparation to act on recovery.

Some individuals who transcend their situations may remain symptomatic. For example, people coping with schizophrenia may continue to experience hallucinations or so-called negative symptoms while they move forward to a gainful and satisfying life. People coping with HIV infection return to work and school even though they must cope with acute episodes of illness. People coping with chemical dependency may always struggle with the desire to revert to an old lifestyle. Both listening to symptoms and co-existing with them can be strengths and may indicate personal awakening. Complete resolution of symptoms is not an absolute necessity for an individual to move forward in recovery.

Within Jungian psychology, symptoms are seen as opportunities for change requiring individuals to recognize and listen to what symptoms communicate while they come to understand the conditions under which they occur. When symptoms appear, the deficit-oriented practitioner may seek to control or manage them. In contrast, the strengths practitioner will suggest "lets listen to them, come to understand them, and adopt new ways to cope and act in relationship to recovery."

Symptoms may be products of synchronicity, emerging at what appear to be inconvenient or unpredictable times, only to subside as people in recovery and their mentors intuit what they mean in the greater context of a person's past, current, and future life. Symptoms may be the markers of the viaticum as they communicate to individuals in recovery that their own heroic work and their journeys of recovery must continue. They may signal challenges that require the individual to bring the shadow further into the light of awareness.

The Transpersonal Practice of Strengths-Based Recovery

Four strategies offer specific tools for fostering the journey of recovery. They are: (a) feeling pain and calming the spirit, (b) using the story and finding the innate image, (c) fostering individuation, and (d) balancing action and solitude.

Feeling Pain and Calming the Spirit

It is difficult to relate to a higher purpose and to find personal meaning when anger, hostility, and selfdoubt plague one. The loss of hope can instill cynicism about any possibility of change and restoration. Selfdoubt about change may fuel this cynicism making the person who is early in recovery hostile towards any suggestion or recommendation. They may feel that they have exhausted all of their alternatives and the failure of their previous attempts to change only prove to them that they will also not be successful this time. They likely prefer inaction, temporarily finding security in asserting that change is neither desirable nor possible. From a transpersonal perspective these attitudes and feelings suggest how the person has accommodated to the use of chemical dependency and their change can be markers of success.

As people take stock of their lives they can be overwhelmed by feelings of failure and grief that may, in turn, fuel pessimism which only reinforces inaction. Grief work may dominate the early period of recovery as individuals assess the consequences of their chemical dependency and take inventory of the many losses they have experienced including financial, health, family, vocational, and educational ones. The multiple losses can bring into consciousness the sheer toll chemical dependency has taken.

Of course the intent here is neither to frame nor to assess these losses as personal deficits. They are likely consequences not causes of complex forces. But they are nonetheless real and they must be dealt with so that the person can move forward in his or her recovery work. The ability to mourn and grieve is strength. This indicates that the person can make a critical assessment of his or her life and withstand the stress inherent in self-appraisal. The person who is unwilling to feel the pain of past conduct and behavior may still require time to reflect and think about the aims of his or her recovery work. It is not a deficit to be unready to change. It means that a person must engage in additional work to become ready. Increasingly human service practitioners legitimize the idea of readiness as an intervention outcome and recognize the necessity to help people become ready to engage in change. The astute facilitator can practice what Myles Horton (1998) referred to as his "two eye theory of teaching," keeping one eye on where the person is at and one eye on where they can go while supporting the person and helping them to become ready for change.

The teleological quality of recovery deserves amplification here. The practitioner may want to explore people's feelings about change, the direction they wish to take, and their overall aims for recovery. People may be reluctant to explore these issues and so the practitioner must not be presumptuous about the appropriateness of any one individual for recovery work. Continued relationship building and positive regard for the individual may help a reluctant or even hostile participant to move forward in the recovery process. Simple round robin discussions about basic questions that stimulate people's thinking about recovery may open up even the most reluctant participant to sharing their thoughts and feelings (Belenky, Bond, & Weinstock, 1997).

As the recovery process stimulates grief work and mourning as well as the expression of strong doubts about the possibilities of change, the practitioner calms the spirit. Transpersonal practice suggests that the way to the spirit of the individual may be through the introduction of simple and mundane activities that help each individual to create productive routines of daily life. Buddhist practices suggest deep involvement with the here and now, awareness of one's body, and mindfulness of one's actions in the external world. Facilitators can replicate versions of these spiritual practices when they work with people in recovery, either individually or in groups.

Teaching people to appreciate the calming effects of deep breathing and helping them use imagery to calm their thoughts can be combined to help individuals gain peace even though it may be temporary. Facilitators can help people to use walking meditation and prayer as ways to calm themselves while they help people in recovery to reclaim their involvement in daily activities and derive pleasure from simple activities like meal preparation, chores, and errands (Hahn, 1991). All of these can become meditative rituals within recovery work (Hahn, 1991). In Buddhist tradition, the establishment and use of routines and ritual are ways, as Thich Nhat Hahn (1999) notes, to "touch and wake the spirit up" (p. 94).

The aim here is to help people to integrate various domains of functioning including cognition, physiology, attitudes, and behavior and to reduce their alienation from the here and now (Hahn, 1991). Liberation can be found in giving up self-critical thoughts of past deeds and acts and releasing anxiety produced by dwelling on what the future will bring. This kind of practice can produce feelings of serenity and peace which, in turn, can bring comfort no matter how fleeting it may be early in the process of recovery.

"Calming the spirit" is in service to the awakening of the individual, an essential faculty people require who seek awareness of the substance and direction of their lives (Hahn, 1999). As Thich Naht Hahn (1999) suggests, an outcome of awakening is "nonfear" an important if not essential resource to a person initiating the viaticum. Awakening to one's suffering can stimulate compassion for others who suffer thus making the process of calming a prerequisite to establishing the basis of civic service (Thurman, 1998).

Using the Story and FInding the Innate Image

The person's journey in recovery can be best expressed as a personal narrative. Helping each person to express his or her story may bea potent way to help an individual to understand a career of chemical dependency and to make sense of the social forces that shaped it. The construction of a personal narrative may be the most influential pathway to reveal the shadow and to illuminate the person's accommodation. Individuals may be reluctant to tell their stories, fearing the shame and guilt they may provoke. But should this fear be operating in a person's recovery process, it is likely indicative of strength. It takes sensitivity to social norms and mores in order to feel embarrassment, shame or guilt. Reticence to share a story or narrative may indicate that a person is still getting ready to begin recovery.

A person's story of chemical dependency should not be isolated from the person's overall story of his or her life. As Campbell notes, the heroic journey is the "road of trials" which will likely become apparent to people in recovery as they tell their own stories. The narrative can be quite complex since it is composed of historical, cultural, social, and personal elements that together define the biography of the person. The content of the narrative may surprise even the most hardened people as they awaken to the forces that have shaped and molded their life stories.

The process of construction may begin by a discussion of what influences the use of drugs and what produces addiction. The facilitator may help individuals in recovery to diagram the personal, economic, social, and cultural influences fostering drug use, and the consequences of these influences. This cognitive or intellectual exercise can then move on to the personalization of the model by asking of each individual how these issues, dynamics, and forces played out in his or her own life. The personalization process can foster the telling of "my story," the person's autobiographical account of his or her own career of chemical dependency. This account may prompt in individuals a sense of loss and even despair as they begin to outline graphically the toll chemical dependency has taken.

The facilitator may follow these presentations with basic questions concerning a person's accommodation. "How did you try to use chemical dependency?" "How did you try to adapt to the influence of the greater society?" "What does your use and your addiction mean to you?" "What are you trying to accomplish through the use of drugs?" Responses to these questions can offer individuals an appreciation that their careers of chemical dependency are complex and influenced by numerous factors that they may not have understood on a conscious level. The aim here is not to rationalize the use of drugs, nor is it to justify such use. Getting to the stories of people in recovery can facilitate awakening and can serve to enlighten them about their situations. Some individuals may require assistance in surfacing and elaborating their stories. Here, artwork such as murals, painting, or clay sculpture may help individuals to tell their stories. These materials can help individuals to portray their chemical dependency and the forces influencing them in concrete or abstract forms at nonverbal levels. Presentation of the person's artwork and the explanation that flows from it can offer deep insight into the person's story.

The telling of stories can reveal that each individual is much more than his or her use of drugs. The content of stories can suggest other identities, aspirations, and dreams as individuals discuss "what could have been" and "where they could have gone" and "what they could have become." The facilitator can ask each individual to extend the story into the future and to discuss its positive teleological trajectory. New questions may emerge: "What direction do you wish to take?" "What do you seek for yourself?" "What will bring you satisfaction?"

These are paths that were not taken but nonetheless represent the direction individuals may still consider to fulfill what they desire and what they seek for themselves and for others through the use of the positive innate image. Embedded in every story is teleology and the career of chemical dependency can be seen for what it is: a "road of trials" that every hero confronts (Hillman, 1997).

The elaboration of personal stories can reveal that each person deals with multiple innate images. There is the "false positive image" that may express itself as unbridled bravado. There is the "false negative image" in which the person sees himself or herself as "merely a drug user." Each portrays something important and the telling of the story can bring these images out of the shadow. The facilitator seeks the positive image based on the personal truth of the individual. The true positive image may be found in the teleological extension of the person's story into the future. It is reflected in the person's desires and aspirations to be drug free and to embrace new concepts of the self based on such things as family life, parenting, homemaking, vocation, health, and service to others (Washington & Moxley, 2001). Revelation of the positive image is metanoic. It suggests those positive values by which the person must live in order to fulfill the true positive image. The construction (and deconstruction) of the personal story now places the journey into the context of recovery. The teleological extension of the story can offer each person a sense of purpose based on his or her own aspirations and desires. The journey becomes metanoic through the introduction of positive values that the true positive innate image requires for its realization. Recovery is about moving towards the true positive image by practicing the values that the image demands. Relapse, setbacks, and decline represent movement back to the false positive or negative innate image. Inner truth now becomes the teleology and metanoia of the new journey. The struggle with chemical dependency, the accommodation it represents, and the possibility of recovery begin to move out of the shadow.

Fostering Individuation

Individuation is the process by which people find their distinctiveness and unique calling within the world. It requires individuals to understand themselves and to form a relationship with the shadow; the "other" that resides within them but can remain unknown unless it is brought into the light. This understanding means that the individual affirms the true positive innate image knowing that it co-exists with a false innate image that can express itself at different times or under certain conditions. The metanoic and teleologic are important aspects of the individuation process in which the person discovers how to live a life of purpose.

People coping with chemical dependency can come to the see their own recovery as a process of individuation. Drug use becomes understood by the person in recovery as an accommodation to greater forces that interact with personal history and experiences to form an innate self that legitimizes chemical dependency. Bringing this accommodation out of the shadow recognizes its presence and influence and enables the person coping with chemical dependency to form a relationship with the shadow. The shadow is likely omnipresent and it remains influential as an element of the person. Relapse can be framed as a challenge to individuation as the person's accommodation reenters the shadow and re-energizes its influence over the person.

Individuation introduces into the process of recovery a dialectic. The recovery process can offer an individual who is ready or receptive insight into the enormous opportunity for change they face. But potentially compromising the opportunity for change is the inherent threat of inertness, the possibility that the person will not risk change and will fight the process of individuation. The dialectic here is the conflict between action and no action. The reconciliation is the paradoxical integration of both. The person in recovery can move between intense periods of action and progress and periods of stasis and inaction. Relapse may be seen as a way to signal to the person in recovery that the pace is too fast and too intense. Anticipating relapse using innate processes of intuition, insight, and wisdom may be important to modMate the process of recovery and the individuation it requires. Intuitive insight and wisdom may be products of contemplation and reflection helping the person to consolidate changes and learn to integrate them into recovery. After all, individuation may require considerable practice and likely will be a product of progress and setbacks, action and inaction.

While previous strategies foster the identification of purpose (i.e., teleology) and positive values (i.e., metanoia), the process of recovery as individuation requires praxis. The person coping with chemical dependency can learn to balance the opportunity for change and the threat of inertness. One aim here is to balance action and contemplation helping each individual to achieve a practice of recovery with which he or she is comfortable. A second aim is to identify the conditions under which relapses occur and to decrease their number, length, and depth through purposeful practice requiring reflection, planning, and intervention and management.

Many people in recovery can benefit from a mentor, a person who is devoted to them individually and personally to manage the recovery process. The mentor may be a professional who is keenly aware of recovery practice or it can be another person who successfully achieved individuation in relationship to recovery. Or, the mentor may be a professional who has successfully integrated his or her own shadow of recovery from chemical dependency, a form of practitioner who is becoming prevalent in many different human service and health fields.

The mentor offers specialized knowledge, sustains hope, helps define and acknowledge the true positive innate image of the person, helps resolve the dialectic between the opportunity for change and the threat of inertness, and offers intuition, wisdom, and insight about the process of individuation. People in recovery working with mentors can create recovery plans that incorporate a vision of recovery, the values that will guide the journey of recovery, and the actions that can be taken to bring the vision to fruition. Individuation is an outcome of the integration of teleology, metanoia, and praxis and it is the purpose of the plan to bring these three qualities of the transpersonal together in service to recovery.

Balancing Action and Solitude

The recovery process may unfold as small cycles of change that go unnoticed by the person engaged in the process, but are visible to the astute mentor. The person may be taking concrete actions to address the accom-modation that is coming out of the shadow. Mentors of recovery foster the sensitivity of the people they serve to the dynamics of their own cycles of change helping them to move forward towards the life they envision and to stay true to the values they have selected to guide them towards this vision. Both action and reflection characterize the praxis of recovery within this particular strategy while the mentor helps the person to identify when he or she should recede from action to engage in the practice of solitude.

The mentor is sensitive to synchronicity. What appear to be accidental happenings to the individual may be, from the perspective of the mentor, indicative of the progression of recovery. For example, a friendship forms between the person in recovery and another person whose values strengthen the person's own journey of recovery. Another person in recovery may desire a job only to receive a lead from a friend that results in an offer of the kind of employment the person hoped for. The mentor helps the person in recovery not to expect these kinds of developments but to look for their possible emergence and to understand their occurrence as an expression of progress in recovery. The mentor amplifies the intuitive perception of the person in recovery to the "positive accidents" of everyday life. There will continue to be setbacks and relapses but the mentor helps the individual in recovery to develop an intuitive sensitivity to the prodromal signs of symptoms.

The mentor helps the individual to see symptoms as opportunities for change that call for new ways of taking action or new experiments in recovery making improvisation a resource to personal change. Mentoring may help each person in recovery to identify, try, and judge their own innovations and, as a result, develop their own tacit knowledge base of what works for them under specific conditions.

The shadow can reassert itself. People in recovery can lose the vision of their destinations forgetting that they strive for meaning and purpose in their lives. The stress and demands of change can result in demoralization and they may yield temporarily to the accommodation. The mentor can address these challenges to recovery by using previous strategies. The mentor can offer individuals opportunities to express their pain and assist them to calm their spirit, revisit their stories, relocate their positive innate visions, and foster individuation. Recovery is not linear so the mentor and mentee can recapitulate the various strategies to return to the path of the viaticum.

By alternating action and solitude the individuation process continues to unfold. People in recovery can learn to trust themselves, to appreciate the gifts of life, to respect their intuitive sensing, and to listen to and observe the shadow. They can become witnesses to their own recovery the successful resolution of which may mean that they become mentors to others who initiate their own heroic journeys making peer support an important ingredient of recovery practice. Ultimately, recovery means that people relinquish their careers of chemical dependency by embracing and practicing new careers, ones energized by teleology, metanoia, and praxis, and ones informed by their own sense and pace of individuation.

Conclusion

Recovery likely requires numerous modalities and strategies. So, transpersonal practice is not necessarily independent of other approaches to practice but does contribute something distinctive to the recovery process. The transpersonal reminds people who practice recovery, whether as consumers or providers, that they influence and are influenced by a greater good and higher purpose that binds living and nonliving things together into an ecological or spiritual whole. The transpersonal domain reminds people that nothing in life effectively helps people to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that one's life has meaning. It is not up to the facilitator or mentor of recovery to prescribe particular beliefs. A salient challenge is to ensure that individuals articulate their own perspectives concerning what the transpersonal means to them. But it is the responsibility of the transpersonal practitioner to offer people in recovery opportunities to awaken. That is, to help individuals coping with recovery not only to make sense of a greater purpose and meaning in life but to do so within the context of their own individuation.

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David P Moxley is professor, School of Work Wayne State University, 314 Thompson Home, Detroit, MI 48202, and Olivia G M. Washington is assistant professor, College of Nursing, Wayne State University, 313 Cohn Building, Detroit, MI 48202; small: [email protected] and o. washington wayne. edu.

Original manuscript received: July 19, 2000 Revised: December 15, 2000

Accepted: October 4, 2000

Copyright Families in Society May/Jun 2001
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