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Personal moments can motivate people in recovery and behavioral health professionals
The road to recovery looks different for each person-it is a very personal experience. However, some common occurrences often are shared by most people who choose this path. Over the past few years leaders in the recovery movement have identified several common steps along this path. Among them are LeRoy Spaniol, PhD, and his colleagues at Boston University, who have been conducting several qualitative, longitudinal analyses of individuals' recovery experiences.1-4
Dr. Spaniol and colleagues have identified four broad, overlapping phases of recovery that people move between: overwhelmed by the disability, struggling with the disability, living with the disability, and living beyond the disability. Furthermore, they have identified three factors associated with the degree of challenge to recovery: comorbid substance abuse, environmental context, and age of disability onset.
Mark Ragins, MD, medical director at The Village Integrated Services Agency in Long Beach, California, is another leader in this area (The Village otters a comprehensive program for people with serious mental illnesses). Dr. Ragins describes four fluid stages of recovery: Hope, Empowerment, Self-Responsibility, and Meaningful Role in Life.
Similarly, recovery services provider META Services, Inc., in Phoenix calls for an attitudinal prerequisite of love and identifies five recovery pathways: hope, choice, empowerment, environment, and spirituality.
These three models and others have a lot in common. So many of us try to use models to describe recovery because it gives us a map we can follow and redraw for each person who comes down the recovery path, thereby establishing an approach that works for most people. Models can be useful but are limited in their ability to accommodate subtle internal shifts that define the process of recovery on a personal level.
Let's examine the personal process of recovery and what happens "in the moment" as the process unfolds. In interviews with people in recovery and...