…Or herstory, as it were.
My name is Molly DuMars, and I’m the founder of Reimagining Recovery. I’m writing this on September 23rd, 2018 and I feel a little silly talking about the “history” of something that was only properly conceived a few months ago. Although I will say, that this idea has had a pretty lengthy incubation period; that period is in fact the sum of my experiences in recovery.
One of the many events that cumulated in this conception was my most recent hospitalization for suicidal ideation 5 months ago. Once again I had found myself at a point of desperation. This was my 5th or 6th hospitalization (they blur together in a haze of slowly-sipped instant bouillon and Sharkzilla marathons interspersed with crying spells and art therapy). Once again, going to the hospital enabled me to stabilize, grow, and feel like I was getting somewhat of a fresh start. When I began to trust myself enough to be alone, I was discharged.
As for my plan after discharge, I kept running into the same exasperating decision: Go to mental health or addiction treatment for my outpatient care? Very few integrative options exist, certainly in my price range. I had briefly lapsed on my drug of choice, alcohol, but my crisis had precipitated before the idea of drinking even entered my mind. Several triggers converged at once and my PTSD symptoms became beyond my control. I learned in retrospect that I was also in the middle of a hypomanic and dissociative episode. My trauma, my bipolar, and my addictions are one inextricable ball of twine, and my experience isn’t unique in that: More and more, dual diagnosis is beginning to be seen as the rule rather than the exception.
Hence, why I have opted to do away with the whole addiction/mental health dichotomy and offer classes, groups, and discussions about issues that affect everyone, practical coping and grounding skills that anyone can use, regardless of their diagnoses or lack thereof. I believe that humans all have the same needs, at core. One can get them met in constructive, or destructive ways. Many of us have unfortunately learned a lot of destructive methods, but not for lack of alternatives. The knowledge has just been out of reach. That’s why this project is essentially about accessibility and inclusion for people at all stages in their journeys.
But I digress– After I was discharged, I opted to go to Providence’s intensive outpatient program (IOP). They do wonderful work there, and where I used to be a tinge ashamed, I now proudly say I have graduated not once, but FIVE times. And I learned new lessons and cemented old ones each time– lessons about topics like distress tolerance, mindfulness, myths and realities of mental illness, radical acceptance, sleep hygiene and other self care basics, and so much more. During one particular class about enforcing boundaries, I wondered “Why doesn’t everyone learn this stuff in school?”
I’m sure I wasn’t the first to ask that. But, I’ve always felt constrained by schools and academia. When I was 16 I decided to Unschool myself and “dropped out” and into lifelong learning. I have always been an autodidact, the type of person that listens to lectures in their free time. It never feels like a chore, because I’m passionate about learning. Once you begin to feed your curiosity, it grows, and the rest comes naturally. So I’m wanting to bring some of the things I’ve learned through that journey back to the recovery community: First, the joy of teaching oneself new things; Second, the joy of sharing that knowledge with others.
Another lesson from this quest for knowledge, is the freedom of not having to choose a speciality, the freedom of not being bound by “discipline”. A cross-disciplinary approach is helpful, but to truly approach understanding of complex systems (for instance the small matter of everything that constitutes the human experience) it’s more effective to transcend disciplines entirely. When you’re free to follow your curiosity wherever it takes you, I’ve learned that you can achieve a more nuanced understanding of any issue.
Another experience of mine that informs my ideas on the project and my vision for it is my year of teaching English in a “small town” of 5 million in China. It wasn’t something I had really planned on, in fact it would have been inconceivable that I’d go back much less move there a couple months prior. It’s too long of a story to go into here, but I was barely eking out an existence in Sydney, Australia, juggling my time between working at a small grocery store and moonlighting as a cello-wielding busker when my then-boyfriend’s online poker buddy in China said their school was hiring and they’d pay for our flights. Thus we were faced with a decision: Admit defeat and cut our trip short, become homeless, or make a rather drastic detour?
So, there I was thrust into the world of English pedagogy abroad. I had to learn how to teach people from age 10 to 90 and quick. It actually came surprisingly easily to me. After all, I was fluent, I grew up in and amongst the matrices of this complex, beautiful language– I knew the subject matter well, I just had to learn how to relate the material. Luckily, the school I worked for made it as easy as possible for teachers to step right in and start teaching– all you had to do was pull a lesson plan out of the filing cabinet, look it over, add your own twist if you had some extra time, and go to class. The students did most of the work. Most of the time you were just soliciting responses, asking the right questions. The point was to give the students room to talk. This brought to mind what I had heard of the Socratic method, and I started experimenting with those concepts with my more advanced students. I was also introduced to a wide range of teaching and learning styles. Most of all, it taught me that everyone has the potential to be a natural teacher, if you give them a solid template and set a good example.
Another thing that has influenced how I approach the question of “How can we reimagine recovery?” is my own struggles with addiction; specifically, my struggle with putting down The Drink. I tried, lapsed, relapsed many times. I did get decent periods of sobriety racked up, but kept repeating the same patterns eventually. I now look back on how I managed to accumulate the time and successes I have, and I realized I was unknowingly practicing dialectical abstinence.
The idea behind dialectics is that two seemingly opposite truths can both have and contain truth. My aunt once commented, “Isn’t that just growing up?” and I admit there’s truth to that, but not everyone had that learning opportunity, especially in the case of developmental trauma. In this case, dialectical abstinence is the idea that harm reduction and complete abstinence both have benefit. The idea is to practice harm reduction while you are making your ultimate journey to sobriety (whatever that means to you), as you gain the coping skills that enable you to make the transition.
Thus I want to teach what traditional support groups shy away from: Harm reduction. How many of us believe in abstinence-only education in high schools? It doesn’t work. The same is true in recovery. It is an act of radical acceptance to acknowledge that recovery is f*cking hard. Recovery is not linear. Recovery takes time, and it’s a continuous process. We are going to make mistakes, and rather than wallow in shame, it is more effective and helpful to accept rather than reject reality as it is.
To touch on another main influence: I want to take a different kind of detour now, and it’s a twisty one. Flash forward to my hospital stay again. I had finally gotten the courage to ask an actual doctor something I had wondered about for years– How had the specifics of my earliest traumas impacted my development? (TW for the footnote below)* Specifically, how had a substance that was given to me without my knowledge affected my brain development? He told me– and I might have taken this a lot differently if he hadn’t been the first psychiatrists there to sit down and truly listen to me without judgement or an agenda– that he thinks I’m probably THE expert on that one. It was validating, actually. He was also the first person in a white coat to tell me they would change my diagnosis to C-PTSD if only the APA would catch up and put it in the diagnostic manual (which it sounds like they will soon). It was empowering also– I am my own expert. We all are the experts at our own lives, because no one else has ever had to live them.
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*(TW r***, in**st) Flash back to 8 years old– I think? I think that’s about when my dad started drugging me so that he could more easily mo**st me in the wee hours of the mornings before he would go to work. Sometimes I think he drugged me first so that he could convince himself he was doing less harm, but even that’s probably giving him too much credit… I’m sure it was just to more thoroughly silence me.
This project is also me speaking out against oppression in all forms. My dad’s actions cannot be neatly separated from the r**e culture we inhabit. The personal is political, and especially with relation to trauma. Recovery to me also means examining the structures that lead to a chain of events that cumulated in homelessness. poverty, self-destruction, addiction, and how these intersections interacted in my lived experience. As is often the case, understanding the factors that led up to my addiction contextualized my experience in a way that enabled me to shed shame, which is toxic to recovery.
