Recovery Support Services

The catalyst for recovery, hope, is the belief that recovery is real — an essential and motivating message that patients can and will overcome internal and external challenges, barriers, and obstacles that confront them as a result of their addiction. Hope is internalized by patients and should be cultivated by peers, family members, providers, allies, and others within society. 

Relationships and social networks support recovery. Family members, peers, providers, community members, and other allies form vital support networks. With these connections, patients engage in new roles that result in a greater sense of empowerment, autonomy, social inclusion, community participation, and personhood that help foster enduring recovery. 

Recovery is person, or patient, driven — both self-direction and self-determination are two of the foundations for recovery. Patients assert their autonomy and independence by leading, controlling, and making choices regarding support, further improving their recovery and resilience. Patients are empowered to initiate recovery, build on strengths, and recover control. 

Recovery is based on and influenced by culture. Values, traditions, and beliefs are all keys in determining a patient’s pathway to recovery and well being. Support services are culturally grounded and attuned as well as sensitive, congruent, compassionate, and personalized to meet the unique needs for recovery and wellbeing of each individual patient. 

Recovery occurs through numerous different pathways, as each patient has unique and distinct needs, strengths, goals, culture, and backgrounds, all of which affect and determine their pathways to recovery. Recovery pathways are highly personalized and build on the multiple capacities, strengths, talents, coping capacities, resources, and values of each individual. 

The experience of trauma is often a precursor to or an associative aspect of substance abuse triggers and substance use, as well as mental health problems and other related issues. Educational and support services are trauma-informed to foster safety and trust, promote empowerment, and cultivate collaborative relationships and choices. 

Recovery comprises a patient’s whole life, including their mind, body, spirit, and community. Recovery requires addressing family, self-care practices, housing, employment, transportation, education, services and supports, clinical treatment for mental and substance abuse disorders, primary healthcare, spirituality, creativity, social networks, and community participation. 

Communities, families, and individuals all serve as a foundation for patients’ recoveries. Patients have personal responsibilities for self-care and their unique journeys and recovery. Individuals should be supported in their strides towards independence, and they have a social responsibility to uphold their strengths, needs, wants, desires, and aspirations for recovery. 

Peers and allies support recovery through the sharing of experiential knowledge and abilities and social learning. Peers both encourage and engage others and provide them with a vital sense of meaning and purpose, supportive relationships, valued roles, and community. Peer-operated supports provide essential resources to patients along their journeys to recovery. 

Crucial to achieving recovery are community, systems, and social acceptance. Taking steps towards recovery typically requires great courage from those suffering from addiction. Self-acceptance, development of a positive and meaningful sense of identity, and regaining confidence in one’s self are particularly crucial to the recovery process.