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James Deakin described his vision to Wulf. He considered it very important that NWRC was not like a traditional rehab, ‘sealed off’ from the community in which it is embedded. He wanted the residential part of NWRC to be integrated with the surrounding community.

I'll be spending a week in North Wales in late April with my Recovery Voices colleague Wulf Livingston and his lovely wife Melanie. It'll be a full-on week for me as I will be spending a good deal of time at North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) in Bangor, where a number of activities are planned.  I'll also be visiting Eternal Media...

When people get into AA and NA they learn a culture of unusual self-disclosure. They become very open and honest. However, it is still not acceptable to be a recovering alcoholic or to have problems with alcohol in much of society. For example, Charles Kennedy, leader of the Lib Dems, vanished from the political scene...

Effective 4 October 2024: 'Just for today, I’ve chosen a future of creating art, continuing to facilitate recovery coach training, establishing myself as a seasoned brilliant fisherman, possibly walking the Appalachian Trail again, picking up trash with the Ocean Recovery Community...

Gary says that the team of people at ARC have contributed to the magic and success of the organisation. All but one person have been there from the start of the journey. Team members work in areas where their strength shines through. They get the fact that ARC is an...

Content relating to Wulf's interviews with Tim Leighton and Gary Rutherford took up six of the spots in our ten most viewed posts of the month. Top of the list was my blog post about my favourite columnist of The Guardian newspaper, John Crace, celebrating the 37th anniversary of the beginning of his recovery from heroin addiction.

Maintenance is the stage where the new behaviour pattern becomes automatic, requiring little thought or effort to sustain it. The new behaviour becomes integrated into the lifestyle of the person. However, there is still an ever-present danger of reverting back to the old pattern—lapses or relapses may occur.

‘So, if you willingly engage in something that's difficult and you do it enough times and you do it regularly, then you become resilient…. And that translates to recovery, because for me, recovery is just resilience in motion. That's literally what it is. It's every day, it's getting stronger and stronger and stronger.’

The huge promise of Dame Carol Black’s two recent reports on drug treatment, prevention and recovery has been squandered by government. Much funding is being wasted, or put towards traditional services who have a tendency to provide what is often called ‘spray-on...'

In this interview with Gary, we capture so much about what has inspired us to do this series. We have a recovery leader, a champion, who has taken his own personal recovery journey and understanding, and transformed it into a vibrant and thriving recovery community.

Claire and Ian, and their team, have done a remarkable job with DDN over the years. Today, it still remains a magazine of the highest quality. It helped realise my (and Simon Shepherd’s) dream of seeing a field that is much better informed than it was all those years ago when...

On 18 March 2009, Tim and I both spoke at a conference in London organised by Action on Addiction and my grassroots initiative Wired In, with the main speaker being leading US recovery advocate Bill White. Recovery advocates from around the UK attended the conference...

... Bill White pointed out that there was a paradigm shift occurring in the addiction world, from a pathology and intervention paradigm to a recovery management paradigm, where the role of professionals is to introduce people to recovery and connect them to recovery resources which can help them create a meaningful life...

Our latest release is an Interview with Tim Leighton, in which the abundance of value and values comes across very strongly. In this conversation, we have managed to catch from Tim a beautiful integration of community, educational, personal, political, professional, research and theoretical understandings about recovery.

I just wanted to remind you about our five sections of Extras that you can find on our website. They contain a wide range of content (66 pieces) that I have written over the years for our sister website Recovery Stories. Sections include one with 15 articles about addiction, recovery and treatment, some focused on Wired In research...