As I have previously mentioned, I first met Tim Leighton back in 2004 when I visited Clouds House, the residential rehab run by Action on Addiction. In 2005, I was appointed as External Examiner for their two-year Foundation degree in Addiction Counselling, which was linked to Bath University. I was thrilled to be asked to act in this role, as the field desperately needed such a course like this delivered by experts like Tim Leighton and his colleagues.
I loved visiting Clouds and seeing Tim, one of the most knowledgeable and inspiring people I have ever met in the field. Tim who first introduced me to the amazing writings of William (Bill) L. White, the leading addiction recovery advocate in the US. Bill’s work really got Tim and I excited and in full discussion mode. 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 Bill White. Addiction recovery advocates from around the UK were invited to the conference, which was a great success.
Here are some of Tim’s reflections on recovery from his Recovery Voices conversation with my colleague Wulf Livingston.
Tim emphasises that Phil Valentine’s statement ‘You are in recovery if you say you are’ seems to him profound. The statement has been criticised by many people—can someone who is absolutely pissed out of their head and shooting up smack say ‘I’m in recovery’? That’s surely not what Phil means, thinks Tim.
Recovery is very personal to a person and can take different forms. He believes that people who are on opioid substitution treatment and using it as intended, and are not using anything else problematically and their life is improving, have an absolute right to say they are in recovery, just as much as someone who believes that abstinence is key to their recovery.
Tim emphasises that recognition of people’s needs on the basis of their ethnic, religious and other affiliations must be taken into account when helping people find a safe, secure, congruent environment that facilitates meaningful recovery. People like Sohan Sahota, with his BAC-IN 2Life recovery community in Nottingham, specifically looks at the needs of people in ethnic minorities as they recover from addiction.
Wulf talks about the diversity of activities (e.g. arts-, sports-, green-therapy-based) that people can do in ‘recovery sociality’. This diversity talks to people who have different needs in recovery.
Tim believes that whilst this diversity is extremely important, it can also lead to a sort of vagueness about what recovery organisations are. People with lived experience and recovery are organising such activities in various ways, but because they are so varied it is ‘difficult to kind of define it and then give it some institutional status.’ This could be a good or a bad thing.