Celebrating recovery is one of our favorite activities here at MARR. Luckily, September is National Recovery Month and is another reason to honor everyone who has experienced the freedom that comes through recovery. National Recovery Month 2021 marks the 32nd year of the tradition and its theme, “Recovery is for Everyone: Every Person, Every Family, Every Community,” is a needed reminder that no one is alone in their recovery journey.

What began in 1989 as “Treatment Works! Month” to showcase the work of substance abuse professionals is now dedicated to everyone recovering from substance dependence and all mental illnesses. Sponsored by Faces & Voices of Recovery, the month honors every person who has overcome addiction.

For Every Person

At MARR, we love recognizing each person’s recovery individually because their journey to recovery is unique and worthy of recognition. That’s why our alumni are invited to participate in events and meetings throughout the year with the intent to continue the community building that they experienced while here at treatment and to share their stories with others. We also offer our alumni app, Marr4Life, as a platform for those living in recovery to connect daily with others on the same path and stay connected after graduating from our program.

For Every Family

The idea that we’re all in this together isn’t just a catchy slogan at MARR. When we say we walk with you for life, we mean with you and your loved ones. During National Recovery Month, MARR will be hosting both Men’s and Women’s Olympics, along with our monthly speaker meeting, for both alumni and family to join. Along with events, we offer resources and workshops for families with a loved one in recovery.

For Every Community

We’re nothing without our community of alumni, current patients, staff, and everyone involved in helping free people from addiction. To foster that community we publish our podcast, Stories of Recovery, to share first-hand accounts of what recovery has done in our patient’s lives. In addition to our efforts, the Georgia Council on Substance Abuse is dedicated to helping the recovery community by offering recovery community centers in every county in Georgia to bring positive change during National Recovery Month and beyond.

How Can You Honor Recovery?

If you or a loved one is currently living a life of recovery, congratulations – your hard work does not go unnoticed. If interested in getting help for either yourself or a loved one, the first step is a phone call or message to our Clinical Assessment Team. Our licensed and certified clinicians are available for a confidential and complimentary conversation about the next steps you can take to get help. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chatbox. We’re ready and honored to take the first steps of recovery with you.

Spirituality in Recovery 

Sometimes people looking for treatment have difficulty with spiritual terms often used in 12 Step Recovery. These terms might seem strange, mystical, or outdated. Perhaps they seem in conflict with providing competent medical care. 

They might raise questions for people seeking treatment. If substance use disorder is a medical condition, what does spirituality have to do with getting better? Aren’t there medical facts and best practices behind how to treat the disorder? And doesn’t spirituality take us into the realm of unproven and faith-based assumptions?

All of these thoughts and concerns are reasonable. However, they probably come from some confusion about what spirituality or “having a spiritual experience” means in the context of the A.A. literature. 

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous pragmatically talks about spirituality. Above all, the spirituality required for successful recovery involves open-mindedness. 

The text states directly: “Any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial” (“Alcoholics Anonymous” page 568).

In other words, the spirituality we encourage at MARR is not a dogmatic set of beliefs. Instead, we help our clients foster an open attitude to trying new solutions. 

Also, spirituality in recovery does not exclude competent medical care. In fact, we believe that the open-mindedness that our clients foster through a spiritual approach actually enables them to receive the care they need. 

MARR is licensed by the state of Georgia and accredited by the Joint Commission. Our clinical staff is made up of licensed and certified mental health clinicians. The spirituality our clients develop in treatment frequently provides them the open-mindedness to make good use of the high level of medical care available to them at MARR. 

What is a Spiritual Experience?

In the Big Book of A.A., the terms “spiritual experience,” “spiritual awakening,” or “psychic change” come up again and again. 

But such a transformation may be more accessible than it initially sounds. The Big Book describes a spiritual experience as a “personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism.” It also says that it “manifests itself in many different forms.” This means that the experience looks different for different people. 

These are not usually single, dramatic moments in which everything changes. Rather, spirituality in recovery frequently takes the form of the “educational variety.” In other words, the spiritual change takes place gradually over time. Eventually, this gradual change results in “a profound alteration in [the person’s] reaction to life.” 

For many, this change may include returning to the faith tradition of their youth. It might also mean joining a spiritual community for the first time. Many times it may have nothing to do with organized religion at all. The only requirement is that the person “not close his mind to spiritual concepts.”  

At MARR, we believe Twelve Step Recovery, at its most basic level, means a willingness of the person to say “I don’t know.” It means having at least a little bit of a desire to see things from a different perspective.

Laying Aside Our Judgments

The Big Book addresses issues of spirituality and belief directly in the chapter titled “We Agnostics.” The chapter makes clear that recovery does not require a specific approach or religion. The only thing that the chapter seems dead set against is “prejudice.” Seven different times it asks the reader to remove or lay aside “prejudice.” 

What does this mean? Prejudice about what? It asks the reader to put aside judgments about the meaning of “Higher Power”, “God”, “prayer,” and other spiritual terms. It asks them to allow themselves to have a new experience of what these things can mean to them.

Suppose spirituality is about being willing to be open to something new. In that case, the words “God” and “prayer” have much more to do with an attitude and posture of humility. They become less about the content of the person’s belief system and more about the openness to a new experience. 

Spirituality in Recovery Means Freedom

Of course, as long as we have minds, we will make judgments about people and situations. On a basic level, judgments about our surroundings help us survive. But with the help of the tools in 12 Step Recovery, our clients have the opportunity to catch these judgments before they harden into harmful prejudices. 

In conclusion, staying spiritually healthy means trying to keep ourselves open to being surprised by life. A prayer common to 12 Step Fellowships beautifully summarizes this sentiment.

“God, help me to set aside everything I think I know about You, about others, myself, and my own recovery, so I may have a much-needed new experience in You, others, myself, and my own recovery.” 

Regardless of beliefs, a spirituality of open-mindedness provides the opportunity for a new experience of life. It allows a person an opportunity not only to escape addiction but to have a life they never thought possible. 

Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Spring reminds us every year how life works. For something new to emerge, the old has to die away. Even if we don’t consciously take note of this happening, we get reminded of it annually. For us in the treatment field, there’s a deep metaphor here. 

By the time clients or family members pick up the phone to call us, they are usually in the midst of loneliness and desperation that has settled in for a long period of time. It feels like the deepest parts of the winter, and can sometimes even lead to clinical depression. But unlike winter, there is typically no sense of when the days will start to brighten and warm up.

In fact, many times, the hope that the days will get better has been stamped out by the disease of addiction. Often, by the time people reach us, they are under the impression that their lives are irrevocably damaged. Even if they think there’s a chance they or their loved one might stop using substances, they often carry a sense around with them that life will never really be good again. 

But based on over 45 years of experience, we know that this does not have to be the case. Although pain, grief, and loss are common to those entering recovery and must be encountered and felt, there is an alternate perspective on how we can view these heartaches.  

Rather than the end, we can see this period as a painful but potentially life-changing transition, an invitation to something new. 

The old way of life, centered around the addiction and all that it entails, is dying away. The former coping mechanisms, systems of denial, and avoidance strategies wear thin. And this process can be painful. 

Those previous ways of handling things simply will not work anymore for our clients. This is often true for our clients’ family members as well, who have grown so used to living under the sway of the family disease and codependent patterns it creates.

At times, this transition certainly can feel like dying. It’s difficult to find the words to express the loneliness people with addictions and their families feel as the disease progresses. 

These difficult feelings are thoroughly disorienting. The hope of something better can often feel impossible to access. That is where we come into the picture to help in this rebirth process. 

Along with clinical expertise, best practices, and individualized treatment plans, we carry the hope that is continually restored and renewed that recovery into a life full of meaning and connection is possible, no matter how impossible it seems. 

We carry that vision and hope for our clients and their families until they can carry it for themselves. 

We’ve seen it happen countless times. Like the early spring, the sun gradually stays out longer, and the cold begins to melt away. It often sneaks up on our clients and families in quiet moments. They may notice themselves genuinely laugh from their gut or relax their posture, perhaps for the first time in years. 

This melting away of the cold continues. All that is required is a posture of honesty, openness, and willingness to try something new.

Before long, life can be completely different for our clients and their families. A passage from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps, gives the most succinct description of this winter months’ transition into the spring of early recovery. 

“Life will take on new meaning. To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends – this is an experience you must not miss” (Big Book of AA, page 89).

In time, the genuine connections formed in active recovery create a sense of well-being and community strong enough to drive away even the longest and loneliest winter. 

At MARR, we firmly believe that this type of complete recovery is possible for people suffering from addiction and for their family members who are suffering as well. Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Professional success doesn’t make somebody exempt from having substance abuse problems. From our 45 years of working with professionals with addictions, we find that this statement might not be as obvious as it seems.

Some of our most beloved treatment groups that are consistently well attended by current clients at MARR and alumni are our Atlanta Recovering Professionals (ARP) Groups. In addition to individual therapy, mirror imaging, the other Phase I and II groups, the ARP groups are required for our clients in our Recovering Professionals Program.

Meeting twice a week as a large group and then again in smaller groups, these gatherings focus on the concerns unique to professionals in the early stages of recovery.

Many of these clients find the group so essential for their recovery that they consistently return to participate as volunteers, in some cases for decades after finishing treatment.

Why groups specifically for professionals?

As mentioned at the outset, a successful career doesn’t preclude a person from substance abuse difficulties. In fact, it can make addiction or alcoholism more difficult for a person to recognize in some cases.

Denial of addiction is common across the board, regardless of the individual’s work situation or vocation. But people who have managed to maintain careers while also dealing with worsening substance abuse issues often develop a more profound sense of denial about their addiction.

To preserve a career that they have worked hard to achieve, professionals often become experts at hiding their addictions, both from others and themselves. When you add all the exterior signs of outward success to this naturally occurring denial, it becomes even more challenging to see how one’s substance use is a problem. Many professionals with substance use disorder appear as if they have their lives pretty well put together from the outside.

Unfortunately, what this logic overlooks is the fact that substance use disorder is a progressive disease. Typically only after professionals start suffering from more visible and difficult-to-hide consequences do they seek treatment. But in such cases, the addiction has likely been progressing for years, or even decades, under the surface.

Whether they realize it or not, by the time our professional clients end up at MARR, their alcoholism or drug addiction has likely affected every aspect of their lives in significant ways. Many of these effects have managed to go unnoticed because their career has helped to keep up appearances that all is well.

Other professionals who are further along in recovery, who have worked through similar forms of denial, can help newer clients see how their disease has likely been affecting them in ways they hadn’t realized. They can share from their own experience how career success may have covered up red flags that were present for a long time.

Also, many times it is the ARP groups that relieve deeply held shame. In cases when a significant incident like the intervention of an employer or a licensing board mandates treatment, open and honest sharing from others who have dealt with similar stresses provides an invaluable source of hope to professionals in early recovery. A client may discover in these groups that she is not the only dentist to have diverted medication—a secret she thought she would never be able to talk to anybody about. Or a teacher may meet other people who drank before leaving for work in the morning.

Connections in this group also help the clients find hope that they can return to their careers. Many clients who check into treatment assume that they will never work in their field again. However, this is hardly ever the case for those who stay in recovery and comply with their licensing or other oversight boards. The ARP groups provide clients in early recovery with living examples of people who have been in their situation and have returned to work.

ARP groups are a unique and valuable source of insight, relief, hope, and guidance for men and women in a crisis point in their lives and careers. These sources of strength naturally emerge from a group of peers who have confronted circumstances and persevered to find meaning and connection in the very things about themselves they thought they never could face. And the alumni volunteers who return for the group feel blessed and grateful that their past pain can be of use to those new in the recovery process.

These professionals form a community of mutual aid that helps to remind all parties involved of the possibility of recovery, in which they are no longer defined by their career but can use their professional background and skills to help and connect with others.

Our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take to get help for yourself and your loved ones. Call us at (678) 736-8694, or you can reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Around Valentine’s Day, we often think about the people in our lives that we love and how we can express that love to them. We wanted to take a moment in this blog post to reflect on loving and taking care of ourselves and how that actually helps us love others.

For people in early recovery, self-care often involves relearning how to meet basic physical needs that have gone neglected for a long time. This can often include returning to a consistent and healthy schedule of meals as well as regular exercise and sleep. It usually also involves restoring basic emotional and spiritual needs that have gone unmet, like the needs for security, connection, and recreation.

For family members, their lives have often become consumed by the person with the addiction. After years of constantly watching over and cleaning up after their loved one, their physical, mental, and spiritual well-being has likely been affected in significant ways. Often family members get to a point where they also are not sleeping, eating well, or otherwise neglecting their basic emotional and spiritual needs. And many times, reincorporating these practices is the first step to proper self-care. 

It all sounds easy enough. However, when deciding to do something for ourselves, we might fear that the people close to us will feel neglected or cheated out of our attention. But we might be surprised. Often people who care about our well-being derive deep satisfaction from seeing us take care of ourselves. 

A MARR family counselor once recalled a family session in which a client in early recovery told his wife that it made him feel happy whenever he saw her taking time out of her day to go running. This revelation was a surprise to her. She thought he might feel like she was ignoring him during this time. But of course, she wasn’t ignoring him, and he knew that. Properly taking care of ourselves gives us the strength and emotional capacity to show up to love others in our lives. 

Sometimes self-care is more challenging in the short term. For people suffering from addiction, checking into treatment might not be the thing they want to do at the moment. But it is undoubtedly a better way to take care of themselves than taking that next drink or drug.

In the case of family members of people with addictions, self-care often involves setting healthy boundaries. Doing this can often feel cold or uncaring, but healthy boundaries force the person with an addiction to confront the reality of their illness. Even though it is hard, it is actually the loving thing to do. 

When addiction is involved, we often need help to practice self-care, but we don’t even know where to start. Addiction has a way of confusing everyone. Even when we think we are caring for ourselves or others, we can sometimes unknowingly cause them and ourselves harm. 

If you need some help sorting through how you can take care of yourself and your loved ones, our Clinical Assessment Team is available for a confidential and free conversation about the next steps you can take. Call us at (678) 805-5100 or reach out via the chat box in the lower right-hand corner of our website.

Self-care is foundational to being a happy, whole, and connected human being and foundational to loving others in the best way we can. Healthy self-care, which contributes to healthier family dynamics, is one of the most important goals we have for all of our clients and their family members.