Fifteen area residents took part last week in the first sessions of a new Recovery Coach training program meant to create more support for those in recovery from substance use disorder.
The training was offered at no charge by Surry County Office of Substance Abuse Recovery, Recovery Friendly Workplace Program and Piedmont Triad Workforce Development Board.
Substance Abuse Recovery Director Jaime Edwards said the goal “Is to increase community knowledge about the recovery process and increase the level of social capital in our community — this will in in turn increase and improve the quality of helping services that our entire community can benefit from.”
He has often said that there is no one size fits all solution to dealing with substance abuse, the same is true of Recovery Coaching training — there is no one size fits all outcome for the participants.
While the training may lead to an accreditation as a recovery coach professional for some of the participants, others will take their improved toolbox of skills back into human resources departments at area companies or to their roles with nonprofits or even in county positions.
Edwards explained, “This is a formal curriculum and process that was built to increase the ability and the confidence of anyone from community members to professionals to individuals who have lived experience, to those who do not.”
That lived experience is one of the major differences between recovery coaches and peer support specialists who will help similar clients, but who start from the unique perspective of being in recovery themselves or having dealt with emotional, behavioral health issues.
The coaches though will have their own unique life story all the same. “Each person’s uniqueness will be one of their greatest strengths as a coach,” Edwards said. “This program and approach believes that everyone has something to share in their own unique way and that uniqueness is actually a strength”
The residents taking part in the classes offered by the county represented an interesting cross section. “It’s a very diverse group, students, folks in recovery, retirees, individuals who work for local nonprofits, professionals,” he said.
Last week the attendees were taking part in the Recovery Coach Academy portion of the training featuring “basic person focused skills.” The second portion of training, Ethical Considerations for Recovery Coaches, starts in early August; the final portion, Recovery Coaching and Professionalism, happens at the end of August.
“It’s a great group and this process this material forces us to understand and reminds us of the value of the person that we’re all humans; we all make mistakes,” Edwads said as the class worked on a project in teams of two at the Mount Airy City Schools building on Riverside Drive.
He added, “At the same time, we have to recognize that good intent when we want to help people only takes us so far. You can have good intent, and it’s required, but if that’s all we have sometimes we can unintentionally do harm.”
Edwards said in those sessions, “We are learning how to be with someone else, how to listen, how to ask good questions and take yourself out of the equation so the focus is on the other person. How to encourage the other person to teach us about their experiences so we are not teaching them what we think their experience is.”
Those skills in hand the training shifts to ethics lessons that he said pose the question, “How can we morally and ethically make sure we are not doing harm and following best practices? How do we know we are staying in our scope of practice? What boundaries have we established?”
“Imagine not being properly trained to understand self-regulation and how your actions can negatively impact someone else. If we don’t remember ethics from the get-go, if we don’t know what we believe, then all these things we want to do in terms of helping will be tainted.”
“We’re training these people to be informal supporters in the community and many of these folks occupy jobs in the world of human services. They are learning how to better interact with people in recovery or with behavioral health,” Edwards explained.
“That is one of the primary purposes of Emily (Venable Schiff)’s Recovery Friendly Workplace Program is to not only engage and increase the capacity of those in recovery to reengage in the workforce but also to increase the capacity of the workforce currently providing services to feel more comfortable — that is a huge focus,” Edwards said.
“If we are not prepared as professionals, sometimes we can kind of get in the way. If you go through this process and we don’t support you from day one with supervision, support, training, and a focus on ethics/boundaries we’re not really helping.”
“We’d be placing the person who wants to do good at risk and we’d be placing those persons they are trying to help at risk. But also, we’d be damaging the faith and confidence of the public,” he said.
Surry County Office of Substance Abuse Recovery is planning to offer the next session at a date to be determined, after Labor Day, Edwards thinks, which will be even easier for working professionals to take part in, “The next one we’re going to try online in the evening over Zoom.”
The program, by design, should pick up steam as it goes along, he said, “This is a really great process because it’s community driven, so these 15 folks can be living, breathing examples to another 15.”
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