MPI is the 28-day inpatient treatment program in downtown Oakland where we have had a LifeRing meeting on Wednesday nights since March. Tonight was one of the more interesting meetings.
I had the whole enrollment of 24 patients plus one person "off the street" in the LifeRing meeting this evening. This happened because the AA speakers failed to show up for the second week in a row. (The meeting runs in the same time slot as an AA meeting, patients' choice.) Last week, the head counselor, a popular guy, filled in for the absent AA speakers and "told his story," and I had four patients in the LifeRing meeting. This week, the counselor said, in so many words, "f*ck it," and sent the whole group to LifeRing.
Because LifeRing was brand new to practically all of them, I gave an introductory talk, featuring the "two heads" and all that, and answering questions. The reception was very positive. A couple of people said this was a totally new approach, they had never heard anything like this, and they felt enthusiastic about it and felt it could work for them. There was not one hostile question and nobody stormed out of the room in protest. The atmosphere was interested, positive, alert, supportive. The ritual round of applause at the end was strong and sustained.
I had brought some workbooks to give to staff, and happened to hold one up for show. It turns out the patients there have money (I never knew this) and I sold four workbooks to patients on the spot, at $20 a pop, right after the meeting, and had a request to bring more with me next week.
Afterward I happened to chat with the one person who had come in "off the street." She had been told by her doctor to check out treatment programs and she happened to come into MPI just in time for our meeting. She said she was definitely going to sign up for MPI because this session was exactly the kind of thing she was looking for; she did not like the religious stuff she had been told she would encounter and she was so relieved. I had to earnestly advise her that the LifeRing hour was the one hour of the week when she would not run into "the religious stuff" in this mainstream 12-Step program, and that she needed to come back any other evening and check it out before plunking down her $15,000 for the experience.
(Attached as a PDF file is a scan of the patients' weekly schedule in this program.)
Then I had a longer private chat with the two counselors on duty. They were aware that the "person off the street" did not like "the religious stuff" and that the LifeRing hour was not typical of what the program did, and that if she came back and checked out the program's typical offerings she would probably not enroll. This started some interesting deep musings. Counselor A said that they were running into a lot of resistance with the "higher power -- turn it over" approach, and that when clients saw "all the God stuff" in the 12 Steps (nodding toward the huge poster by the door) a lot of them got turned off. Counselor B said that the only people who really ate up the 12 Steps were the Jesus freaks and that those people turned her off. B said the real essence of the steps to her was just to do things a little bit differently. A said he was doing a lot of re-evaluation of what they were doing in the program because they were having just a tremendous rate of relapses in the program and something wasn't working. He was going more and more toward a "generic" approach, backpedaling from the "higher power" stuff, bringing it in later in the program, or bringing in just the first step, etc. He saw people going for the Promises but then when it does not happen for them they go out. He felt that people should not be exposed to the Steps at all until they were out of detox entirely and had stabilized and had their feet on the ground. He also was disappointed that the local AA H&I committee could not reliably supply them with speakers.
Both counselors were very positive about the workbook and said they were happy that I sold some to patients. (We'll see what that leads to ... ). I happened to overhear them talking about the workbook and about LifeRing and they were saying good things about us to the patients even in my absence. We exchanged Christmas hugs and there was good feeling all around.
Interesting ... learning a lot.
-- Marty N. 12/20/00
Previous articles about this meeting:
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