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LifeRing: Who What
Where When How Why
Who: Formal name, LifeRing Secular
Recovery. Main office: LifeRing
Service Center in Oakland CA. In 2006,
the organization is a network of about 100
face-to-face support groups and dozens of
online communities, with a core membership
of several hundred and annual meeting
attendance in the low thousands. Membership
includes alcoholics and drug addicts without
distinction. Participants come from all
walks of life, but typical income and
educational levels are somewhat above
average. The percentage who attend church is
similar to national averages. An annual
meeting elects a nine-member Board of
Directors. All directors, officers, and
meeting leaders are unpaid volunteers. A
basket is passed at meetings. Main source of
funds is literature sales and contributions
from meeting baskets. [Contact
info for LifeRing,
meeting
list,
membership survey,
Board of Directors]
What: LifeRing is a non-religious
pathway to abstinence from alcohol and other
drugs of abuse. Visitors who prefer
moderation, harm reduction, or controlled
drinking approaches are referred elsewhere.
LifeRing is secular. Members' religious
beliefs remain private during the meeting.
Religious as well as anti-religious advocacy
is absent during meetings. Meetings
generally conclude with a mutual round of
applause. Other than abstinence, LifeRing
avoids recommending any particular recovery
program to members, instead encouraging
members to build personal recovery programs
tailored to their particular needs. A
workbook (Recovery By Choice) is available
for building personal recovery programs in a
structured way. [LifeRing
Philosophy,
Recovery By Choice workbook]
Where: LifeRing face-to-face
meetings meet primarily in treatment
programs and community centers, but a
significant minority meet in churches.
LifeRing online communities use
www.unhooked.com as the main port of
entry. The greatest concentration of
LifeRing face-to-face meetings is in the San
Francisco Bay Area, where at least two
meetings are available each day of the week.
A worldwide meeting schedule is published
online. [Worldwide
meeting schedule]
When: LifeRing face-to-face
meetings typically meet weekly and last an
hour. LifeRing held its founding
national Congress in 2001 (Brooksville FL).
[LifeRing
Congresses]
How: LifeRing works through the
power of positive social reinforcement.
LifeRing posits that there is a healthy,
sober self residing alongside the addict
self within each addicted person.
Meetings establish supportive connections
(synergy) between the sober selves and
thereby reinforce them. The long-run goal is
a stable dominance of the healthy self
within the person, expressed in the slogan,
"Empower Your Sober Self." The
LifeRing approach is eclectic, open-ended,
pragmatic, and evolved through recovering
people's experience, but it shares common
tenets with Cognitive Behaviorism,
Motivational Interviewing, Solution-Focused
Therapy, and similar academic and clinical
approaches. In 2006 a growing number
of treatment professionals are adapting the
LifeRing approach to their treatment
protocols, but a LifeRing treatment manual
per se does not exist. [Short
PowerPoint slide show on how it works,
introductory brochure,
article How Our Groups Work,
45-minute CD,
book-length explanation]
Why: Like other alternatives
beginning with Women for Sobriety in the
1970s, LifeRing exists because people in
recovery want choices. Treatment
programs that give patients a choice enhance
motivation and improve outcomes. A growing
number of individuals credit their
successful recovery experiences to their
LifeRing participation. [Membership
survey,
Testimonials] [Top]
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The Best-Kept Lifestyle Secret
The most
underreported lifestyle story is the fact
that the majority of American alcoholics who
make successful recoveries -- sixty per cent
-- do it outside of AA. [Source]
If you ask Dear Abby, Dr. Phil, and any
other number of other media lifestyle
authorities, all you hear is "go to AA."
Every year,
thousands of people who have a problem with
alcohol take that advice and try AA. A
huge percentage of them get turned off and
drop out. According to AA's own
membership surveys, out of 100 who start AA,
only 5 are still sober and still attending a
year later. [Source].
Almost
nobody writes about the 95 per cent who
dropped out of AA, or about the unknown
numbers who never approached AA at all.
The general assumption seems to be that they
drink themselves into oblivion. That
can't be true. Sixty per cent of
alcoholics who reach the five year sobriety
level -- statistically, a benchmark for
stable lifetime recovery -- did it without
AA.
The
majority of people who find long term sobriety
stand in the darkness. Only very rarely do
their voices find print [Example].
That's a shame. Alcoholism is a major
killer. Those sixty per cent have found
solutions that work for them.
Shouldn't we try to find out and let the
world know what those
solutions are?
[Top]
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A Note to Religion Editors
The word "secular" is widely misunderstood in the U.S.,
occasionally even by journalists. It's frequently confused
with "sectarian." It's also often equated with atheist
or agnostic. LifeRing is neither sectarian nor
atheist/agnostic.
Secular, for LifeRing, means that we are neither for nor
against religion. Neither religious advocacy nor
atheist-agnostic advocacy have a place in our meeting
format. Our meetings are devoted to the topic of
staying clean and sober.
A similar organization in this respect is WeightWatchers.
WeightWatchers meetings are devoted to weight control.
Religious or anti-religious issues don't come into the
picture in WeightWatchers meetings, any more than they do in
LifeRing.
About 40 per cent of LifeRing participants attend houses
of worship -- similar to national averages. [Membership
Survey.] Most religious people feel perfectly
comfortable in secular recovery meetings.
People have different models of addiction and recovery.
If a person views addiction as a sin, they will probably
view recovery as a quest for salvation, and religious
concepts and practices will be central to their program.
LifeRing participants, by contrast, generally view addiction
in medical, behavioral, psychological, or cognitive terms --
for example, as a disease or condition, a trauma, a bad
habit, a compensation mechanism, or the result of wrong
thinking. Viewed in this way, the recovery project is
similar to doing physical therapy after a heart attack or a
broken bone, or overcoming a phobia, or job retraining, or
taking a class, or any number of other mundane projects such
as learning to ride a bicycle, rebuilding an engine,
debugging software, or washing a mountain of dirty laundry.
[Top]
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Why You May Not Have Heard of LifeRing
In late 2005 I was a panelist at a
conference on addiction recovery. The
panel moderator was a highly placed media
figure, whose voice is probably familiar to
millions. I had a good day; I spoke often
and well, and enjoyed a positive audience
response. When it was over, the moderator
thanked me. I suggested that she put
me on the air in her program. She said
nothing. Ten minutes later, in the
hubbub of social chitchat on the floor, I
happened to overhear the moderator telling a
friend, "And then my sponsor told me ... "
It's no secret that journalists are prone
to overindulge in alcohol (and other
things), and in the natural course of events
some of them will get sober in AA. That's
fine. But it's also no secret that AA
members have a duty to AA to "carry the
message." That looks a lot like a
conflict with their duty to the public as
journalists, to tell the whole story without
deliberate bias or filter.
People inclined to paranoia say that
there is an AA fifth column in the media,
which systematically promotes recovery
stories friendly to AA and filters out
stories that point to alternatives. It's
hard to prove that kind of assertion, and it
smacks a little of McCarthyism. But I have
to wonder. Everyone knows that tons of
people are turned off by their contact with
AA. Everyone knows that relapse is a
common outcome of AA-style treatment.
By the law of averages, stories about AA
disasters ought to be at least as common in
the press as success stories. How is
it possible that this approach enjoys an
almost exclusively rose-colored press?
-- Marty N. [Top]
See also:
Spinning Mel Gibson's Relapse (blog)
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