Original Blog Date:  December 15, 2017 Knowledge about the effects of addiction on families and the family recovery process has grown exponentially as a result of scientific studies and cumulative clinical experience. Among the most important conclusions to date that can be drawn from this body of knowledge are the following. 1. Alcohol and other drug (AOD) problems spring from diverse influences; unfold in widely varying patterns of severity, complexity, and duration; and are resolved through multiple pathways and styles of personal and family recovery. 2. The effects of addiction (a generic term used for the most severe patterns of AOD problems) on the family are influenced by the role of the addicted person within the family, the timing of addiction within the family life cycle, the degree of co-occurring challenges faced by the family, the cultural context within which the family is nested, and the resilience resources and recovery capital available to the family. 3. Addiction can be transmitted intragenerationally and intergenerationally via multiple, interacting mechanisms. These mechanisms include the following: a) genetic and neurobiological influences (e.g., those with family histories of addiction are at increased biological risk of developing a substance use disorder), b) assortative mating (i.e., the propensity of individuals to select intimate partners with shared family and developmental experiences) intensifies both biological risk and substance use as a preferred coping mechanism), c) parental/sibling/spouse modeling (i.e., substance use as a learned behavior and one potentially initiated and coached through the influence of other family members), d) adverse childhood experiences with multiple traumagenic factors (e.g., early trauma, multiple episodes and duration of trauma, more boundary-invasive forms of trauma, multiple perpetrators, perpetrators drawn from family or trusted social network, failure of belief and protection when trauma is disclosed), d) historical trauma (e.g., such as that experienced by Native American tribes), e) early onset of AOD use (early onset increases risk of addiction, greater problem severity, more rapid problem progression, and a longer course of problem resolution), and f) environmental factors (e.g., drug-saturated neighborhoods, social promotion of excessive AOD use). In short, the addiction of one family member increases the risks of addiction in other family members; addiction in past and present generations increases the risks for addiction and related problems in future family generations. 4. Family roles, rules, rituals, and relationships; the frequency and quality of family interactions with kinship and social networks; and the global health and functioning of family members are all severely disrupted by addiction. These effects can be far-reaching, with effects on children carrying into their adult development, including their future intimate and family relationships. (See interviews with Claudia Black, Stephanie Brown, Sharon Wegscheider Cruse, and Jerry Moe) 5. The adaptations families make to survive the immediate threats of addiction enhance short-term safety and emotional survival of family members and lower threat of family dissolution, but also constitute roadblocks to long-term personal and family recovery. 6. With proper coaching and support, families can play a catalytic role in recovery initiation and maintenance of the addicted family member and the family as a whole. (See interview with Robert Meyers) 7. The recovery of affected family members can begin prior to the initiation of recovery by the addicted family member. The improved health of affected family members increases pressure for change in the addicted family member. Strategic actions can be taken by families that increase opportunities for recovery initiation. 8. Family-focused addiction treatment and recovery support services generate recovery outcomes superior to treatment focused solely on the addicted person. 9. Recovery can destabilize family relationships if families are not provided ongoing support through the recovery process. According to the research of Dr. Stephanie Brown, addiction-affected families in recovery need “scaffolding” of support to manage the transitions from active addiction to stable recovery. Lacking such support, families that absorbed and survived every addiction-related insult may be fractured (i.e., family dissolution) during the recovery process. 10. With support, families can achieve a level of health and functioning superior to that which existed before the family was impacted by addiction. Addicted individuals and their families have the potential to get “better than well.” 11. With support (including the options of peer and professional support services), families can heal and break intra- and intergenerational cycles of addiction and related problems. (Recovery of one family member increases the probability of successful recovery of other family members. See Here.) Families that lose a family member to addiction also need a recovery process—a process that can be enhanced through peer support and professional guidance. 12. Individuals and families in recovery can play a larger role in healing communities wounded by addiction via their support of others affected by addiction, their recovery advocacy activities, and larger service to their communities. It is time—no, past time—that the basic unit of service within recovery support service settings shifted from the individual to families and kinship networks. Making that shift will require substantive changes across the addiction treatment and recovery support service continuum.

My relationships with White Bison founder Don Coyhis and with the Native American Wellbriety Movement are among the most important influences on my recovery advocacy and recovery research activities. I first met Don in the late 1990s as rumblings of a new addiction recovery advocacy movement in the United States were just beginning. In the years that followed, Don and I had innumerable opportunities to collaborate. We served together on boards of recovery advocacy organizations, shared speaking platforms at national conferences, and co-authored numerous articles and a book on the history of recovery in Native America. Through those years we mentored each other and became endeared friends—brothers of another mother, as is sometimes said.

At each event we mutually attend, Don and I seek time alone to talk about our evolving ideas and how we can best serve the recovery advocacy movement. As I look back over these years, Don’s contributions to my own continuing recovery, my own thinking, and the recovery advocacy movement seem endless. His books, videos, and innumerable trainings are filled with profound insights, but among this large menu, Don made two exceptionally unique contributions. He brought to the advocacy movement and to my own work a perspective of time (recovery across past and future generations) and a perspective of space (the ecology of recovery) that existed nowhere else in the recovery movement.

The time perspective Don conveys has many dimensions, beginning with a profound sensitivity to history. His teachings on historical trauma widen our understanding of how addiction and related problems have been transmitted intergenerationally within historically oppressed communities and how the legacies of such trauma can serve as potential obstacles to successful recovery. He further demonstrated how to “forgive the unforgiveable” and draw upon the history of cultural resistance and recovery to break such intergenerational cycles. Don has repeatedly reminded us that we cannot understand today’s addiction problems or their solutions without seeing them in historical context. He has a deep consciousness of and respect for ancestors and ancestral wisdom—how the teachings of elders conveyed through stories, songs, ceremonies, and sacred texts can aid recovery for individuals, families, and communities.

Don’s time perspective also embraces the future. He often suggests we consider how present proposed decisions and actions will affect people seven generations into the future. Knowing that much of our vision of transformed communities could not be completely achieved in our lifetime, Don conveys a sense of urgency to recruit young people into the recovery movement and to mentor these young people to carry forward work toward that vision. It was, in fact, that awareness that spurred a shared commitment by Don and I to create a body of written work that would be available to current and future generations of recovery advocates. In that sense, we were writing for our contemporaries, but also writing to people who will be here long after we have passed from the earth.

Don’s time perspective also includes the issue of timing—for individuals and communities. He admonishes that timing matters. A community must be ready for transformation before successful efforts can be launched. Like personal recovery, community recovery can be supported, but it cannot be forced. In Don’s work, Native communities have to demonstrate a commitment to community recovery before receiving a sustained commitment for support from White Bison. While Don’s presence often helps spark that commitment, it is the community itself that must demonstrate its desire to break entrenched patterns of passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. Don expects a core group of community members to declare that they are ready—that it is their time.

When most people think of addiction recovery, they think of it as a highly intrapersonal process. Don brings to the recovery advocacy movement the gift of placing that personal recovery process in its environmental context. First, he suggests that the success or lack of success of personal recovery hinges to a great degree on community context—the degree to which the community environment invites and supports recovery or stands as an obstacle to recovery. Second, he suggests that there are whole communities that have been ravaged by addiction and points to the need for a community-wide recovery process. Third, he suggests that wounded individuals, families, and communities need a “healing forest” that can nurture and reciprocally support these recovery processes. Don is among a small cadre of innovative thinkers arguing that the exclusive focus on individuals/families should be extended to neighborhoods, communities, and the wider culture. He reminds us that recovery must be nested in the earth, that it requires anchoring to physical as well as social, psychological, and spiritual space. That conceptual breakthrough radically widens policy advocacy and recovery support options by illuminating as never before the role of community in recovery.

My publications on recovery management, recovery-oriented systems of care, recovery capital, community recovery, and recovery coaching as well as my broader recovery advocacy writings have been deeply enriched by my discussions with Don over these many years. Beyond the kinetic ideas he shared, Don influenced the language I use, my interest in the language of addiction and recovery, and our need—the recovery advocacy movement and the country—to purge language and labels dripping with centuries of stigma and moral censure. Much of this work began with Don’s simple and oft-quoted declaration: “Words matter. If you want to care for something, you call it a flower; if you want to kill something, you call it a weed.”

The recovery advocacy movement and recovery advocates across the world owe a great debt to Don Coyhis and the Native American Wellbriety Movement. Don, today we honor that debt by offering our deepest appreciation for all that you have done for us and with us and most importantly for serving as our wisdom keeper. In retrospect, the rising recovery advocacy movement was itself in need of a recovery coach—an elder guide—and you have served that role with uncommon skill, dignity, and humility. We extend our hearts to you in gratitude and look forward to our continued collaborations in the years to come.

 

Essentially, it is thought that the negative effects emanating from group trauma experiences are not only transferred across generations, but that these effects accumulate, such that events occurring at different points in history are part of a single traumatic trajectory.—Amy Bombay, Kimberly Matheson, and Hymie Anisman

Wakiksuyapi, those carrying the historical trauma, can transcend trauma through a collective survivor identity and a commitment to traditionally oriented values and healing.  Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart

Historical trauma and historical unresolved grief (as that experienced in the Jewish Holocaust, in the genocidal and cultural wars against the Indigenous tribes of North America, and in the historical enslavement of African peoples) are recently introduced concepts that convey the enduring effects of mass disconnection from culture, family, and self (Brave Heart, 2000).

Historical adversity, such as that currently underway in Syria, involves the simultaneous experience of mass deaths, loss of homeland, dislocation and dispersion, economic hardship and exploitation, abandonment by the world community, and the resulting destruction of family/cultural ties and identity-shaping stories. Such trauma involves a colonization of homeland and culture and can also involve a colonization of the mind.

Research on historical trauma underscores the potential intergenerational effects of such adversity upon individuals, families, and cultures, particularly when remnants of institutional violence and oppression remain in the emerging social, political, and economic environment. Recent studies of survivors of the Jewish holocaust and survivors of Indian Boarding Schools vividly reveal how the effects of historical trauma can amplify the effects of contemporary stressors across generations and be manifested through increased rates of guilt, depression, suicidality, substance use disorders, aggression, pessimism, apathy, sleep disorders, and interpersonal conflicts.

The mechanisms of such intergenerational transmission have been extensively catalogued and span multiple dimensions. Physiological mechanisms include the transmission of trauma and stress vulnerability via epigenetic inheritance.  Psychological mechanisms include the collective memory of and preoccupation with traumatizing events or a shared “conspiracy of silence” related to such events, amplification of responses to current injustices, survivor guilt, self-blame, increased risk for personal trauma, low self-esteem, internalized aggression, and enhanced risks from self-medication. Social mechanisms of transmission include the disruption of family, extended family, and kinship networks; loss of positive cultural identity; suppression of cultural coping styles and rituals; lack of parental role models; impaired parenting across generations; and potential enmeshment in subcultures (e.g., drug, criminal) that undermine personal hardiness.  Religious mechanisms include the loss of religious traditions and healing rituals and vulnerability to charismatic cults.  Political and economic mechanisms include political and economic marginalization and the loss of personal and tribal agency.

Collectively, these factors can create a snowball effect of stress proliferation and impaired coping capacities across generations, including the intergenerational transmission of alcohol and other drug problems and their progeny of related problems. But history does not dictate personal or collective destiny. Recent research on historical trauma reveals the capacity to transcend such effects through open acknowledgement of the traumatizing events, restorative justice (cultural acts of apology and restitution), forgiving the unforgivable, rituals of inter-group healing, and intra-cultural strategies aimed at intergenerational resistance, resilience, and recovery. The story of historical trauma is incomplete and is itself wounding if it fails to include the elements of survival, strength, and the potential for healing and health in spite of prolonged adversity.  This brief essay will focus on these healing processes that tend to unfold in four overlapping stages.

Intergenerational recognition is a breakthrough of awareness of the links between the past, present, and future. Recognition involves full admission and acceptance of prevailing problems and their interconnection, a new vision of solutions, and discovery of the laws of change that govern the journey from problems to solutions. Recognition involves the discovery that solutions lie both within the self, family, community, and culture and in the mobilization of resources between and beyond these realms.  Resistance, resilience, and recovery begin with processes of truth-seeking and truth-telling across the generations.

Intergenerational resistance is a culturally-, politically-, economically-, and religiously-aware refusal to continue family and tribal legacies of alcohol and other drug problems. It is a refusal to expose oneself to that risk. It is a personal declaration, “Here it stops!” Addictive disorders result from a collision of vulnerability and exposure.  Resistance is the conscious refusal to be exposed.

Intergenerational resilience is a refusal to develop a severe alcohol or other drug problem following alcohol or other drug use exposure. It is an assertion of health in the face of adversity and risk, e.g., a drug-saturated family and social environment.  It is the embrace of alternative styles of coping and an alternative identity.  It is the conscious mobilization of internal and external resources to neutralize the mechanisms through which intergenerational alcohol and other drug problems are transmitted. It is the advent of new personal and family traditions of coping and health.  Intergenerational resilience is the process of aborting alcohol and other drug problems before they have an opportunity to fully develop.

Intergenerational recovery involves initiating or sustaining a family history of recovery to break intergenerational cycles of alcohol and drug and related problems. It is the unequivocal admission of one’s own problems within a larger historical context and a sustained commitment to enhance intergenerational health and positive connection to community. It is a personal declaration that this new tradition starts with me!

In the face of historical trauma and historical unresolved grief, manifested in generations of alcohol and other drug related problems, we have observed seven steps essential to promoting intergenerational recognition, resistance, resilience, and recovery for individuals, families, and communities.

Awakening and Collective CommitmentThere is a period of consciousness-raising through which new stories (oral histories) arise that acknowledge prolonged AOD problems and place them in their larger historical trajectory. New and renewed leaders voice unspeakable truths framed in a message of hope for the future and a vision of how to create such a future. The healing vision of the future extends to the seventh generation. “I stories” of injury and healing (personal narratives) are reframed through a new and larger “we story” of injury and healing (collective story of a people). Anger, guilt, shame, and fear are openly acknowledged. Personal and collective survival are extolled and rendered heroic—tapping new strength within and beyond personal and tribal identities.  In light of these truths, drinking and drug use are framed as forms of personal and cultural capitulation/suicide; sobriety is framed as an act of personal, family, and cultural resistance and a strategy of survival and protection of oneself, one’s family, and one’s culture. The personal healing of historical trauma requires escaping one’s own encapsulation and standing with others in a cultural circle.

Mass Mobilization There is a call to action that reaches the hearts of the people, first in small numbers and then in every-increasing waves. Personal self-consciousness gives way to a new collective consciousness and commitment to action. The expansion of resources for healing self and family are extended to visions of a healed community and a healed history.  A revitalized culture is birthed via history, language, symbols, art, literature, music, and ritual.  Collective identity solidifies into awareness that new activities constitute a potentially historic movement. Personal and family identities are strengthened by this renewed cultural identity.

Personal and Collective Mourning The past is mourned so that a future can be forged. Tears must wet the early trail of new beginnings. The sites of past trauma are revisited. Rituals of personal and collective grief are created and repeated so the unspeakable past is never forgotten.  Injuries of the past are linked to continued injuries in the present, as well as awareness that inherited styles of coping may not fit new realities. The wounds of men, women, and children are distinctive, creating the need for them to heal separately before they can heal together.

Forgiving the Unforgivable To move beyond the enduring wounds of the unspeakable past and its contemporary legacies, ways must be found to forgive the unforgivable. Self-destructive rage over past injury must give way to healing across the boundaries of victim grief and perpetrator guilt. (We become what we carry!) The heart of the perpetrator must be found within the heart of the victim; the heart of the victim must be found within the heart of the perpetrator. Forgiveness of others begins with forgiveness of self.

Achieving a New Harmony. Historical balance between the peoples is achieved through acts of restitution and new rituals of reconciliation. Mechanisms of restorative justice are explored and acted upon.  Without acts of, and the experience of, justice; replicating cycles of the past cannot give way to new forms of relationships. We-they polarizations give way to a larger understanding of the human family. Interpersonal contacts between cultures increase exponentially and are ritualized and harmonized.

Acts of Empowerment, Service, and AdvocacyThere is a mass transformation of helpees into helpers. The wounded are rechristened as healers and charged with the responsibility of sharing their resilience and recovery (experience, strength, and hope) stories with others. Personal dependence (isolation and victim-stance) gives way to mutual dependence (restoration of an ethic of collaboration and community service). Mutual help through the sharing of stories is an act of service, but also assures cultural continuity—a ritual that is as much cultural communion as communication.  Collective action, in the form of political advocacy, becomes a ritual of personal and cultural empowerment—a positive antidote to internalized anger and apathy.

Cultural Revitalization Cultural development begun in the stage of mass mobilization takes on increased attention and depth, including expansion of historical research; language reclamation and purging of stigma-laden words and images; embrace of ancestral and new rituals; adoption of ancestral forms of self-presentation via hair, dress, jewelry; culture-laden art, theatre, and film; and expressive styles of music and dance. A stage of community building is evident in new and revitalized institutions, emboldened by sober leadership, that support the health of individuals, families, and the community. Collectively, this revitalized culture and these support institutions constitute a healing forest that mends the wounds of the people and frees their capabilities.

Acts of Celebration Ancestral community ceremonies (gatherings, memorials, communal rituals, power songs, dances) are renewed and new ceremonies are birthed that celebrate cultural survival and vitality. Kinship bonds are strengthened. Cultural values of survival are elevated and extolled through acts of storytelling. Stories of suffering are transformed through a process of cultural alchemy into stories of heroic survival and strength. Connections between youth and elders are strengthened by the transmission of historical memory and through mutual identification. Problem visibility is replaced by celebration of personal, family, and community solutions. The public nature of these celebrations also progressively alters how communities view those who have experienced historical trauma. A new empowering narrative revealed in these events alters perception of self and one’s own culture and also alters how one and one’s community are perceived by others, shedding legacies of stereotypes, stigma, discrimination, and personal shame.

The seven processes above are critical to the promotion of intergenerational recognition, resistance, resilience, and recovery across diverse communities and cultural contexts. Such processes are a reaffirmation of the inextricable link between personal and community health as set forth in The Red Road to Wellbriety: “…the individual, family, and community are not separate; they are one. To injure one is to injure all; to heal one is to heal all.”

Of Potential Interest

Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2011). The impact of stressors on second generation Indian Residential School survivors. Transcultural Psychiatry, 48(4), 367–391.

Bonnano, G.A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience:  Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28.

Brave Heart, M. (1993). The historical trauma response among Natives and its relationship with substance abuse: A Lakota illustration. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 35(1), 7–13.

Brave Heart, M. Y. H., & DeBruyn, L. M. (1998). The American Indian Holocaust: Healing historical unresolved grief. American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 8(2), 56–78.

Coyhis, D. (2011). The Wellbriety Movement Comes of Age.  Colorado Springs, CO: Coyhis Publishing.

Coyhis, D., & White, W. (2003) Alcohol problems in Native America: Changing paradigms and clinical practices. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 3/4:157-165.

Coyhis, D., & White, W. (2006). Alcohol Problems in Native America: The Untold Story of Resistance and Recovery-The Truth about the Lie.  Colorado Springs, CO:  White Bison, Inc.

Denham, A. R. (2008). Rethinking historical trauma: narratives of resilience. Transcultural Psychiatry, 45(3), 391–414.

Kirmayer, L. J., Dandeneau, S., Marshall, E., Phillips, M. K., & Williamson, K. J. (2011). Rethinking resilience from indigenous perspectives. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(2), 84–91.

Sigal, J. J. (1998). Long-term effects of the Holocaust: Empirical evidence for resilience in the first, second, and third generation. Psychoanalytic Review, 85(4), 579–585.

 

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. –The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy

That’s all it takes—pressure and time.—Red (Shawshank Redemption)

There is a tradition within many Native American tribes of using ancestral history to inform current decision-making and weighing the potential impact of present actions seven generations into the future. Leaders of successful social movements similarly understand the value of inherited wisdom and that fundamental social change requires sustained advocacy across generations of time. As a result, such leaders have articulated visions of a transformed world beyond their own lifetimes (e.g., from the Code of Handsome Lake to “I have a dream…”) and inspired children, youth, adults, and elders to devote their lives to the fulfillment of such visions.

Recovery advocacy in the United States can similarly best be thought of in intergenerational terms. We now find ourselves in the middle of what may well be a seven-generational change process. The first waves of recovery advocacy organized by and on behalf of people seeking and in recovery can be traced to late 18th and early 19th century abstinence-based Native American cultural revitalization movements  and to Euro-American temperance advocates. The former drew on their recovery experience to challenge the use of alcohol as a weapon of genocide and called for the rejection of alcohol and other trappings of European culture and a return to Native traditions. The latter used their personal stories of addiction and recovery to castigate alcohol, invite others to sign a pledge of abstinence, and, in some cases, advocate the legal prohibition of alcohol.

The rise of alcohol problems following repeal of prohibition stirred a second wave of recovery advocacy launched by Marty Mann in 1944 via the establishment of the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA). NCEA sought changes in public attitudes toward persons addicted to alcohol and a commitment of public resources to support alcoholism-focused public and professional education and community-based alcoholism treatment. NCEA evolved into the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD), expanding its focus to all drug dependencies.

A third wave of recovery advocacy efforts unfolded in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the founding of the National Alliance of Methadone Advocates (NAMA, 1988—presently the National Alliance for Medication Assisted Recovery, NAMA-R) and the Society of Americans for Recovery (SOAR, 1991). NAMA-R has sustained its advocacy activities, but SOAR under the leadership of former Senator Harold Hughes was only active for a few years.

A fourth wave of recovery advocacy culminated in the 2001 Recovery Summit and the founding of Faces and Voices of Recovery. In a process similar to that experience within the civil rights and other social movements, the success of Faces and Voices spawned complementary and more specialized organizations, including the Association of Recovery Community Organizations (ARCO), Young People in Recovery (YPR), Facing Addiction with NCADD, the Association of Recovery Schools (ARS), the Association of Recovery in Higher Education (ARHE), and the National Alliance for Recovery Residences (NARR), to name just a few.

Other waves of recovery advocacy will likely follow. It will take a long time to destroy the cultural misrepresentation of people experiencing and recovering from substance use disorders and the harm to individuals, families, and communities that flow from such caricatures, but make no mistake, that process of change has deep roots that are now accelerating. The present era contains its own unique vulnerabilities, but, compared to earlier generations, the advocacy movement of today portends a much more sustainable movement due to stronger organizational infrastructures, greater cultural and philosophical diversity, greater attention to leadership development and succession planning, greater involvement of women, people of color, and young people in recovery, and boundary expansion to include all those affected by addiction (including the families of the more than 72,000 individuals now dying each year in the U.S. from drug overdoses).

It is a profound blessing to be part of something so much greater than ourselves—to contribute to a movement with full knowledge that its greatest fruits will be harvested by generations to come. If you have been graced with the promises of recovery or have lost someone to addiction, come join us in creating a world in which a message of hope is extended to all who still suffer and in altering the community landscapes in which such suffering flourishes. Addiction has long been marked by intergenerational legacies of pain and despair; personal/family recovery and recovery advocacy offer opportunities to replace such traumatic inheritances with legacies of hope, resilience, and active resistance. Join us. Let’s Go Make Some History.

The famed historian Barbara Tuchman once observed that the historian’s greatest challenge was capturing the history of the present—or as she put it, history that is “still smoking.” There is much within the worldwide history of addiction recovery that is still smoking, including the:

1) international growth and philosophical diversification of recovery mutual aid organizations,

2) astounding growth of electronic recovery support media and virtual recovery communities,

3) cultural and political mobilization of people in recovery via a rapidly evolving recovery advocacy movement,

4) emergence of recovery as a potential organizing paradigm for drug policy,

5) shift toward recovery management and recovery-oriented systems of care as new frameworks for the design and delivery of addiction treatment and recovery support services,

6) proliferation of new recovery support institutions and new peer-based recovery support roles, and

7) the dramatic increase in recovery-focused research activities.

Collectively christened the recovery revolution, these developments are touching individuals, families, communities, and cultures in profound ways that warrant careful historical documentation.

As a historian of addiction treatment and recovery in the United States, I can assure you that many past chapters within this history have been lost with only faint rumors of their existence remaining. It is my hope that the same will not be true of recovery within our current era. For those of you with a potential interest in preserving this history, listed below are activities that could help prevent such a loss.

* Collect documents, photographs, audio, video, and other artifacts that document the history of addiction treatment and recovery in your local area.

* If you are a member of a recovery mutual aid organization, other recovery community organization, or treatment organization; help create a local archive that captures and disseminates this local history.

* Record interviews with treatment and recovery elders telling their own stories and sharing local recovery milestones.

* Learn some of the basics of historical preservation to assure the safety and integrity of these collected resources. (Many invaluable historical documents have been lost to flooding, fire, theft, humidity, and insects.)

* Share aspects of these stories through presentations, articles, monographs, and books.

* Offer copies of these materials to one or more of the major addiction studies archives to assure their availability to future historians. Such archives include the Brown University Chester H. Kirk Collection on Alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous, the Alcohol Studies Library of Rutgers University, the Pittman Archive of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the Alcohol Research Group Library, and the Illinois Addiction Studies Archives.

I have proposed through my writings that people in recovery should be viewed as a people—an indigenous culture with their own distinct institutions, languages, symbols, rituals, music, art, and rituals worthy of historical investigation and preservation. Perhaps you can play a role in such historical research and preservation. The shift to a recovery paradigm deserves careful national and local documentation. Those of us on the front lines of this movement must serve as witnesses and the archivists of this revolution in thinking and service practices.