Watch Your Steps: 5 Pro Tips to Surviving Your Recovery Program
When you’re trying to change your negative patterns of behavior, finding people you can trust is super important, and there are all kinds of groups who are willing to offer you support. But some groups are safer than others.
Not all groups are worthy of your trust.
Until you’ve built up a long-term relationship with a small network of reliable individuals you have absolute confidence in, be especially careful.
Here are some suggestions if you decide to enter into a nonprofessional, volunteer-based program of recovery where you are expected to share intimate information about yourself and those you love on a frequent basis.
1. Do not share your real, registered phone number with a multitude of strangers.
There are all kinds of services and databases freely or cheaply available that link your real, personal information to your real phone number. Even Google will betray you for free.
Be especially careful about listing or providing your name and number in an open-access database (like a Google doc or Excel spreadsheet) which is available to the public, or that can be easily seen by an open, general membership, or even downloaded with a click of a button.
With just your phone number, it is easy for anyone to look up your first and last name, your listed properties, your family relationships, your legal history, your work history, your social media profiles, and more.
If you’re going to give your contact information to a recovery fellowship or similar collective, get a secondary phone number you can safely share that isn’t tied to your home or work address.
Tip: Do not program your real name into your secondary phone. Some smart phones volunteer this information, along with your profile picture, to new contacts.
Using an alternate phone number is especially helpful if you are calling into phone meetings, where all or some of number may be visible on the software used by those hosting the meeting—you never know who might be keeping track of what, and why.
2. Think about using an alias, pseudonym, or alternative name when you attend meetings or meet with program contacts.
You might feel pretty safe inside the circle of recovery, but no matter how secure the rooms feel now, there’s always a chance someone inside the circle could let something slip, either on accident, or during a relapse of their own, or for other reasons.
If you’re sharing sensitive information about yourself, or about members of your family, you may wish to do so under a pseudonym that people will not easily recognize if others describe your behaviors to their friends or contacts in the wider world.
Remember, there's a good chance other people in the rooms are taking the same precaution.
3. Be careful about sharing a written record of your past, or a complex inventory of your personal deficiencies, or a list of every single person you've wronged—especially electronically.
Some support groups will ask you to extensively self-document your history of mistakes, crimes, or transgressions.
For example, if you are in recovery for sexual addiction, your support group may suggest that you write down your history of "acting out," and email that history back and forth with your sponsor as you work on crafting a group disclosure.
If you are in a support group for anger management, you may be asked to email your rage-record back and forth with your volunteer, nonprofessional partner.
Later—during Step Work—you may be asked to self-inventory every fear, insecurity, negative self-thought, even every area of resentment and every target of resentment in your life, or to create a detailed list of every person you've harmed. You may be expected or pressured to share that by email with your volunteer sponsor, or a similar support partner. You may be pressured to share that with a large or small group of fellow addicts or recovery partners in a setting generally open to the public.
Be careful. Once you click “send” on an email with that information, you no longer have control over that information. Once you recite your transgressions in a public setting, you can’t control what people do in response to that confession.
Recovery groups and 12 Step programs are frequently coordinated and visited by volunteers who have no legal obligations to protect your confidences, and by people who might have a private reason for attending.
It can be useful to honestly remember your history of addiction, patterns of abuse, or general misjudgments.
Journaling about your resentments and sharing them in a professional setting can be incredibly therapeutic, and useful for growing emotionally and spiritually.
Just be careful about surrendering that information to people you don’t actually know very well.
How will you cope if the information becomes public, or is turned against you in a way that is shameful?*
*author’s note: my response was to start blogging
4. Make sure you really understand the culture of any support program or group you join, especially those that are unregulated, free, and open to the general public.
Community-based programs attract… well, people from the whole community. Unfortunately, groups with open memberships are open to predators who might see your circle of vulnerable, hurting people as an excellent place for their own predation.
Long-term group members, with established community ties within the circle, can be real predators. You are not obligated to trust someone who is treated as a king or queen inside the circle. You know. Just like at church. Anyone can show up and nestle in, and bring their friends along.
If your recovery group has weak individual protections, or a culture that prioritizes the group’s image or the group’s welfare over the safety of individual members, you may need to think twice about whether you really want to participate at all.
If you’re not sure if a particular program or group will protect its members, do some basic research. Don't just ask around casually or make assumptions. Read what is written down, and read it carefully.
Is there a strong, centralized leadership, with clear mechanisms of accountability in cases of abuse?
Or is it only vaguely defined, with a sort of make-it-up-as-we-go, handle-each-case-like-we-feel vibe?
Is there a central organization that is accountable in case something goes horribly wrong, or are there several layers of deniability and multiple degrees of separation conveniently built in?
Does the program-as-practiced match the program as it is described on paper, or are their major discrepancies in what is written in the books and scripts and what you are told to do?
Do you spot a lot of red flags you don’t understand?
Do people share things that seem unusual that are swept under the rug?
Do people share things that seem to have pointed subtexts, implicitly threatening particular members, or particular member bodies—is there a subculture present that only the “initiated” really understand?
Do people show up out of nowhere with unusual grievances that are ignored?
You may have to look a little harder for these things in a 12 Step program.
The 12 Traditions encourage members to never speak negatively about their experiences to other people, and to always represent their recovery journey in a positive and ‘attractive’ light—there is a culture of secrecy and false representation that keeps a positive spin around the 12 Steps, no matter the reality.
So if you see them at all, really, really pay attention to those warning signs.
Does your program expect its members to keep their participation in the group hidden or discrete in the eyes of the public?
Are members encouraged to prioritize the program image over the truth?
Are you expected to keep the program hidden from outsiders, non-participants, or the media for some reason?
Are you expected to defer to the will of the group over your own safety and wellbeing?
Evaluate your program carefully before you find that you have overextended your trust to the wrong people.
5. Be selective in choosing your accountability partners and sponsors, the information you share with them, and the access you grant them to your personal life.
12-Step recovery programs like AA, MA, NA, SA and SAA rely on volunteer, nonprofessional sponsors. While many of these individuals give freely of their time and energy, they are, by definition, not professionals.
There are no strong protections in place if someone gives you bad advice, violates your confidences, intentionally abuses you, or convinces you to do something against your better interests. Marriages that fail when you act on bad advice are still broken once you realize you were tricked. Jobs you lose when you overcommit your time to your recovery journey are still lost.
Many 12-Step groups are accountable only to themselves. If you do report concerns or abuse to a local group, the only real action that might be taken is a casual reprimand directed at an individual within a particular group.
Unless a crime was clearly committed, abusers who violate program codes or traditions might only be asked to move to a different group circle in the same community of recovery partners.
Finally, if you are in a recovery program that prioritizes any kind of internet sobriety from internet-based content of any kind (Gambler’s Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Shopper’s Anonymous), be especially careful with "accountability" software that tracks your internet activities, and automatically sends reports to other people.
Covenant Eyes, in particular, automatically gathers your search history for a partner, but has has no safeguards of any kind against abusive information sharing. Covenant Eyes also tracks that information privately, for the company’s own private purposes.
Are you sure you're okay with your daily internet routines getting out to more than one person in a worse-case scenario? Are you vulnerable to abuse and manipulation of multiple persons have access to your data without your knowledge?
Recovery from unhealthy behaviors is hard.
Don't let your recovery group make it harder!
Good luck.
