If your experience is typical, some of your clients benefit from the 12-step approach, and some do not.  That's only to be expected.  As a professional, you already know that 12-step recovery was never intended for everyone.

Do you have tools in your kit to help those patients who fit something other than the 12-step approach?  Do you have support groups where you can send them?

This web site can empower you, the provider, to offer your clients/patients a broader choice of pathways to abstinent recovery.  It can put more arrows in your quiver and help you help patients who would otherwise be lost.

LifeRing Secular Recovery ("LifeRing" for short) has many points in common with the 12-step approach.  It is uncompromisingly abstinent.  It rejects moderation and controlled drinking.  It emphasizes peer group support, the sharing of "experience, strength, and hope."  It protects confidentiality. It resonates with some common themes of 12-step recovery, such as "take what you need and leave the rest."  Many recovering people attend both LifeRing and 12-step meetings.

In other ways, LifeRing stems from a different vision:

• LifeRing groups include alcoholics and addicts without distinction.  We support the poly-addicted to maintain poly-abstinence, just as you do in your treatment program.
   
• LifeRing offers support and education to participants who wish to quit smoking along with their drinking and drugging.
   
• LifeRing meetings are small groups with a circular format, focusing on current events in participants' recoveries -- similar to your process groups, but with peer leadership.
   
• LifeRing groups encourage supportive crosstalk.  Crosstalk provides feedback, a powerful recovery tool.
   
• LifeRing is secular.  The meeting format is free of religious content.  Participants' beliefs or disbeliefs in a Supreme Being, an afterlife, and other spiritual or religious concepts remain private.  The closing ritual is a round of applause for the members' progress in recovery.
   
• The LifeRing program uses an open architecture to maximize  motivation.  The foundation is abstinence.  On that common ground, participants do what the highest quality  treatment programs try to achieve:  they construct individualized recovery plans that match their particular profile.  There is a workbook (Recovery by Choice) that assists participants in building their customized programs in a structured way.

The treatment facility that can offer its clients a choice of recovery paths enjoys a huge therapeutic advantage.  Twenty years ago the blood banks discovered two magic words that dramatically reduced donor discomfort and multiplied return visits. The magic words are: "Which arm?"  Giving patients a choice, even as basic as that one, creates client investment, powerfully enhances motivation, and yields better outcomes. 

At this time, a recovering person in the San Francisco Bay Area can attend LifeRing meetings seven days a week.  We have excellent working relationships with treatment professionals who refer their clients/patients to LifeRing.  In more than eight years of holding our meetings side by side with 12-step meetings, there has never been an incident of antagonism.  We travel different roads but we are on the same journey. 

Offering patients/clients the choice of a LifeRing meeting is the mark of a top-quality program.  

LifeRing would be pleased to schedule a speaker team to explain LifeRing to your staff and/or your patients, and to help you get LifeRing started if you so desire.  We would be happy to send you complimentary literature explaining our concept.  If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me. 

Sincerely yours,

 

Martin Nicolaus ("Marty N.")

For the LifeRing Service Center