Journey to Recovery has new home and new approach

 

by Joseph Gresser

NEWPORT — When Journey to Recovery opened its doors at its former home on Second Street its aspirations were modest.

“Before my time, the culture was just come hang out,” said Director Lila Bennett at a meeting at her new office on May 7, just under a year after she was hired.

“It was a safe place to be but, unfortunately, there weren’t too many boundaries in place,” she added.  “There wasn’t a lot of demand that every person that came there really worked with a coach and really engage in groups to truly transform their world.  The intentions were good, but it sort of dissolved into a casual place to hang out that wasn’t really propelling people to the next stages of their lives.”

The location on Second Street was a problem in itself, Ms. Bennett said.  The neighborhood has the reputation of being an area where drugs are sold, so some of those trying to get and keep themselves clean were triggered while others found the proximity to a marketplace a source of temptation.

Journey to Recovery has moved away from its original, rented, space and bought a building on Prouty Drive.  Its new home wasn’t chosen at random.

“We wanted to move to this location because it’s directly across from the hospital, and we have a program where we are on call 24/7,” Ms. Bennett said.

She was seated in an office with windows that look directly out at North Country Hospital’s emergency room entrance.

“We have pagers,” she explained, “and one of us has the pager every single day, every single night.  We are there for the nurses in the emergency room to page.  The police can page us, too, if they need help.  But what’s happening is, in the emergency room, we get paged if somebody comes in from an overdose or from drinking too much.”

Ms. Bennett said many people return repeatedly to the emergency room for treatment of an overdose.  Given the amount of other types of cases the doctors and nurses have to deal with, it’s understandable that they can get frustrated seeing the same people over and over again.

“We know relapse is a huge part of recovery,” she said, but with all the demands made on medical staff it’s sometimes hard for them to remember compassion.

“Part of our role is to take the burden off of the nurses,” said Ms. Bennett.  “We step in and we’re there to support these people and help them find their way and support the nurses and kind of remind them that it does take more than one overdose sometimes.”

Every person deserves a chance to recover even if it takes several attempts, said Ms. Bennett.

“It takes planting the seed sometimes multiple times,” she said.  “What’s unfortunate in our area is we don’t have a place for people that are in crisis to go.  So they go to the emergency room.”

Perhaps a person may want to get into a rehabilitation program but will have to wait a while before getting a place.  That person may not want to go home, but if their medical condition is okay, the emergency room can’t keep them, Ms. Bennett said.

“So they’re discharged back to the same environment that’s triggering them to use,” she said.

Journey to Recovery coaches go to the emergency room and help patients with the organization’s services, or help get them into rehab.

“We talk to them about what their options are,” Ms. Bennett said.  “We talk to them about how they got there.  We talk to them about what they’re going to do.  And the reason that we want it to be right here is because a lot of people end up in the emergency room with a social crisis.”

She said Journey to Recovery doesn’t imagine it can do the necessary work on its own.  In addition to its partnership with the hospital, Ms. Bennett said, she and her staff remain in close contact and work with their opposite numbers in most of the other social service agencies in the Newport area.

While the intentions of those who set up the center were good — providing people who want to get out from under various types of addiction or other negative behaviors with a comfortable and familiar place to go, the old center may have been too familiar, she said.

“Most people who are struggling are in crisis in all different kinds of ways, whether it’s poverty, generational poverty, generational addiction, no coping skills ever taught in the family, no role model to show even the concept of success,” Ms. Bennett said.  “All of that stuff is not even part of your reality growing up.  Lots of people just cope.  Every single person in this world is driven by connection, belonging, purpose, and love.  Right?  Those are things that are driving you whether you’re aware of it or not.

“If you’re looking for connection and you don’t know how to make connections, you end up drinking, partying, going to bars.  If you’re anxious, or you feel like a failure, you become the life of the party and, bam, you’ve got a world and you have an identity.  It’s exciting and people fall into it that way.

“So, when I got to the recovery center and the first thing I saw walking in the door was a pool table, and a stained couch, and a stained carpet I had a sense of more of the same.”

Journey to Recovery’s first home was set up to make its users feel at home.  The organization’s current building is not at all cold, but it is all business.

Gone are the couches, except for a couple of comfortable seats in the waiting area out front.  Even there, Ms. Bennett said, her goal is for people to wait for as short a time as possible to see their counselors or meet with their groups.

People may have liked the pool table and other parts of the old center, she said, “but what we found was that didn’t really work, because the reality is you are transforming, and you are going to step in and create inside yourself and outside yourself an entirely whole new world.

“I want every single person that walks into the center, to not only feel like it’s a safe place to land, it’s welcoming,” said Ms. Bennett.  “Even if it feels foreign to you, because it’s not the same old, same old, you get an immediate sense of hope, and that will give you the courage to engage in our services and really take control of your own life with us by your side.

“In a way I feel like I kind of ripped the tablecloth out from underneath all the ideas and shook it all out and put it all back together in a different order to be able to serve people in the way that they need even if they don’t know that they need it yet,” she said.

Those entering Journey to Recovery are greeted by a receptionist seated in a central area around which doors lead to rooms where people can meet privately with a counselor.

While the original center hired staff members who may not have been too far removed from their own experience with addiction or other problems, Ms. Bennett said she has only certified recovery coaches working at the center.

“I’m bringing people on who are dedicated to understanding the patterns and behaviors that go along with addiction and recovery,” she said.  “A better way to say it would be the patterns and behaviors that go along with trauma-induced behaviors that result in destruction of a life.

“The people who work here are trauma-informed staff members,” Ms. Bennett said.  “What that means is that we look at every person and every action and every behavior and we look at the person’s deeper root cause.  It’s not that someone’s just drinking for no reason.  They’re bringing a lifetime of pain along with them, and a lifetime of not knowing what else to do, and not understanding where it came from.”

She said the staff works to create a “space of safety” where people can “go all the way back to the beginning of their life and look at the things that have caused confusion and pain so we can heal those things.  Then there’s more room for peace and love and the ability to go forward with the awareness of what hurt you in the first place, instead of just blindly trying to make yourself feel better.”

Many times people get into trouble by self-medicating without understanding the condition they are trying to treat, Ms. Bennett said.

Getting certification is a serious commitment, she said, requiring at least 500 hours of work.  Ms. Bennett said she is equally committed to working with her board to make sure salaries are commensurate with staff members’ qualifications and dedication.

Every person in the recovery program has a cell number to connect with their counselor at any time.  (The counselors are not required to answer all messages or calls immediately, Ms. Bennett was quick to add.)

She said many of those in the program will just text “hi” as a way of staying in contact with their coach.

Ms. Bennett said the eagerness of the people using the center’s services to stay close is very encouraging.

It’s been hard to do the work during the pandemic, but with more and more people getting vaccinated, the options for in-person counseling are growing.

Ms. Bennett said the staff was able to use the enforced isolation to prepare the center for people ready to use its services.

As an organization, Journey to Recovery is still relatively young and working to find its way.  Ms. Bennett said she hopes to add new certified recovery coaches to the three who, along with herself, make up the staff.  While their qualifications are hard to attain, Ms. Bennett said, her organization needs to add several people who are interested in its work as board members.

 

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