Seventh Slice of Cheese: Job/School/Future

Memo to Self: “Get back in the cockpit (to my job, to school, to building a future)

What we did at Le Mont with regard to employment or continued education: Our residents were required to start a job or be enrolled in school in their first month of stay. This was the issue we had the hardest time enforcing, especially with our younger adult residents. I think that’s because we were observing a fact of how the brain - and volition - heals in early sobriety.

It is possible that choice comes back on incrementally rather than all at once. This article about how Free Will works in the brain, or doesn’t, explains what we might have observed in our residents in the first few months of their sobriety:

Free Won’t: It May Be All That We Have (or Need).

Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl (2011) Psychology Today

My good friend Robbie Bills, who runs a very fine recovery residence in Utah called Balance House, believes that staying sober and participating in recovery activities for the first few months is a better approach than going straight back to work. He may very well be right. Because of this struggle in getting people to find jobs, at Le Mont we decided not to force the issue if the resident was doing well otherwise. We decided not to make employment “the hill to die on.”

Collegiate Recovery Communities are the most exciting part of the recovery movement today. Here Dr. Tom Kimball, who runs the Collegiate Recovery Program at Texas Tech University discusses how they came about and how they work.

Dr. Kitty Harris describes the four things that CRCs provide their participants.

Dr. Kitty Harris describes the importance of having an identity as a college student as a recovery resilience factor.

Dr. Tom Kimball describes the power of combining education and recovery.

Dr. Kitty Harris describes the positive energy common to Collegiate Recovery Communities.

Dr. Tom Kimball describes the living situation of the Collegiate Recovery Program participants at Texas Tech University.

I asked Dr. Kitty Harris which of her many research publications on Collegiate Recovery Communities is she most proud.

Dr. Kitty Harris describes how she would answer skeptics of Collegiate Recovery Communities.

Dr. Tom Kimball describes how Collegiate Recovery Communities improve University life.

Dr. Kitty Harris addresses the argument that providing something as valuable as a college education to a former drug user represents a “moral hazard.”