Archways' Threads

Narrator 00:02
Welcome to Archways Threads, a show focusing on the threads of family and recovery support services that help make up the tapestry of life in recovery. Join us as we share stories from peers and participants in the field and practice of peer recovery support and family support and strengthening. And now your host, Archway's CEO, Michelle Lennon,

Michelle Lennon 00:25
Hii everyone. My name is Michelle Lennon, and I am the host of Archways Threads our podcast. And I'm here with Cara LaPlant, who was here with us just over a year ago, I think, still a Plymouth State student and getting ready to graduate, and she's been out of school now for a year, and career's kind of taken off. I mean, she's a wellness initiative coordinator doing peer recovery coaching and doing a lot of work with Plymouth State University and HTI, other places, getting these collegiate recovery groups going. So we're really grateful to have her here. She's also been doing some speaking nationally on various topics, including alternative peer groups for youth peer support, and most recently spoken in San Antonio, Texas, and will be speaking at the Recovery, Inclusion Community and Harm Reduction Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire, so we're really fortunate to have her today.

Cara LaPlante 01:26
Yeah, thank you so much,

Michelle Lennon 01:28
Busy girl.

Cara LaPlante 01:28
Busy girl, yeah, grateful for it.

Michelle Lennon 01:31
So today, she's going to be sharing with us information on identity based goal setting, moving forward from smart consequence based goals to really setting these identity based goals. And, you know, we have talked a little bit about what it looks like when you're first coaching somebody, and you want to share a little bit on what that maybe looks like for somebody that's just starting out?

Cara LaPlante 01:56
Absolutely, yeah, so as a recovery coach, participants that we serve come in all phases of recovery, all walks of life, but there are some trends that we see when participants are first coming in for services, and this can often look like crisis navigation, that you're coming in because they are in some real need of help, and then it looks like accessing concrete resources and supports, getting IDs, birth certificates, identification, social security cards. Housing is a big, a big concrete need that we work on a lot. Food security, and then also navigate health care, mental health care, and also navigating the systems that our participants also interact with, the legal system, DCYF, state benefits, probation, parole. So a lot of these concrete needs and system involvement is typically what we're working with participants at the get go.

Michelle Lennon 02:59
So initially, that's what goals look like. They're very concrete. They're task driven, yes, and about kind of managing that initial crisis, right?

Cara LaPlante 03:09
Absolutely.

Michelle Lennon 03:10
Yeah. And then second secondary meetings. We usually call them intakes, right? Because a lot of times people walk in, they're in crisis. We might get some brief information about them, but try to build that trust in that first interview type of thing, or that first meeting, and then, and then you go through a number of steps. Right? With a, with a participant in an intake.

Cara LaPlante 03:33
Absolutely. Yeah. So after the initial meeting, then it's time for a little bureaucracy, paperwork type, type interaction. So intake is, you know, basic documents like informed consent, releases of information, those types of things, but also including surveys, including the Brief Assessment of Recovery Capital, the BARC 10, as well as the quality of life surveys. So those surveys happen every session to track participants' progress, but the initial meeting is paperwork. So paperwork, baseline surveys, and then for most participants, it is that task management that aligned with the concrete supports they're looking for.

Michelle Lennon 04:20
So the surveys kind of give you information and then help you build a recovery plan.

Cara LaPlante 04:26
Absolutely.

Michelle Lennon 04:27
And it's based on what the participant wants. It's participant driven despite what the surveys say. The surveys say, "Well, you need housing first," not necessarily what you do. It really goes by what the participant is looking for.

Cara LaPlante 04:42
Absolutely. That's really the role as a coach, is receiving what participants identifies their needs and and navigating that with them, not imposing our own ideas onto them.

Michelle Lennon 04:54
Yeah, because they're the expert on their own lives.

Cara LaPlante 04:56
Exactly.

Michelle Lennon 04:56
Yeah. So what happens? You know, after maybe six months go by, people get stable. What do you see?

Cara LaPlante 05:05
Totally. After people start to stabilize, there's a couple different things that can happen between coaches and participants. One is that people and this is what we're looking for, people stay connected. They build a good relationship with their coach, they're stable, they have their needs met, and then we work on what I call like those higher level goals, maybe looking at going back to school, maybe looking at getting a car, maybe looking at a different type of job or career. So that's what we're looking for. But there's a couple other things that can happen. Participants, after they start to stabilize, they can disengage completely, which is something we do see, you know, they have their needs met, and they feel stable, and so they choose not to engage in services. And then also, along those same lines, people disengage, and then when they are in a jam, they need something, another need met, maybe they need lost their birth certificate, needs another one type deal. They'll come back to their coach when they need more concrete needs met. So yeah, ideally, though, we want to stay connected with participants and really walk that journey to thriving with them. But that is typically what we what we see for folks.

Michelle Lennon 06:28
Is that most people disengage after the kind of the initial tasks are complete.

Cara LaPlante 06:31
Totally.

Michelle Lennon 06:32
Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that, you know, you talk about is that this is normal human behavior that you think of New Year's resolutions, how people kind of set their tasks, they hit their goal, and then they just let it go by the wayside, usually, right? So you lose the 20 pounds and and it's like you've reached the goal, and then it's like you're done, you know? And then you start doing the things that got you into trouble with food, right?

Cara LaPlante 06:58
Totally.

Michelle Lennon 06:59
Right? And, yeah, and you gave us some other examples of that. Do you remember?

Cara LaPlante 07:04
Yeah, totally, yeah. I think the New Year's resolution is, you know, like you said, once the task list is checked off, then they did what they needed to do, so we move on. Another example of this is that people who graduate from college, you know, they're doing their coursework, they're reading, they're reading research, but 42% of people who graduate from college will never read a full book again, not be not for any other reason, then they manage the tasks and reach the goal.

Michelle Lennon 07:38
Yeah, yeah. So we see that when that when we have goals that are kind of task driven, that they're there to achieve a specific consequence, generally speaking, the daily actions don't stick after you reach that consequence, right? So the change doesn't necessarily last. So improvement can stop. And I think about how this plays out in our field, that you know, you have somebody that is in a long term treatment program, and they do great, and then they leave the treatment program, and it's like they fall off a cliff. Or we see people in recovery houses, for instance, you know, they're, they're going to meetings, they're, they're doing their chores, they're making their beds, you know, and then they leave that setting, not and not everybody, but when, when those, those consequences are not there, right? Then, then all of a sudden, you know, people can fall off. So all of a sudden, their beds not made anymore in their apartment, or they're not going to meetings anymore. They they've gotten a job, so, you know, they're too tired, or, you know, feel like they don't have the energy maybe, to go to meetings anymore. So, so the goal is changed or missed one of the other. But what we find is, if there's not a target in front of us, the focus gets lost, or a deadline is missed, or a person can feel like they failed, you know, if they don't reach a consequence that they were aiming for by a certain time or date or, you know, substances, right? They have a reoccurrence of use that that maybe only lasts a day, and they feel like a failure, you know. And you know, part of that is, you know, the washing over of this idea that you got to start over when really you haven't lost all the recovery that that you've had. And we're going to, I think, talk a little bit about limiting beliefs, but, but when, when you have that belief that missing a consequence is a failure rather than an opportunity to learn from you know, we talk about how you know you're not, you're not really in that growth mindset of making progress, you know, getting better. Yeah, so, so how do we help ourselves and our participants to be consistent in continuing to improve their life course trajectory moving forward? Like, you know, after the pressure of systems are done, or after the requirements are no longer there, or they're not in recovery court, having to, you know, check the boxes anymore. Because we do see that that people often do well, when there's a lot of structure, but when the structure is removed, sometimes things fall apart.

Cara LaPlante 10:19
Totally, yeah, and ideally, as coaches, we want to support our participants in building the tools and coping skills to be self sufficient to continue that life course trajectory, but just supporting them in task management and concrete needs isn't necessarily the skill building and coping that's going to help people really progress, progress past that. We can also look at as coaches identifying limiting beliefs, which I know that we'll get into a little deeper, and this idea of identity, and I think that's really why this conversation is important, because task management is just that task management. But what helps folks stay progressing and be successful in what they want success to look like is really connecting to our why, which I know we'll talk about a little more.

Michelle Lennon 11:22
Yeah, so you mentioned limiting beliefs. I know I did too. I had a lot of limiting beliefs that I didn't even recognize, and I had worked with a coach on some health and wellness goals, and didn't realize how many limiting beliefs I had and how many negative tapes I've played in my head around food. So beliefs really matter a great deal when we're talking about setting goals. And Henry Ford had said it that whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're most certainly right. And I think in so many ways that's true, just thinking about even the definition of belief, that that is just a feeling of certainty that a thought is true and it's critical to our sense of identity. And, you know, for me, I went on this journey of wanting to be this fit and healthy leader, and found, you know, some of the limiting beliefs that got in my way was things that I was speaking over myself, like I was saying I wasn't a morning person. You know, I was saying, and this is terrible, but it was like the tape that plays in my head from my mother, because it was, I lived in a house where you cleaned your plate. And she used to say there were starving children in China all the time. Like, if you weren't finishing your plate, like that was like her go to message that you needed to eat your food and be grateful, you know? So, yeah, so when we think about the definition of belief, that there's a feeling of certainty that a thought is true, that's critical to our sense of identity, sometimes we don't even know where they've come from, until we really take the time to have either somebody point them out to us or, you know, we come to awareness somehow of of the beliefs that we're holding on to?

Cara LaPlante 13:04
Absolutely, yeah. And that's the, I think that's one of the challenging parts about talking about beliefs, is that, like you just said in the show, we don't even realize we have them sometimes, or how they're holding us back, or how they're empowering us, because there's two types of beliefs, empowering beliefs, which is the thought or idea that we hold with certainty, but that's what makes it a belief that gives us confidence and energy and permission to take action and move forward. And then the disempowering beliefs, or the limiting beliefs, like what we were talking about the thought or idea that we hold with certainty that restricts our potential, that holds us, that holds us back, lowers our and lowers our confidence and prevents us from taking meaningful action. So there's two different ways that we can kind of look at ourselves and the beliefs that we have about how we show up in the world.

Michelle Lennon 14:01
Yeah, when I think of the empowering beliefs, you know, there's some that to me, like I felt I was lying to myself. You know, we talk about affirmations. Affirmations really only work if there is a little belief that they could be true, right? And I find I had to even switch my language that, you know, I was working towards becoming a fit and healthy leader and and I slip, you know, I was thinking about it today, and I missed breakfast, and I grabbed two Pop Tarts, because that's what's handy. And we'll talk about environment too. Because, you know, obviously, if there were not Pop Tarts here, I would not have eaten them, right? But, you know, you know, just thinking about how you know that idea of I can, I could do anything I set my mind to. I believe that in certain circumstances now, you know, and part of it was experience, you know, I remember crying in my office with this gentleman named Tim Rook that I I was going to have to tell my board of directors they needed to find a new Executive Director for Archways, because I had hit my ceiling, that the agency had grown to a point where I couldn't manage it anymore. And Tim had said, "Don't quit just yet," you know, "I have something in mind for you," you know. And he put me through this learning cohort of other business owners and basically other directors. And worked with two consultants, and it was like a year long cohort of financial capacity building. And I learned the benefit of building systems and investing in systems, and we sacrificed, I would say, all the management team, you know, not being paid what we were worth for, you know, a number of years to be able to invest in systems. Now we're in a position where we can scale, and that's pretty awesome. So I have these limiting beliefs about my own abilities, like, you know, we talk about glass ceilings and and we see that in participants, you know, that I could never go to college or things like that. But you know, you think about some of the other empowering beliefs that we have, you know, some of it is how we approach things. And you know, Carol Dweck's work on mindset, I think is a great book to read. But you know, if you can take each challenge as an opportunity to learn, it changes things, or take the trials with joy so that they're going to teach you wisdom, you know, and and you know, for our participants, in the beginning, like they don't know how to take care of their addiction hell, it's not really, you know. It's a learning curve. And you know, rather than continuing to identify as I'm an addict or an alcoholic, like, I'm a person that's learning to take care of my addiction health, or my my mental health or my relationship health, you know, those kind of things. And, you know, I think about how, you know, even with like, the health and wellness stuff, like, I had to see myself as worth the investment, you know. And I think that's an important thing that we can do, like we talk about carrying hope for people, but there's these other limiting beliefs that I'm not worth the investment, you know. And we hear that in our heads, you know, because other people have told us that. I mean even that society as a whole, we haven't created a culture that's conducive to supporting people in recovery. We still shame and blame people, you know, in systems so beliefs, you know, empowering beliefs are so important. And sometimes I think when we're working with people, we have to kind of do a belief audit to see where are they landing. Like if, if we see signs that somebody is in trouble with the mental health or this really struggling with past trauma or anxiety, like we know it's outside of our scope of work, but how many times do we try to make the referrals to a higher level of care in that area? And people like, I'm not doing that, you know? And I think, oh, that might be time to audit their beliefs around getting support for mental health, because sometimes there's a message running there that, oh, Only weak people do that, or, you know, some of those kind of things. And in where an empowering belief would be, I'm worth the investment. And I think about that, because I still see somebody weekly.

Cara LaPlante 18:20
Yeah.

Michelle Lennon 18:22
Shout out to Pat Tucker.

Cara LaPlante 18:23
I think to what you said about mindset and how taking care of addiction health is. There's a learning curve. I think that's been a big perception change on my part, is that my perception of recovery, since being in this work a little bit and learning as much as I've had the opportunities to is that recovery really just is learning, learning about ourselves, learning about our support circles. And the part of learning about ourselves is this deep dive into our beliefs, or identities, and also the example of participants not accessing mental health support, and instead of, you know, giving them a label of, oh, they're resistant. Oh, they don't want help, they don't actually want to be better.

Michelle Lennon 19:18
Oh, how many times have we heard that? Oh, they they're not ready, or they don't want it, yeah.

Cara LaPlante 19:24
Yeah. When, in reality, as coaches like we have the opportunity to ask those questions about them and really find and really start to open some doors into what's really going on here, because what's being said is not always the inner truth.

Michelle Lennon 19:41
Yeah. What kind of disempowering limiting beliefs do you hear in coaching session sometimes?

Cara LaPlante 19:46
Absolutely. I'm a junkie, I'm an alcoholic. That's that label, which you know can be, well, it is, it's stigmatizing, and it is a limiting belief. Belief that, especially for someone trying to enter the learning process of recovery, having that core belief that you're just a junkie always will be a junkie. Where are you gonna are you gonna go from that you know? How are you where are you going? I love the example of I could never go to college. I could never own a home, stuck in this apartment, and then the and then the mental health one too, like the counseling's for the weak. You know, men don't cry,

Michelle Lennon 20:31
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, because we have seen people that we've worked with buy their own houses, go to school, get advanced degrees even, over a 10 year period, we're starting to see those kind of things, because it takes time to achieve any goals, but, but there is often a shift, you know, that people believe it's possible, and it has a lot to do with how they see themselves in their own identity. But you know, thinking about where our beliefs come from, when you work with participants, what do you see?

Cara LaPlante 21:12
Yeah, I think you know, talking about environment that you mentioned before, I think it's really what we've soaked in from those layers of people in our lives and what we experience. Family, what we're hearing from our parents and aunts and uncles and cousins, siblings, what we're hearing from them, especially for folks in active addiction, right? They're being told by their family that they're this, they're that, they can't do this, they need to do that. Our friends, right? Who we surround ourselves with, and that's also a huge change in recovery too, is learning what type of supports are actually helpful, and then our culture, which is, which is so deep and broad, I feel like, but really who we surround ourselves with, and our experiences throughout our whole entire life is what's going to shape our beliefs.

Michelle Lennon 22:17
Yeah, and I think about health and wellness, it was not really valued in my home at all. I think about what my family values were, it was like religion, definitely religion, that we were in church every Sunday. As kids, we were on our knees by our bedside, you know, saying our prayers. And I just remember, you know, blessing everybody under the sun to avoid going to bed during my younger years, you know. But I think too about cleaning your plate like it was it was a value that you didn't waste things, you know, whether it be food or or things that could be recycled. You know, I look at my own life patterns of clutter, and, like, saving every piece of wood that I can. And I talked about my junk file, I'm like, Yeah, I made this out of my junk file. It's like, this badge of honor, you know. And you know substance use. Substance use was prevalent among my family, my extended family, my uncles and stuff. But I can remember, I can remember the last time my my dad came home under the influence, after a softball game at work, and my mother being done with it, and he just decided that he was going to put it down. But he had siblings that just weren't able to so, so I grew up experiencing addiction in my in my family, so I always had a fear of it, I would say. And you know, it was in my college years that I put alcohol down, but it was like by choice, because I was an idiot. You know, my behaviors were not good when I was drinking. So I just never got into substance use where, you know, some of my family members did. And, you know, I have a younger brother that struggles with it. And, of course, you know, my own family, but, but I think about the beliefs that I had around it, and how they were reinforced and changed, you know, rooted in my experiences like growing up, what I saw, what I didn't want for myself. And what I experienced in one of my relationships that, you know, it just, just know that that's not what I wanted for my life, you know, and I did not struggle with addiction. When I decided to put it down, I just put it down. So I don't identify as somebody in recovery, because I I never had that struggle. I live a recovery lifestyle, because that's what I live, you know what I mean? And most of my friends are in recovery at this point, too. But I do think about how we can change our beliefs, you know? And I did experience this with the the fitness coaches that I worked with, you know. I was thinking about how our behaviors will reinforce change in our beliefs. And one of the things that took me by surprise was having started out walking, you know, 15 minutes a day, got to a place where I was running about half hour a day, and I got into a car accident. Now I would have never identified as a runner, no way. Like half hour, it was, it was brutal, like it was something I didn't enjoy. It was like, I'm doing this for cardiac health, basically. But, but getting into a car accident, the officer had asked me how I knew she was in my lane for five seconds, and I could hear the countdown of my Fitbit in my head, and I was like, oh. And I just answered, oh, it's because I'm a runner. And it was like, where did that come from? You know, because my behavior was sending that message to my, my brain, because it was a repeated activity that I did on a regular basis. And so, so that's cool, because we can reprogram our our brain basically.

Narrator 26:20
Thank you for listening to Archways' Threads. If there is a topic you'd like to see us cover, email us at podcast@archwaysnh.org or call us at 603-960-2128, visit our website at archwaysnh.org to learn more about the Archways' family of recovery and family resource centers.