January 18, 2024
Dear Hossein,
Thank you for sharing the history of Congress 60’s views of and service to families. What you describe is very similar to the evolution of such views and practices in the United States. Historically, families were viewed by most treatment programs as at best a distraction from treatment or at worst the cause of addiction. This led to many treatment programs prohibiting patient contact with families during treatment and offering no support to families whose loved one was undergoing treatment for addiction. The remnants of such attitudes continue to linger in many U.S. treatment programs, but most have come to other conclusions, the most important of which include the following that parallel what you describe.
One: Family life (relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children, between the children, and between the family and extended family members) is severely damaged through the addiction process. These damaged relationships are the consequences of addiction, not its cause.
Two: The abnormal adjustments of family members and the family as a whole constitute efforts to maintain psychological and relational health in the face of the sustained trauma of addiction.
Three: Family adjustments during addiction must be changed to support the initiation and maintenance of recovery. This readjustment process can be very stressful to all involved and is best done through sustained and structured family support.
Four: Families provided such support can achieve long-term health and happiness. Addiction recovery rates are superior for families provided such support.
Congress 60 is a model of such sustained family support through its range of family support activities. That said, I know of no other program that has adopted the gifting practice that you describe, which I think is a wonderful ritual. I also think your insistence on a balance between mutual support between families in Congress 60 and respect for family privacy is a distinctive feature of your approach. There are two paths of recovery: recovery of the individual and recovery of the family. What has evolved within Congress 60 supports both these paths.
Dr. Best is writing a book about recovery capital—the internal and external assets that can be used to initiate recovery, maintain recovery, and enhance quality of personal and family life in long-term recovery. There is a relatively new body of research that focuses on such assets rather than the traditional literature that focuses on addiction-related pathology. Dr. Best is editing a book whose chapters will be authored by those who conducted these early studies on recovery capital. What he has asked me to do is write the book introduction and help write one of the chapters.
Dr. Best is doing some of the best research on addiction recovery and is now involved in multiple studies and many publications. I regret our earlier efforts to involve him in studies of Congress 60 faced so many political and logistical obstacles. He is now in a new university so perhaps this is something we can explore again in the future.
Until recently, very little attention was paid in addiction treatment programs to supporting the continued education of patients undergoing treatment. But recently, programs have been established to support the continued education of those who would like to complete high school or go on to college or graduate school. Some of these individuals want to go on to become specialists working in addiction treatment. I was encouraged to hear of the many members of Congress 60 who are pursuing advanced education. The experiential knowledge they have gained in Congress 60 will be of great value to the universities they are attending.
I enjoyed your story of the drunk looking for his lost keys under a streetlight. Many lessons in that story.
Please extend my warmest regards to your family and to all members of Congress 60.
Friends and Brothers Forever