Are You Comfortable?

Today I was thinking about two words, comfortable and complacent. These two words scare me to death. They are the last two words I ever want to use to define my life. I don’t mind words like struggling or challenged. In fact, I welcome struggles and challenges. They are the reason that we grow. Let us look at the word complacent and comfortable in a couple of different contexts.

For starters, I am in recovery from an addiction to more. Yes, I preferred methamphetamine then alcohol but I would use whatever was available. My addiction did not stop there, either. I was addicted to money, power, women and violence. I have been in recovery for 4 ½ years now. I work in the field of recovery and have for about 6 years (4 ½ years in recovery but 6 in the field may puzzle you. I consider abstinent and recovery two completely different things). I sit in multiple meetings every week, since I conduct them. I go to trainings and read the latest research on addiction and recovery but I know I do not have it figured out. 

I can never allow myself to get comfortable and complacent. If I do, I might lose focus. You see, my addiction is not gone. It is at work in the back of my head; lifting weights, running on the treadmill and doing research on the internet. My addiction gets smarter, stronger and more cunning. It is searching for a way to take my life over again. Comfortable and complacent has caused me to relapse once before. I cannot relapse again. I am pretty sure that I don’t have another recovery left in me.

How about work? I work in the field of addiction. I am currently a counselor for an organization that has DWI and Drug Court contracts, so I work with clients and teams from those 2 courts. I have been doing that for 5 plus years now. I have also in that time period worked with residential and outpatient clients. I feel that I am pretty good at what I do. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology, a Master’s degree in Social Work and I am a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker). I have 4 ½ years in recovery after a 20 plus year addiction. I am street and book educated in this field.

I can never allow myself to get comfortable and complacent. My clients deserve better. Comfortable and complacent tell me that I don’t have to go the extra mile for them. I can kick back on my laurels and coast. Absolutely not, this is so much more than people’s freedom. It is their very lives that they can lose if they go back out there. If they do, is it my fault? No, but I want to know that I did everything I could to give them the best interventions and support I could. Complacency does none of that.

How about faith? I have been going to church for about 6 years and got saved 4 ½ years ago. I know the songs and I raise my hand when I worship. I tithe like I should. I pray. I don’t judge and I am accepting of all people. In fact, I love the services I go to and I feel accepted and know that I am doing what I need to be doing after I hear them. I know the primary message of the Bible and it comforts me because I know Jesus loves me and that I am saved. I love that everybody can go to my church and not feel called out and no one will judge me if I make mistakes here and there.

I can never allow myself to get comfortable and complacent. When I think of Christ and the early Christians the last thing I think of is warm and fuzzy. They lived a radically different life that led to many of them being killed. We are called to be Christ-like. Christ told us people would hate us at they hated Him and to daily pick up our cross. Those two things do not sound comfortable nor do they fit into a complacent life. I should be talking about feeling the Spirit move, not how rocking the band is.

In the end, complacency kills. It could cost me my job. It could cost me my sobriety. It could cost me my eternal soul. This is not something to mess around with. I should challenge myself all of the time. I should surround myself with people that help build me up and people that I can help build up. I should not live my life comfortably. We are called to lead by example, to be salt and light. I can’t do that when I live a comfortable life, blend in with everyone else and never call anybody out for their actions. That is ordinary. I don’t know about you, but I was born to be extraordinary!

Speaking at the MADCP Convention

I got an opportunity to be the closing speaker at the Missouri Association of Drug Court Professionals (MADCP) annual conference that was this past week. I was not supposed to speak. The closing speaker's mother had a heart attack on Thursday and was in intensive care. He could not make it, so on Thursday morning I was asked if I could speak Friday afternoon to close out the conference.

I said yes, and then began to work on what I would say. The conference was attended by a lot of probation officers, prosecuting attorneys, counselors, drug court judges and drug court administrators. Even the chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court was in attendance. I knew that I needed to share about me, but also about how they are the catalysts behind the changes we make.

The conference was entitled "A Generation of Transformation" because it has been 20 years since the first drug court began in the state of Missouri. I looked back 20 years and realized that I was incarcerated in Booneville Correctional Center 20 years ago. That is where I would begin what I had to say.

The more I pieced together what I was going to say, the more a theme came to me. I do not mean to call out programs, but I am going to do that in this blog and I did it in my speech. Not because they are bad programs, but because there is a huge disservice they are doing to people who are in them. I also called out counselors because one had impacted me at one time. I am sure if that happened to me, it happens to others as well.

I started by discussing who I am today and what I am identified by. I am David Stoecker and sometimes that is followed by LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) or RASAC II (Registered Associate Substance Abuse Counselor). Twenty years prior I was identified as David Stoecker 190415. Those were the numbers the state used to identify me once I got into the prison system.

Then I discussed the first generation of my life. I talked about physical and sexual abuse from various people in my life. I discussed having an alcoholic father and divorced parents and how all of that turned to violence. I got into marijuana use at 12 followed by alcohol and other drugs. I also talked about dying in a car wreck, overdosing, attempting suicide, prison and shooting up methamphetamine.

Then I had a probation officer that saw something in me I did not see in myself. Because she saw something, she offered me residential treatment instead of revoking my probation and sending me back to prison. Than I relapsed, but eventually I began doing outpatient and getting into college.

I don’t know if you know this, but as addicts we are great criminal thinkers. I was working in a restaurant and saw my counselor come in and sit at the bar. After running up a $50 tab he left inebriated. This is the same guy who told me a drug is a drug, and that alcohol was a drug period. My criminal thinking kicked in, and I reasoned that if he could drink so could I. That started my 8 year stint with alcoholism.

In  college I found recovery by giving God a try. After using jail, house arrest, scared straight, prison, suicide, medication for a myriad of diagnosis over the years as well as counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation and anonymous meetings and not finding success I turned it over to God once and for all. It worked. I stopped using, drinking, smoking cigarettes, getting into fights and having premarital sex while beginning to attend church full time.

Several things enabled that change:

·         Converting from an Agnostic to a Christian.

·         Changing playgrounds and playmates.

·         No longer being ashamed of my past and hiding it from everyone.

·         Sharing my recovery with everyone who will listen and anywhere that will have me.

·         Realizing that community service was not something the judge ordered.

·         Knowing all that I represent and wanting to represent them well.

I realized I needed hope and was not finding it through Agnosticism or Atheism. If I was to have a positive life, I needed to be around positive people who had goals and dreams they were chasing. In sharing my past struggles and the positive choices I make now with everybody I have been able to chase my own dreams and begin to see them come to fruition.

I could work through my s hame about the past, build self-esteem and self-respect by beginning to see that I was a part of the community. I did not have to hide who I used to be, because I am not that person today.If not for what I went through and the choices I made in the past, I would not be able to make the same impact on the people around me. Thankfully, I do make an impact and I credit my past for allowing that.

The final piece of recovery was stepping out of anonymity while owning and sharing my past. I have found that I can speak more freely and be a bigger part of the community by representing recovery and doing it well (we will talk about that more next Saturday in my next blog). We need to take our recovery into the community and display it with pride.

We need to build up alumni groups that go out into the community and help benefit local, national and worldwide causes. This is how we educate the public and remove the stigma associated with addiction and recovery. We put ourselves out there as people in recovery and show the world what we can do. That helps remove the stigma and destroy people's preconceived notions of addiction.

The amazing thing is that this is beginning to happen. It is happening because the drug courts are giving people better tools and holding them accountable when they don’t use them. It is occurring because the drug courts are giving people chances to become part of society that they never would have had in the past. It just needs to happen more and be talked about more so the message of positive things the recovery community is doing spreads.

I am blessed to be a part of the drug court/recovery community. I have seen how far the legal and recovery systems have come in the past 20 years, and I can’t wait to see how much further developed they will be 20 more.   

Great News for "Religious" Parents (Religious People in General)

I am a substance abuse counselor (RASAC II) by vocation and a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) by degree. Due to both of those being a part of my employment, I have to go to training so that I can keep my credentials. This is about the training that I attended last Friday. It had information on a couple of studies that I had not seen. I then looked up several other studies. I want to share this information with you.

These are several different studies I have come across. The first study is done by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. It was a two year study that they conducted they found a significant difference between children and adults who attended church and those who did not (http://www.casacolumbia.org/templates/PressReleases.aspx?articleid=115&zoneid=48). Let us look at the adults first.

Adults who did not consider religious beliefs important were 3 times likelier to binge drinks, 4 times likelier to use illicit drugs other than marijuana and 6 times likelier to use marijuana. Adults who never attend religious services were found to be 7 times likelier to drink, 5 times likelier to use an illicit drug other than marijuana and 8 times likelier to use marijuana. So what about the children?

Teens who did not consider religious beliefs important were 3 times likelier to binge drink, 4 times likelier to use marijuana and 7 times likelier to use illicit drugs. Teens who never attend religious services were 3 times likelier to use marijuana and binge drink and 4 times likelier to use illicit drugs than teens who attended at least one religious service weekly.

In a study conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that 10.1% of individuals who attended fewer than 25 religious services in the past year had used illicit substances in the past month while only 2.9% of individuals who had attended 25 or more services in the past year had. A study of youth done by Indiana University showed that non-religious students were twice as likely to use drugs, alcohol and engage in binge drinking when compared to students that were religious (http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/articles/religion2.htm.)

The researchers studied data gathered through Monitoring the Future, the University of North Carolina's four year nationally representative survey of high school seniors. Among specific findings were that especially religious youths were less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs and more likely to start later and use less if they started at all, he said. They went to bars less often, received fewer traffic tickets, wore seat belts more, took fewer risks and fought less frequently. Shoplifting, other thefts, trespassing and arson also were rarer. "Religious 12th-graders argued with parents less, skipped school less, exercised more, participated more in student government and faced fewer detentions, suspensions and expulsions," Smith said (http://monitoringthefuture.org/).

In another study conducted by Byron R. Johnson, Director and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, University of Pennsylvania, and Adjunct Fellow, Center for Civic Innovation, Manhattan Institute of 1,087 youth ages 11 to 17 (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_12.htm), he arrives at a number of important findings:

• Religious low-income urban teenagers are much less likely to take illicit drugs than otherwise comparable teenagers living in the same high-poverty neighborhoods.
• Highly religious youth living in poor urban neighborhoods are less likely to use illicit drugs than non-religious youth living in middle-class suburban neighborhoods.
• The degree to which being religious reduces a youth’s probability of using illicit drugs increases the older a teenager becomes.
• Youth who have good family relations, do well in school, have non-drug-using friends, and possess anti-drug attitudes are even less likely to use illicit drugs when they are also religious.
• The effect of religious commitment in cutting illicit drug use among poor urban teenagers is statistically significant for all categories of illicit drugs including hard drugs.

In closing, I want to say that I too have found this to be true. I was an addict in and out of jail and prison when I was Agnostic. I have not so much as gotten a traffic ticket since I was saved. I was hopeless, and without hope I began using and eventually became mired in addiction. This blog looks at research that shows that the non-religious use drugs and alcohol at much higher rates than the religious (if you look up these same studies you will find that they also commit crimes and commit suicide at higher rates, also). I have been told by many atheists and agnostics that my son would be better off raised without religion, and that I was stupid for feeling otherwise. "God is just a worthless fairy tale that you are better off not buying into," several have told me. For some reason, that just did not sound right to me. Guess what? It wasn't.

I now have statistically significant research that supports me sharing my faith and raising my son to have a relationship with a Higher Power. Raising my son in the church will give him a better chance to live drug-free/sober, not commit suicide and stay out of prison than if  he does not attend. For me as a father, that is huge. Besides, my son is deserves that chance!!