Abstract:
The idea that clinicians who are in recovery from addiction or substance
abuse working as addiction practitioners seems deeply counter-intuitive.
Compounding this is the problem that many have incurred criminal records,
so the idea seems, at best nonsensical. Yet the cold hard essentialisms of professionalization
and medicine gives way at times to the sophistry and serendipity
of empiricism. These former sufferers know what they are talking
about. The result is that there is an extremely high success rate in securing
employment at practitioner, supervisor and management level as well as popularity
with clients, due to them having a high affinity with lay experiences.
This is an exploratory sociological article intended to raise some issues that
present with the employment and training of recovering people as addiction
practitioners. The tentative conclusions are that counsellors in recovery have a
sophisticated awareness of the idiosyncrasies of the addiction field. However,
of much more impact is the issue that they face challenges, related to matters
of professionalization, stigma and the associated ongoing gentrification of the
addiction field. There is a need for further research and emerging themes
given the changing and reconfiguring nature of the health field and the wider
neo-liberal political arena. They also possess a resilient and strength based
wisdom not located in the over accessible neo-liberal vocabulary around these
precepts but have experiences of the encounter with the Gethsemane understanding
of deficit and purgatory; thereby the right to take back the stolen
neo-liberal appropriation of resilience. They also importantly have access to
alternative proven yet marginalised discourses that have stood the test of time.
