Strengths-Based Recovery

The traditional mental health and substance use delivery systems were highly influenced by the medical model, which emphasizes pathology, focusing on problems and failures in people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders. The basic approach is diagnosis and treatment.

The strengths-based approach allows practitioners and peer specialists to acknowledge that every individual has a unique

POSITIVE THINKING WORKS!

Positive attitudes make life more exciting. No matter what we do, attitudes go a long way toward making life a joy or a pain. Friendliness, cooperation, and dependability make life easier. Days pass quickly and our environment should be a pleasant place to be. Positive attitudes are emotional lifts that give an optimistic outlook to life in general.

Beliefs and Values

Beliefs and values strongly influence the choices individuals make and their resulting behavior. For example, someone who believes in having “lucky days” may gamble away large sums of money.

Most beliefs and values are formed in response to some basic needs. For example, a young child adopts parental beliefs and values out of a need to be loved and approved of by the parents. Similarly, a teenager might drastically change his beliefs in response to the need for a sense of belonging and approval.

Individuals are not always aware of the beliefs and values that are affecting their behavior.

Trauma-Informed Peer Support.

The six key principles of a trauma-informed approach include:

1. SAFETY

Both the peer specialist and peer must feel physically and psychologically safe. The setting and the interpersonal interactions must promote a sense of safety.

2. TRUSTWORTHINESS AND TRANSPARENCY

Decisions, goals, and processes are conducted with transparency to build and maintain trust with peers, family members, and others involved in the recovery process.

3. PEER SUPPORT

Peer support and mutual self-help are key vehicles for establishing safety and hope, building trust, enhancing collaboration, and utilizing stories and lived experience to promote recovery and healing.

4. COLLABORATION AND MUTUALITY

Importance is placed on partnering and collaborating. The peer specialist demonstrates that healing happens in relationships where there is a mutual sharing of power and decision-making.

5. EMPOWERMENT, VOICE AND CHOICE

Peers are supported in shared decision-making, choice, and goal setting to determine the plan of action they need to heal and move forward. They are supported in cultivating self-advocacy skills. Peer specialists are facilitators of recovery rather than controllers of the process.

2016 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Pilot Draft – Part 2

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6. CULTURAL, HISTORICAL, AND GENDER ISSUES

The peer support approach actively moves past cultural stereotypes and biases and uses processes that are responsive to the racial, ethnic, and cultural needs of the peer.

Intentional Peer Support (IPS) is different from traditional service relationships.

 IPS relationships are viewed as partnerships that invite and inspire both parties to learn and grow, rather than as one person needing to ‘help’ another.

IPS doesn’t start with the assumption of a problem each of us pays attention to how we have learned to make sense of our experiences, and then uses the relationship to create new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing.

 IPS promotes a trauma-informed way of relating instead of asking “What’s wrong?” we learn to ask “What happened?”

 IPS examines our lives in the context of mutually accountable relationships and communities looking beyond the mere notion of individual responsibility for change.

 IPS encourages us to increasingly live and move towards what we want instead of focusing on what we need to stop or avoid doing.

Exploring

Exploration statements are verbal statements that help explain relevant issues. Good exploring statements help define problems in terms of real and specific experiences, behaviors, and/or feelings. An exploration statement does not have to be a full question or sentence. It can simply be a word or phrase.