However We Got Here

When America declared war on alcoholism and drug addiction in the 1960s and early 1970s, it did so without an army to wage this war. There were quite simply no foot soldiers to fill the front-line positions of service delivery. A workforce had to be created …and created quickly. At what seemed like the cutting edge of the field were the Minnesota Model alcoholism programs that used recovering alcoholics and the therapeutic communities that used ex-addicts counselors and managers. As the field expanded, there was an enormous market for recovering people willing to work in the expanding network of addiction service programs. They were referred to as "paraprofessionals" or—more benignly—as "professionals by experience." Although the use of recovering people in service activity had a long history, it was also influenced by a contemporary community mental health movement that experimented with the training and deployment of indigenous workers who had no formal academic credentials.

Those who worked in the alcoholism field in these early programs were mostly middle-aged white men, recovering alcoholics with strong A.A. backgrounds. Few had relevant formal education or supervised clinical training, and most were hired, not because of their skills, but because of certain traits that were thought to be useful in work with alcoholics: flexibility, humor, warmth, and creativity.

Most of the first "ex-addicts" drawn into this burgeoning filed were ethnically diverse, and most brought a past history of heroin addiction, and—not uncommonly—had more prior contact with penal institutions than with educational institutions. An incredible variety of people began working as alcoholism and drug-abuse counselors without regard to their education, their training, or the stability of their personal recovery from addiction. Many were hired first as non-therapeutic aides, but they soon evolved into counselors when it became apparent that they could quickly establish deep rapport with and influence upon clients.

The professionals who worked in the addictions field in the 1960s and 1970s were an interesting mix. In its earliest days, the field served as both a dumping ground and an oasis, drawing some of the lowest-and highest-functioning professionals from allied human service fields. At a time in which choosing to work with alcoholics and addicts was itself viewed as a professional kiss of death, professionals who risked entry into the addiction filed did so either because they had few choices or out of a special attraction to the field.

The field attracted those with their own personal or family-related addiction issues and those who were drawn to a frontier profession that valued creativity and innovation. Others were swept into the addictions field from their participation in what was being christened "the counterculture." It was out of their stew of backgrounds, personalities, and circumstances that the fates of the early programs and their clients were shaped.

Now…counselors are still entering the field for much of the same motivation, however they are coming in more aware and educated and with a multitude of diverse focus that has broadened the type of assistance we can give our early recovering clients. We are much more aware of coexisting addictions and behaviors and like me and my passion for assisting the compulsive gambler and her/his family members we can easily find trained clinicians who specialize in eating issues and sexual issues and refer clients for assistance with all types of issues.