Peer Recovery Specialist

What is a peer recovery specalist?

A Peer Recovery Specialist, also known as a Peer Support Specialist or Peer Coach, is an individual who has personal lived experience with addiction, mental health challenges, or other significant life challenges and has successfully achieved recovery. They use their personal experience, combined with specialized training and certification, to provide support, guidance, and mentorship to others who are on the recovery journey.

Peer Recovery Specialists serve as role models and advocates, offering empathy, understanding, and encouragement to individuals in recovery. They provide emotional support, help develop coping strategies, and assist with navigating the recovery process. Their primary goal is to empower individuals by fostering hope, promoting self-determination, and facilitating connections to community resources and support networks.

These specialists typically work as part of a treatment team or within community-based organizations, such as recovery centers, addiction treatment programs, or mental health agencies. They work collaboratively with professionals in the field to enhance the recovery experience and improve overall outcomes for individuals seeking recovery.

It’s important to note that Peer Recovery Specialists are not clinical therapists or counselors. Instead, they provide non-clinical support and serve as a source of inspiration and guidance based on their own personal journey of recovery.

Forward-focused, solutions-driven coaching to address:

Management of mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and social health
Personal and professional stress management.
Creating integration and flow between personal and professional goals.
Relieving mental, emotional, and physical fatigue and burnout.
Overcoming low productivity and reconnecting with meaning and purpose.
Substance use management.

Topics that are covered during the coaching process include, but are not limited to:

Developing a personal wellness plan.
Determining and incorporating personal beliefs and values into daily life.
Understanding our needs and wants and being able to set healthy boundaries.
Rebuilding recovery capital which is the breadth and depth of your internal and external resources.
Identifying and responding to triggers and stressors.
Understanding and creating healthy personal and professional relationships.
Undertaking effective goal setting and action planning.
Exploring healthy lifestyle choices that work for you!

What is Recovery Coaching?

Recovery Coaching is about:

Rebuilding recovery capital in the physical, mental, emotional, social & spiritual areas of your life.
Developing a personalised recovery plan in line with your unique goals, dreams & aspirations.
Setting realistic, long-term goals and developing short-term action plans to achieve them within reasonable time frames.
Identifying harmful triggers that could result in lapse or relapse, and effectively learning to deal with these issues in daily life with the use of forward-focused and solutions-driven tools and techniques.
Learning about the physiological and neurological elements of substance and behavioural abuse disorders, and what the major causes of addiction are believed to be.
Understanding and challenging faulty, habitual thought patterns, habits & behaviours, and replacing them with improved ways of dealing with potentially difficult and challenging situations.
Establishing healthy, self-loving personal boundaries to build strong, interdependent relationships in your personal and professional life.
Finding the answers to your personal truth and living an empowered, authentic life.
Working in a collaborative, accountable relationship with a coach to achieve a more balanced, holistic approach to long-term recovery and wellness.
Creating a safe, collaborative space to explore possibilities and the availability of personal and community resources to aid sustained recovery.

Recovery Coaching is not about:

FRAPping… Fixing, Rescuing, Advising or Projecting our emotions, experiences, feelings and solutions onto others.
Being sick…in the coaching space you are a well person who is best able to develop your recovery plan.
Treating addiction…recovery coaching operates within the wellness and positive psychology paradigm and is not a replacement for substance abuse and addiction treatment.
Revisiting the past and the causes of addiction…it’s about moving forward in a solutions’-driven, goal-orientated way.
Being given advice and answers to your questions…you have all the answers you need inside yourself.
Being told what to do and how to do it…the long-term goals you choose and short-term plans you make will be your own.
Holding onto guilt, shame & anger…it’s about letting go of the past, embracing forgiveness and learning to live in the present.