The River is Reality
1. Early Life
I was brought up in a middle class home with two parents. From the outside it looked like a comfortable upbringing. I was sent to boarding school aged 8 so had a ‘good’ education also. Around this age my mother’s alcoholism started to develop and came to dominate our lives over the coming years in a bad way.
Going into adolescence was a very difficult time. As a result when I encountered drink and drugs in my early to mid teens they found a very willing recruit. They allowed me to fit in, belong and function at a time when I felt like none of those things. It continued like that until my early 20s by which time I could not really function properly or get a career going.
2. First Career
I stopped using drugs at that point and settled down a bit. This led into learning how to program (coding) which suited me really well.
I loved systems, and developed a career over the next decade moving from the coding side into sales support, sales and then management. This was the eighties and I started drinking more and more.
Eventually that blew up and I self-destructed in my early 30s. Back to the drawing board, but the systems came in handy later on.
3. Retraining
I knew it was time to change, and took some time out just ticking over. I did voluntary work to explore different areas, which led me into training as an Addiction Counsellor at a residential rehab.
This led to further training in psychotherapy and family therapy, so a new career path was established. Through the psychotherapy training I got a job in the NHS, where I stayed for over 10 years whilst completing the rest of my training.
I registered as a Psychotherapist with UKCP in 2000. In this period I was no longer drinking at all, and have not since then.
4. Slow Beginings
The clinic I worked in was pioneering new approaches to the treatment of people with Personality Disorders (their words, not mine). It forced me to look beyond conventional ideas of psychotherapy as the patients were so complex, usually with long histories of distress.
Fairly early on I started working with Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which was then a new treatment for people who were self harming and attempting suicide. We were the first outpatient clinic in the UK to pioneer DBT, and a small team of us worked it out with little support.
This was my entry into behavioural work, and I was not a fan initially. It took most of 10 years to work DBT out!
5. ACT
In 1999 I found out about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is behavioural too. Unlike DBT it is more focused on the whole person and less on the symptom, so I found this much better and took to it like a duck to water.
It was a really good fit for someone like me. It incorporated the personal growth element that was becoming more of a focus in my own life, as I had been attending personal therapy as part of my psychotherapy training.
This was in Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT), and I ended up spending 6 years in a Kleinian based therapy. I only needed to do 2 years for the qualification, so draw your own conclusions!!
6. Behavioral Science
I read most of the books on ACT and then wanted more training. It was entirely US based at the time (2001), and my children were young so I decided to bring the training to the UK.
I invited Steve Hayes to come over and ran two workshops- one in Southampton, one in London. From there I ended up running workshops myself and during the next 5 or 6 years trained over 2500 people, pioneering the growth of ACT in the UK.
I set up the ACT section in BABCP in 2006, and was presenting at the main conferences too. By now my shortcomings in behavioural science were becoming painfully exposed so I started learning it via individual supervision and mentorship from Jason Luoma (thanks Jason).
Like the therapy this went on longer than I thought, and it was 6 or seven years before I was up to speed (2011/12). Luckily I like reading.
7. The Matrix
During the ACT period I had started working with people recovering from addiction in a group setting. There was no group model in ACT so I adapted the basic principles and applied them to the group-work I had been doing for 15 years.
Out of that I connected with Kevin Polk who was following a similar line at the VA in Togus, New Hampshire. I went to visit him and out of that collaboration came the ACT Matrix.
This model is described in the book of the same name which I co-authored, Essentials of the ACT Matrix, along with other publications. The ACBS website is a good place to learn more (and find a really old video that I did). Basically the Matrix is very simple and easy to learn.
8. Peer Work
From 2000 I started working with a project in Fareham (UK) called Spotlight that was run by people who were also in recovery from addiction. I will refer to this as peer work from now on. Over the next decade I reduced my NHS work to part time and increased the peer work.
It was successful (and cheap) so it led to more work in Portsmouth, UK. As we started using the Matrix so the project became more successful, due to its simplicity. By the end of 2012 it had spread across the whole of Portsmouth.
We were running 20 meetings per week in the community and a further 10 per week in residential or inpatient settings, including the general hospital.
9. ACT Peer Recovery
There was a change of policy for UK addiction funding in 2013 so I decided not to continue that project further. However, there was a large residual group of experienced peers and we started meeting weekly to think about how to take things forwards. We named ourselves ACT Peer Recovery. A not-for-profit was established in 2014 based on the founding principles that the peers worked out. These are still the same principles we abide by today with one addition- localisation.
From early 2015 I started working in the north west of England around the Manchester area. It was the same peer model based on the ACT Matrix. As it grew then Public Health England (PHE) evaluated us, to be considered as a mutual aid offering. This is the term used for self help (peer) meetings which includes AA and NA as the most well known examples. In the summer of 2015 we were included in national policy, and from there a lot of interest was generated. By the end of 2019 ACT Peer Recovery had a presence in over a third of England, and was generating interest from abroad.
I was working almost exclusively with the peers now and retired as a psychotherapist in 2018.
10. Going Online
Covid came along and brought all of that to a sudden halt. So I returned to my IT background and we developed an online offering.
We launched the first version within 3 months, and changed the name to Pause. Recover. Initially the online offering was somewhat crude and relied on WhatsApp groups, but we had an online platform in place to build on.
I tried turning this into an App, but after a fair amount of effort it become clear this was not the right vehicle. The third attempt has been successful by combining the benefits of the online environment with individual support via messaging. It works really well with people who are not fully dependent.
In the latest development I have taken the ACT-PR materials and turned them into a course called First things First. The pilot has been successful, and a website is in the pipeline as of January 2024