Recovery Capital

We believe that drug and alcohol treatment has for too long been focused on the problem and not the solution. Even in services which offer psychosocial interventions, there is sometimes too much emphasis on what went wrong, rather than a real focus on how to put it right. This is not to say that we should ignore the areas in a person’s life where things have gone wrong, but that we should intensify our concentration on their strengths and resources: their Recovery Capital. This is a term which is increasingly used within the recovery movement to signify those strengths and resources, the options available to a person, which he or she has identified as factors that will maximise their chances of recovery. Broadly speaking, a person’s strengths and resources exist within and externally. Moral values and beliefs, faith, skills, aspirations, intelligence, imagination, conscience; these are but a few of the many internal qualities and characteristics that our clients have brought to the recovery challenge over the years. Family, work, leisure, education and training, mutual aid groups, housing; there are many resources in the community which our clients identify as areas in which he or she already has a foothold and would do well to build upon, or conversely where a weak purchase of these kinds of resources is indicative of that person’s needs if they are more likely to succeed.