Addiction recovery happens in community. COVID-19 is making that very hard.
Jaden Korse usually attends three or four recovery meetings a week, at minimum.
Like many in addiction recovery, especially those in the early stages, Korse, 23, finds these in-person group meetings critical to his day-to-day endeavor to remain sober. Not only do the events add structure, they inject purpose, reminding him that he’s not at it alone. For someone with substance use disorder, support groups are often the life raft to stave off the undertow of withdrawal and isolation that can go hand in hand with addiction.
But in the four weeks since Kentucky diagnosed its first novel coronavirus case, in order to hobble the spread of the highly contagious viral respiratory disease that has infected nearly 2,000 Kentuckians, forced isolation is the new norm. And while adhering to Gov. Andy Beshear’s social distancing mandates requires personal sacrifice from virtually everyone, it can pose an especially dangerous threat to those in active recovery, who know idle time and solitude to be some of their worst enemies.
For someone like Korse, it harkens back to a darker time.
“For a lot of people, me included, prior to relapse, isolation is sort of a trait you’ll see,” Korse said last week. “It’s weird to forcibly be put into that, [since] it was something many of us would do in active addiction.”
It’s why those who offer addiction recovery services have been scrambling in recent weeks to provide alternatives to the in-person support group and other treatment services.
“Coronavirus is scary for all of us, but people with substance use disorders are really vulnerable,” Dr. Amanda Fallin-Bennett said. “Recovery support services rely on connection.”
Fallin-Bennett, who co-founded the Lexington recovery support services center Voices of Hope, said the organization in mid March transitioned all their in-person recovery coaching classes to telephone and to the online platform, Zoom, where multiple people can participate at once.
Larry Fieger, a recovery coach at Voices of Hope, leads some of the organization’s virtual meetings. When he’s not leading meetings, he spends most of his time on phone calls with anywhere from 15 to 50 participants a day, offering support and connecting them to resources.
Many of the people he speaks to have lost their jobs, are worried about paying the bills and being able to get food, he said — real concerns compounded by an already disorienting loss of structure.
“A lot of people I’ve spoken to and work with, they like routine. When you change literally everything about how your day normally goes, then you have idle time [and] you just don’t know what to do,” said Fieger. As someone in recovery, he said, “I’ve heard it over and over: don’t isolate, stay plugged in, stay connected.”
Already, he said, “I’ve had a few people that I work with who have returned to use.”
The fear is evident, Fallin-Bennett said. “We can just see it already in our participants, that fear,” of losing their jobs, housing, access to food, and relationships, especially because “it takes all that to really stabilize their life again.”
‘It doesn’t mean recovery has to stop’
On Wednesday morning, a video message from a recovery specialist for the University of Kentucky arrived in the inboxes of dozens of mothers in more than 40 Kentucky counties in addiction recovery.
“We do this together. We never have to be alone again,” Sarah Bell, lead peer specialist at Beyond Birth, told moms in a YouTube video. “We recover in community, and we suffer from the disease of addiction in isolation.”
Bell is a recovery specialist for the UK outpatient substance use disorder recovery program serving moms in all stages of parenting who are in recovery. She travels to the clinic one week a month, but otherwise works remotely from her home in Memphis.
Though these daily encouragement videos started about six months ago, now, in the age of social distancing, they’re one of only a few ways for staff to reach approximately 170 patients virtually, many of whom would drive from across the state for weekly in-person meetings, some as far as three hours.
Bell typically leads in-person meetings for patients. On Wednesday night, she led the organization’s first online recovery meeting via Zoom. Going forward, the group will offer at least two virtual meetings each weekday, in addition to these daily morning support videos and check-in phone calls.
Like most health care providers, this treatment center had to transition in a matter of days to a completely new, in some ways untested, way of offering care.
Though “this is unlike anything we’ve seen in health care in any of our lifetimes,” Director Holly Dye said, “When you work in an addiction treatment field, you’re used to chaos. In a way, we are viewing it as just another chaotic time,” in part because, “We are continually having to change the way we deliver services.”
A lot of that includes burning up the phones each day to have at least one direct point of contact with each patient.
“The most frequent comment I have heard is, ‘I don’t want to use, but . . .’” Bell said. “That is really showing a lot of growth in our women’s recovery: that they know this feeling of unease will not be remedied by using. We talk a lot about being able to sit with uncomfortable feelings.”
A point emphasized by Beyond Birth staff, all of whom are working staggered schedules both in the office and at home, is that just because most other aspects of life stop, it doesn’t mean recovery has to.
“Addiction is a chronic relapsing disease. That’s part of it,” Dye said. “Relapse starts in the mind: thinking that using once would be a solution. That’s the beginning step, so we try to catch it there.”
Typically for someone in recovery, cravings inflame at different parts of the day, said Bell, who is in recovery — during the quieter evening hours after the kids eat dinner, or maybe after they go to bed, for example. Beyond developing relapse prevention plans, Dye and her team, anticipating evenings to be more challenging, moved their daily meetings from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Since schools are closed, it’s a time of day, often, when many Beyond Birth moms have the first real time to themselves, and when feelings of loneliness and isolation may set in.
“Everybody is having the same thoughts and fears and feelings,” she said. But just because there’s a pandemic, “it doesn’t mean recovery has to stop, or restart, or be lost.”
‘We will trudge through this’
Jonathan Allen, who runs five Primary Purpose sober living homes in Lexington, knows his tenants are between a rock and a hard place.
Sober almost seven years, Allen, 31, has devoted most of his time lately to supporting his 30 or so tenants, many of whom have lost their jobs, including Korse, and are at varied stages of recovery.
This time of year, as the weather warms, he usually schedules a lot of community-building activities for his guys, in addition to the weekly meetings he facilitates: baseball and bowling leagues, community game nights, and camping.
He’s urging them, if they can’t work, to go on walks, exercise, and take turns working in the garden.
“There’s only so much Netflix and so many dumbbell curls someone can do,” he said. “It is taking a toll on them.”
In many ways, the in-person limitations test the extent of one’s resolve to remain sober, said Jeff Sample, another one of Allen’s tenants.
“It’s all about how far you’re willing to go for your recovery,” he said. “There is no growth without some uncomfortability.”
Still, Allen tries to bring small moments of reprieve.
“If they are going absolutely bonkers and they need a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at Kroger, to try and help them out,” Allen said. “I don’t know if it’s ethical or not, but for their safety, I’ll go to Kroger, I’ll get them a box of Cheerios, and then I’ll just sit there and talk to them.”
Allen, also works with Voices of Hope, where many of his tenants attend meetings. He now spends a lot of his time connecting them with services, offering personal support, and assuring them they won’t lose their housing if they can’t pay rent.
“A lot of them have lost their employment because of this, and I’ve assured them, even though they can’t pay rent, we will trudge through this road together,” Allen said.
Korse, who has lived in one of Allen’s apartments for about seven months, lost his job in the service industry when coronavirus hit. He typically wouldn’t qualify for unemployment insurance but now does, as Gov. Beshear has opened the enrollment process to most everyone. But, as have others, he got a letter after applying saying he didn’t qualify — a kink the state is trying to iron out. Korse tried to resolve the issue by calling the unemployment hotline on a recent week day more than 30 times, but he never got through.
On Friday morning, Korse still hadn’t heard back. But he was trying to focus on things in his life he could control, like attending a virtual recovery meeting through Voices of Hope later that night.
“It has been a struggle to remain clean, I guess. There’s some days where my thoughts sort of run toward, ‘You know, things can be [messed] up for a long time, who wouldn’t want to get high,” he said. “A lot of addicts will turn apathetic when even smaller things going wrong and go use again, let alone something as big as this.”
But Korse said he’s dedicated to not losing sight of recovery, amid all the uncertainty: “We’re just trying to relearn how to live life and how to appropriately deal with stuff like this.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 9:57 AM.
