Building A Bridge From Addiction To Recovery

A dozen years ago, a corps of addiction-and-recovery specialists set out to create a bridge of comfort and support for recovering addicts struggling to stay on the road to sobriety.

The aim of nonprofit Connecticut Community Addiction and Recovery Inc. (CCAR) was to be a “face of recovery’’ in Hartford.

One of those involved in building the organization was a former Manchester golf pro, who himself at one time was snared deeply in the grips of an addiction to cocaine and alcohol.

Today, both Phillip Valentine and CCAR are on a clear path of sustaining a volunteer network – many of them people in recovery – that has emerged as an international model for recovery advocacy.

Along the way, say associates, Valentine, who is CCAR’s executive vice president, has become the “face and voice’’ of the organization.

Valentine stresses that CCAR is not a treatment program, rather a bridge meant to keep recovering drug abusers focused on their sobriety.

With a staff of 14 and more than 200 volunteers working in four offices — Hartford, Bridgeport, New London and Willimantic — and a $1 million annual budget, CCAR is the largest recovery support organization of its kind in the nation, according to authorities.

“They’ve become the model recovery advocacy organization in the country,’’ said William White, research adviser for Chestnut Health Services, a leading U.S. operator of addiction treatment centers, who has closely studied CCAR.

“I always think of Phil in terms of his passion,’’ said White, himself a person in recovery, “his great zest for life, his deep compassion for people still suffering from addiction and addiction-related problems.’’

On his 50th birthday recently, Valentine took time to reflect on his 22-year recovery from addictions that he traces to age 13, when he realized he craved alcohol. Drinking led him to cocaine, with both habits for a time derailing his college education and costing his job as a golf pro.

“There was a time in my life when I seriously doubted I’d make it to 50, much less 35,’’ he said, sitting in his second-floor office of a century-old house in the Colt Park neighborhood in Hartford’s South End.

“My recovery dates back to Dec. 28, 1987,’’ he said. It was on that date, he said, that he stood in a hospital delivery room holding his newborn daughter while “strung out on cocaine.’’

“I finally got some help and stayed clean ever since,’’ he said. “I’m not proud of that incident in the hospital, but I’m no longer ashamed.’’

When he isn’t criss-crossing the state and the country on speaking engagements, Valentine enjoys spending time with his family. His oldest daughter, Colleen, from his first marriage is 22. And he has four children — age 4 to 15 — with his second wife, Sandy, also a person recovery.

Valentine coaches soccer and golfs.

“He hero-worships Tiger Woods,’’ said Bill Leary, a Windsor Locks attorney who is president of CCAR’s board. “He is also a fishing fanatic — ocean surf casting. He devotes his two-week vacation to that pursuit — unsuccessfully.’’

“He’s just a charming guy,’’ said Leary, who has been in recovery for 28 years.

Thomas Kirk, who recently retired as commissioner of the state’s mental health and addiction services agency and is widely credited with shaping Connecticut as a recovery model, said Valentine has shown he is an effective administrator who can assemble, manage and tutor a capable staff.

Kirk said it was Valentine’s idea for CCAR to open an information center in Willimantic, known at one point as “Heroin Town’’ for being the epicenter of heroin addiction in Connecticut. Addicts and their families can go to the center for guidance on recovery.

“They helped turn it from ‘Heroin Town’ to ‘Recovery Town,’’ Kirk said.

During his recovery, Valentine says his life has been become a journey of personal discovery and new opportunities. He became aware of CCAR in 1997, shortly after its founding, and two years later was hired as associate director.

“When I first got into recovery, I didn’t know anything about recovery,’’ he said. “I didn’t know anything about treatment. I just knew I had a problem.’’

He went to the hospital, where he met “Smokey, the cab driver,’’ who guided him to various treatment programs that existed at the time.

“As I got into the 12 steps of recovery,’’ he said, “I came to realize I had experiences in my life to help other people with their addiction problems.’’

But he recognized, along with others, flaws in the recovery model that still exist in which addicts are treated with a one-size-fits-all-approach to sobriety, he said.

“Once someone has initiated recovery, the treatment community gets you through the first 28 days, but then they send you back out into the same environment,’’ Valentine said. “Relapse is prevalent.’’

With Valentine as its loudest voice, CCAR and much of the recovery community nationwide promote a new model in which treatment is tailored to the needs and circumstances of the addict. It is an approach that, Kirk says, Connecticut has embraced as a cost-effective and successful means to break the treatment-relapse cycle.

But new hurdles are emerging, he says.

“The trend now is that treatment programs are dwindling,’’ due to insurers’ unwillingness to pay for treatment, Valentine said. “But the number of addicts has stayed the same.’’

CCAR’s staff of 14 trains and oversees a network of more than 200 volunteers — many of them recovering addicts — who have daily or weekly contact with addicts.

“We call a person once a week for 12 weeks to check on how their recovery is going,’’ he said.

The phone outreach has a dual benefit, Valentine said. Recovering volunteers report that making those calls to other addicts helps them hold onto their own sobriety, he said.

“What they’ve done is taken people who were once part of the problem and organized them to become part of the solution,’’ White said.

Last year, CCAR volunteers made 32,000 calls to 1,200 individuals enrolled in its support program.

Valentine warns today’s emerging path to addiction is via suburban “pharm parties,’’ in which youths take drugs from their parents’ and grandparents’ medicine cabinets, put them into a bowl, and dispense them like Halloween candy.

But rather than emphasizing “the darkness of the disease’’ of addiction, “we focus on the light of recovery,’’ he said.

Millions have been spent, he said, researching the reasons people become addicts. Valentine would like to retrain the focus to changing the lifestyles of recovering addicts.

He said society interacts daily with more recovering addicts in leisure and work settings than they realize.

“People who are in recovery have a great work ethic,” Valentine said. “We might sing next to you in the church choir. We may sit next to you in the next cubicle.’’

Valentine says CCAR is his last career stop.

“To have a 10-year career here is the longest I’ve ever been anywhere,’’ he said. “I have no intention of leaving.’’