What Addicts Have in Common

Darren Wrightman had a glow on. But it wasn't the glow that alcohol and drugs used to give him. Wrightman is from Walpole Island, a First Nations reserve not far from Windsor. His Aboriginal ancestry, bright blue sweater and stylishly cut long hair made him stand out from the rest of the sleepy crowd filling the auditorium.

There were a lot of hard faces and hard bodies in the group. They were mostly non-Aboriginal men with tattoos and heavily muscled arms. A slow grin spread across Wrightman's face as the motivational speaker up front worked hard to stimulate the crowd.

It was 7:30 on a Monday morning at the Brentwood Recovery Home.

"Come on, how many of you out there can say you've done anything for someone else this weekend?" shouted the speaker.

"Or did you just lay around feeling sorry for yourselves, trying to get someone to do something for you?"

A slight man in front, wearing a grey V-necked sweater, raised his hand. "I helped my sister move this weekend," he said.

"How did that make you feel?" the speaker asked, but in a sneering kind of way.

"I felt good," said the man.

"You felt good!" the speaker repeated. "Well, what do you know about that? It feels good to help other people. Who'd have thought so? Not many of you, I'd say. Drinking and drugs used to feel good, didn't they? Now you've got to find other ways to feel good. And helping people is a great way to do that."

The facilitator continued his tirade against selfishness until the crowd broke for coffee and then into smaller discussion groups.

"You can tell how long a person has been here by the look on his or her face," said Charlie Baird, an addictions counsellor from Newfoundland raised at the Mount Cashel orphanage who came to Brentwood for help a decade ago and has been working there since. "We take a before and after picture, and many people hardly recognize themselves when their three months are up."

Darren Wrightman reflected on his own three months. "I feel great compared to where I was the day I walked in," he said. "I was broken, I was down. I didn't care if I was dead or alive. I didn't want to be around people, really. I could have sat in jail and been quite fine there."

Wrightman had been jailed for spousal assault, and the Brentwood Recovery Home was one of the few places that would take him with an outstanding criminal charge.

"It wasn't my first choice," he told me. "A ninety-day program to quit drinking seemed like another jail sentence. But today I've changed. I feel better about myself. I've been able to dump a lot of the resentments and the pain that was kind of keeping me from wanting to live and keeping me in a bad place."

Health Canada funds fifty-six treatment centres as part of its National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program, and most Aboriginal addicts prefer treatment centres that are run by their own people. At the Brentwood Recovery Home there's no burning of sage and no sweat lodge. It's a bare-bones kind of place that operates on the belief addicts are the same, no matter what culture they come from.

Dr. Wilfred Gallant, a social work professor at the University of Windsor and a former addict, has written a book about Brentwood called Sharing the Love That Frees Us. Gallant's own positive experience at Brentwood led him to study what makes the centre's program work. From Father Charbonneau, he writes, he learned that an addict has replaced "the need for love, caring and sharing, intimacy, work, play, family, relations and so on" with "a misplaced obsession for lust, inordinate power, control, sexual prowess, workaholism, seduction, family dysfunction and pseudo relationships."

According to the Brentwood definition of addiction, the substance or activity itself, whether it is alcohol, drugs or gambling, does not create the addict. An addict is created from some trauma early in life that leaves an emotional or spiritual void. "Each alcoholic is hurt, wounded or seriously offended at an early age, and carries this resentment, turmoil and confusion into later years, adopting a dysfunctional approach to life, people, situations and events," Gallant writes.

Darren Wrightman began drinking at the age of eight while living in a group home. "For me, alcoholism was about trying to change everybody," he said. "When it didn't work, it brought me down to my knees and into a whole lot of pain. I've learned to accept that the only thing I can change is myself, instead of always trying to change everything around me."

Karl S., twenty-two years old at the time, is also from Walpole Island. He allowed me to record one of his group sessions.

This was his seventh week at Brentwood. He leaned forward so that the men seated in the small circle could hear him better.

He had been asked to talk about "conformity."

"I didn't give a fuck about a lot of things," Karl told the group. "Like, I was supposed to spend time with my girlfriend, I wouldn't do that. I'd be out screwing around with some other chick. I never conformed to anything. I didn't give a shit about nothing, especially the law. I never conformed to being a big brother, a good son. School, I was terrible in school. I didn't want to listen, I guess, I don't know. That's my understanding, anyways, of conforming. I just didn't give a fuck, plain and simple."

"Life was yours, eh?" said the alumni member who was facilitating this discussion.

"Yeah, life was mine, and I lived it how I wanted to live it," Karl said. "I didn't care how people thought about me. I'd go into a party where I had six or seven enemies and I wouldn't give a shit; I'd walk into that party by myself. If I wasn't allowed somewhere, I'd still go."

"So what does conforming mean to you now, as we're sitting here?"

"I'm starting to listen, not going and doing those stupid things that I used to do," Karl said. "Abide by the law, try to listen more, I guess. I'm just thinking about life now, like ahead, what am I going to do? I never thought about what I was going to do. I was always going to grow up and be a gangster.

My plan then was to sell drugs and knock people's heads off and rob for what I need."

"Alcoholism in many definitions is a disease of self," Brentwood's executive director, Don Russell, explained during an interview in his small office. "a a will use terms like 'selfwill run riot'. It's self, self, self, me, me, me and I, I, I. So any opportunity we have, we make sure they get the message that there's a 'we'. There are others. There's family. There's friends. There's peers you work with, and so on. It's the 'we' that's going to get us out of addiction."

Russell has a Master's degree in social work and a lot of addiction counselling experience. But it's his experience as a recovered addict that seems most valuable to people at Brentwood.

A few years ago he took over the reins from the centre's founder, Father Paul Charbonneau. Russell had big shoes to fill, because for many years the centre was animated by Charbonneau's charismatic zeal to reform addicts. From the outset, Charbonneau tried to create a family atmosphere.

"I felt the minute I walked in here there was something special about this place," Darren Wrightman told me. "I felt like I was meant to be here for a long, long time. There is a lot of struggle involved in recovery, because we've got to look at ourselves. There is a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, but it's totally worth it. Now I want to live, and I want to help people again.

I was a good person at one time. Then a bad person, then a good person, then a bad person. Now I'm back to trying to be on the upswing."

Karl S. was also looking ahead. "I want to be a drug and alcohol addiction counsellor in Walpole and help the young guys," he told me over lunch. "I got young guys smoking rock [cocaine]. I was contributing evil on my res. I realize that drugs, it's a really big epidemic on Walpole right now. So it makes me feel bad because I contributed a lot to it. Now I feel like I should go back to Walpole and try to help out, try to change people's lives, because I got a big influence on Walpole. There's a lot of kids who look up to me."

"When the alcoholic makes this breakthrough," Father Charbonneau told me, "he begins to experience a peace and a freedom, a joy. They experience what a human being really is and what it means to live as a person, and experience all the joys and the strengths of being truly human and allowing others to be human with you."

"When you start hearing them talk about their children, when it's not about 'me' so much anymore, they're on their way," Don Russell added. "That's what I look for. When they bring up the children, instead of me, they're really on their way then. That's good."

Staying sober wasn't easy for Wrightman or Karl S. once they left Brentwood. In the months following his first stay, Wrightman relapsed and tried desperately to be readmitted.

The centre is used to this, but it walks a fine balance between providing help and creating dependency. Clients are encouraged to become independent and seek resources outside Brentwood to remain sober. Wrightman did return for a time, and then moved to Sarnia, where he worked at a call centre.

Today he's sober, back home and working on the reserve.

Karl S. was back on the street for eleven months before he got additional help from the CanAm Indian Friendship Centre in Windsor. He'd been sober ten months when I spoke to him in November 2007. He will soon become a father, is working and plans to go to university in the fall of 2008 for training that will make him an addiction therapist.

Karl believes Brentwood got him started on the right road, but says it was returning to his people's traditions and ceremonies that helped him the most.