Facilitating SMART in Kuala Lumpur
Patrick is an American who calls Malaysia home. An online and face to face SMART Facilitator for over 3 years Patrick recently spent some time reflecting on his relationship with SMART Recovery.
My marriage, as is often the situation in cases of substance abuse, had hit a breaking point and, my wife knew that AA would not resonate with me. I will always be thankful that my wife knew me well enough to know what would suit. After researching services on the internet, she urged me to look at something she found called ‘SMART Recovery’. Being an engineer, I am a logical, science-based guy, so a science-based program seemed a good fit. Although I am religious, I have never felt that it was God’s responsibility to ensure my sobriety. So, the “Internal Locus of Control” of SMART Recovery and a program designed to put the power of recovery in MY hands and give ME the tools required to get the job done clearly resonated.
SMART has helped me to achieve the sobriety goals I needed in my life. But, beyond that, SMART has taught me how to cope better with life’s inevitable ‘ups’ and ‘downs’, which incidentally, used to be my excuses for drinking. These days, I seem to use SMART tools like the ABC tool and the Change Plan Worksheet as much for dealing with life in general as for dealing with urges. For example, if someone cuts me off on the highway, I do a quick ABC and get over the incident in seconds rather than fuming about it and letting it ruin the next 30 minutes of my life.
Whilst I was in residential rehab, I learned the value of community support in recovery. My recovery counsellor STRONGLY advised me to find a support group as previously I had (unsuccessfully) attempted recovery all on my own. When I discovered that there really was no SMART Recovery in Malaysia, I just decided to start it. So, together with two other colleagues, we all became facilitators and SMART Malaysia was born.
Malaysia is a multi-racial country, so when we talk about the concept of a ‘higher power’, that means vastly different things to different ethnic communities. That was a main driver behind my wanting to bring the SMART Program to Malaysia; it removes the issue of ‘higher power’.
A great deal of stigma still exists in Malaysia, and throughout Asia, around the concept of substance abuse. Some cultures view it as a violation of their religious principals while others frown upon it as a moral failing. It is also widely viewed as bringing ‘shame’ to the family. It often takes great courage for participants to attend a meeting and we need to exercise great care in appreciating how fragile they might be about doing so. This is where SMART’s policy on anonymity pays dividends. Participants draw comfort when I tell them that we will never ask them their name, or their SOC (substance of choice) and that they even have the option NOT to participate in the meeting, but just to listen.
I will never forget my first meeting. As a newly minted facilitator hosting the first public SMART meeting in Malaysia, I reached the venue filled with equal measures of excitement and abject terror! Only to find that, in the end, no one turned up. So, I did a whole meeting – speaking out loud – just for myself. I read the opening statement, I did my own check-in, I did a tool based on an event that had happened to me that day, I did a check-out, closed the meeting, threw a fiver in the jar and locked the door. The building security guard shot me an odd look as I was leaving, but I enjoyed it!
Being a SMART Recovery Facilitator is an extremely rewarding experience and it does a great deal to support my own recovery. When you can get the group ‘engaged’ so that everyone participates in working a tool and you eventually see the ‘proverbial penny drop’ on so many faces when you reach the end of the exercise, THAT makes the volunteering worth all of the effort and sacrifice. But best of all, in my time as a facilitator I have learned so much from my meeting participants. It is a two-way street and I often leave my own meetings feeling enriched.
Building rapport and conveying empathy is much easier in the face-to-face environment. Plus, it is much easier to ‘read the room’ and tell whether participants are following the discussion or have lost interest. This allows the facilitator to ‘change on the fly’ and easily take the meeting in a different direction. The online environment presents a greater challenge because many of these cues get lost. Plus, participants drop into and out of the meeting at odd times. People leave the online meetings because they have other things they need to do; perhaps their baby might be crying in the next room or they joined the meeting via handphone whilst commuting and then reached the office to start their day at work. This does not happen in the face-to-face environment. I took this personally at first and it took me awhile to accept (thanks to a quick ABC), that they WEREN’T leaving because they did not like my meeting.
It is so easy to align with the SMART program as a volunteer. The training is thorough and professional, the community is so tremendously supportive, and the outcomes are so powerful. SMART empowers you to help yourself, but, through volunteering, it also gives you a chance to touch other people’s lives, both inside and outside of recovery. It has helped me to grow in so many areas outside of recovery. I view SMART as a life kit…tools to help me live a more balanced life.