Yesterday I got to meet a great group of people at the first Introduction to Recovery training that Recovery Connections has ever sponsored and the first one I've ever helped facilitate.  Diana Fullem was my co-facilitator which was awesome.  Diana and I work really well together and that made my freshman run at this training that much easier.  I would say I had a ton of fun, but there is some really heavy material being presented so a more appropriate way to put it is to say it was a very moving experience with some fun moments.  I'm really looking forward to conducting Part 2 next Wednesday.

With that being said, one of the most inspiring moments for me came at the beginning of the training where we ask the participants to write on a name tag a hurtful thing they had been labeled as in the past and then introduce themselves as that label.  The very first time I did this exercise I was a participant and didn't really get much out of it, but that was because most of the group choose not to dig deep into the really painful parts of our past choosing instead to use the safer insults like stupid, dork or nerd.  Not that these terms aren't hurtful, but yesterday I really emphasized for the group to go deeper than that and with almost no exception they delivered.  They dug into their painful pasts and shared labels such as "Hi, I'm Moose", "Hi, Im Useless", and "Hi, I'm a Failure."  We do this exercise to demonstrate how harmful and hurtful stigmatizing someone with a negative label can be and how this stigma continues today toward individuals with a mental illness.  Immediately following this we do two different activities that focus on our inidividual strengths.  The shift in energy in the room was astonishing when we switched from negative labels to our strengths.  It was the perfect demonstration of the difference between the traditonal approach to treating mental illness which focusses on what the individual is not capable of and the recovery approach which foccuses on the whole person and what their individual strengths are.  It set the tone for the rest of the day and was only possible because each of the participants committed fully to participating.  For that I thank them.