There is a question everyone should ask themselves: “Do I want to shake off my circumstance(s) (Homelessness and Addictions) and have a good chance at a positive “Quality of Life”?

In my case, I have written about five life changing events. Anyone of these life changing events could send an individual into depression, substance abuse and living on the street.

• Emotional trauma: a very difficult divorce after 23 years of marriage.
• Physical trauma: an attack on my life leading to a diagnosis of Situational Anxiety
• Abandonment: Once money and status is gone, some family and many friends separate from your world.
• Market crash – most money gone: The capital market crashed wiping out segments of investments and bring the value of real estate so you can barely sell property.
• Medical trauma: an infection from a spinal operation leading to induced comas, three more operations, and lifelong pain and disability.

For more information about these events and the start of this blog, read, About the Author and His Intent

I have written the 1st book under “Brian Master” which is a pen name for “William Reiley Butler”. I purposely have written about my life experiences because just one of these five events could lead anyone to homelessness and substance abuse. But once substance abuse and its causes are exposed, how do you work your way back to being normal and happy.

The following approaches will provide a start to the answer!

1. Recovery Capital and using the Recovery Capital Scale by William White and William Cloud and managed by Dr. David Best: Simply, just like financial capital, the Capital in Recovery Capital are the assets and resources you use to improve your Quality of Life and Normalcy. By examining one’s self with honest answers to the scale’s 35 statements, you will discover the strengths and weaknesses of your situation. When you discover the activities in your life that are weak, you can create and implement action plans to correct them or improve your “scale score”. This works! See The Capital Recovery Scale Evaluation and Next Steps by William White for more information. I have worked with William White and created “Recovery Capital Scale – Category Assessment. The categories I designed make it easier to zone in on issues/statements the individual need to create action individually or with an advocate.
2. 11 Point Action Plan to Normalcy: By combining as many of the 11 action items you feel capable of handling, you will create a foothold in your life so you can plan and move toward a better Quality of Life. I detailed these in the 11 Action Items to create a Recovery Beach Head post. I found a strong parallel between A-R-E’s Beach Head and Dr. David Best and William White’s Recovery Capital Scale.

CRITICAL ADDICTION QUESTION: How can we motivate a substance user to investigate the two concepts? How can we help someone truthfully understand what White, Cloud, and Dr. David Best are saying, which is, work the Scale, acknowledge critical areas, and plan a path for improvement? 

ANSWER:  I will start by creating simple categories from the questions in the Capital Recovery Scale. The individual will answer the questions on the Recovery Capital Scale (RCS) as truthfully as possible. We then match up the “lowest” and the “highest” numbers to the category KEY QUESTION NUMBERS from the RCS, which are under the category name; we will use a scale of 1 to 5; 3 will be in the lowest column.  The result will be a clear view of the quantity and content of the questions NEEDED TO BE ADDRESS. The individual needs to work on those areas in life which can help him or her.

Provide the User with a High Level View of Critical Personal Areas to Normalcy:

1. High Level View of Critical Personal Areas in The Recovery Capital Scale and Category Assessment: We can create interest by organizing the thirty-five questions into easily understood of the “Categories” that a person on the street deals with everyday. Each category corresponds to the group of statements in the scale relevant to that category. Once the user answers the statement with a 1 to 5 rating, we list the questions in that category as either lowest or highest. If the category has a large number of highly rated questions, it has been or is being positively addressed by the user. Should the category have high number of low rated questions, the category has not been achieved or needs to be addressed by the user. This means that the category needs more action items and planning to improve the probability of a better quality of life and normalcy.

The Categories: The Recovery Capital Scale has been modified by William Reiley Butler and approved by William White. The statements are broken into six categories.

• Occupational – attitudes about challenging work and career
• Physical – your health, wellness, diet, and exercise
• Emotional – management of feeling; recognition of the need for positive relationships, both intimate and family
• Intellectual – you are thinking, problem-solving
• Spiritual – need for spiritual recovery and practice of regular spiritual rituals
• Social – active participation in a recovery community, the community at large, and service projects helping others

The categories help peers realize where more work needs to be done in specific areas of life improvement. It also allows the peer to see that improving one category will assist in increasing the score in another category because the statement is complementary to another statement in another category.

The overall objective of this exercise is to show the overlap of “low scores” in the Capital Scale. A person with homelessness and addiction can then create and implement a plan in order to achieve higher scores in the Recovery Capital Scale – Category Assessment. This will lead to a chance at regaining a better quality of life, that a person with an addiction had thought was lost.

2. The 11 Point Action Plan: 11 Action Items to create a Recovery Beach Head

NO MATTER WHAT, both concepts, must be followed up with an Action Plan/To Do List to improve your score and most importantly TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE. Based on the history of the people I have met in my discussion groups and individually, if the questions and categories are planned and executed to the positive, you will succeed. You will have HOPE!

Brian Masters (pen name for william reiley butler

brianmasters919@gmail.com

william-butler.com