I’ve been having Zoom conversations with James Deakin quite a bit over the past months about his life and the development of North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) in Bangor. These conversations are giving me material for the book on recovery and recovery communities that I am writing. I am really enjoying these conversations with James. It just amazes me what he and his colleagues have achieved over the years, sometimes in the face of considerable adversity.
Here is a part of our second interview which was specifically for the Recovery Voices website.
James emphasises that it’s tough at Penrhyn House. He points out that the more intelligent or intellectual a person is, the harder is the process of recovery. People who are very intelligent often think that the problem (addiction) is so complex, invading so many parts of their lives, that the solution must be complex. They often turn out to be chronic relapsers. James says that the solution is not complex.
When James first started, members of North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) used to refer to themselves as a family. That statement used to give him ‘the horrors’, as he started to think of the ‘boundaries’ issue. When he talked to Wulf Livingston about the matter, he was told to stop being an a…….. ‘These guys, for some of them, it is the first family that they’ve ever connected with, or ever felt part of. Who are you to tell them that they’re not, or that we’re not a family?’ Wulf told James he needed to embrace the idea of the family, because the more members felt part of a family, the more they would own it and protect it.
James makes the point that early on he and his colleagues had a very clear idea of what NWRC would be like. However, the community members have shaped it into something very different. It’s this that has made NWRC work so well. The community keeps changing and developing without it needing to be be nailed into some really tight box. That’s one of the beauties of recovery, James emphasises.