Beacon of Hope
In the 1980’s the LCCS founders were deeply troubled by the demoralizing rate of relapse being suffered by substance addicted adolescents and their families. They were alarmed by the widespread apathy among treatment providers. The addiction treatment industry was failing the adolescents in much the same way that it had shortchanged their chronic alcoholic counterparts for generations before and they were using the same explanation … they just are not motivated enough. Unfortunately, the treatment field had come to tolerate such failure with homeless 60 year olds who were drinking themselves to death, but these were kids and something had to be done.
The Leadem’s treatment model sought to offer adolescents and their families the tools they would need to get off the relapse merry-go-round and maintain sustained sobriety. The residential treatment model they developed was very different than the “professional” wisdom of the time. Most treatment providers promoted the need to accept that adolescents would most likely relapse and that their loved ones needed to consider relapse as an integral aspect of the recovery process for young addicts. The model asked much of the adolescents and their families. What they received in return was a course in treatment that began designing relapse prevention plans before admission and strategies for intervening on individual relapse profiles well before discharge. The children and their parents left with hope in the recovery process that could intervene on a relapse before they returned to drugs and very positive treatment outcomes were becoming the new normal.
The model was later organized into a course for relapse prevention when the team at LCCS began working with the daunting relapse rates in folks suffering with sex addiction that were largely blamed on a lack of motivation on the part of the addict. If you have worked with addicts, then you know they don’t lack motivation when pursuing their drug of choice, so there had to be another answer. The Beacon of Hope pillar was designed to provide hope and direction rather than merely consoling the family over their loses and blaming the victim for not taking things seriously.
The Beacon of Hope has emerged as a celebration of the success our adolescent clients taught us was possible. The links below will introduce you to products and services we have developed to support addicts and their families avoid or quickly recover from relapse in both substance and process addictions. Resources for treatment professionals share the same pillar because it is our hope that treatment providers and their client systems will become full partners in the recovery process.