“Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?”
~James 2:5~

Group today I thought went well. I like it most with more people around the room. One of the women who’d been there last semester is back. She’s had several multiple relapses and recently was back in an inpatient program. But now she is back here. I like her because she is very intelligent and has rich things to say when she shares with the group. That’s not exactly why I like her, but that is something about her that I like.

The thing that gets me is how normal these people are. With addictions I’d tend to think of those junkies on the street, homeless and congregating near whatever building was offering the next free meal. They don’t have teeth and their clothes are old and worn. They’re malnourished and often part of a minority population. Everyone who comes to group here is white. Some own businesses. Most of them are currently not working.

Because they’ve taken or been forced into some kind of leave or disability in order to focus on finding sobriety. The person who was the only one there last Friday was not there and did not end up showing up to the weekend conference. After that intense and grueling 1 on 1 group session that Jane and I watched, I thought maybe there was a 65% chance of him showing up, but I was definitely hopeful. I couldn’t believe he didn’t go.

He’d wanted to shut down group a few years. It wasn’t worth it, he could make way more money seeing individual clients. But someone told him that day he needed to read the obituaries. One of the people who’d been in and out of group had died. The alcoholism destroyed his body and killed him. In lieu of flowers, the family said this person before he died wanted memorial memorial money sent to the Thrive Center.

So then he said, okay, no matter what, we’re having group. Jane wasn’t there so it was just me and Kyle when he said that just so we know, for whatever reason, he’d been off in group today. He wasn’t attuned, he didn’t know where to go with it. Gabor Mate’ calls this the compassion of recognition. It’s where you are able to look at the person in front of you, next to you, and all those around you and understand we are not any different.