5 things I learned as the manager of an adolescent drug rehabilitation centre...
I’ve always wanted to work with young people. Ever since I was a young person myself. I still can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it was the stigma surrounding mental health which permeated the 90s and early 2000s, maybe it was my loved ones’ lived experience, maybe I wanted to go back and help my younger self… Probably all of the above.
After studying at university for 6 long years, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to finally dive into the counselling world. However, I soon learned that I would have to start at square one.
Let me explain… I’d done a fantastic counselling placement at the end of my degree at a youth alcohol and drug rehabilitation service, which was run by a non-for-profit, and they were hiring youth workers. So, I jumped at the opportunity - after all - it would be a good way to dip my toe in!
Long story short, I would end up not only becoming a counsellor there for a few years but would keep on climbing the ladder to eventually become the manager. This only lasted a year before I called it quits (but that’s a whole other newsletter article for a different time).
To write what is probably a gross understatement, being the manager of a youth drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre had its challenges; from managing the staff, to managing the young people, to budget constraints, to angry parents (and angry teenagers), to being on-call 24/7. It’s like being a regular manager… but on steroids (pardon the pun).
So, with all of that said, here’s 5 things I learned whilst being the manager of a youth alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre…
Young people (and people in general) need consistency, boundaries, predictability, structure, rules and routine.
Some of you may be reading this and thinking - ‘obviously mate’ - but if I had heard someone say this to me as a teenager or even a young adult, they would have witnessed the largest eye-roll known to man. One word comes to mind - B O R I N G - And that’s the point.
The Young People who walked through our doors, many of whom had none of the above, thrived the most when all of us staff (including me as the manager) were consistent and predictable. This meant; keeping the routine strict, having the young people choose ‘consequences’ (our behaviour management system) when they didn’t follow said routine, explaining the reasoning for our decisions, keeping to a strict time schedule, ensuring the house was clean at all times, helping young people with their chores, upholding the rules consistently, and apologising (yes, I said apologising) when we didn’t.
But how did this help the Young People with their drug addictions? (you may be thinking). As I mentioned before, many of the amazing young people we worked with came from lives of chaos and disarray. Oftentimes, there were no adults to tell them the difference between right and wrong, no adults to tell them to clean their rooms or get to school on time. And if there was an adult, they were inconsistent and confusing (due to their own traumas). This, in turn, created internal chaos for a young person growing up in a world which can be scary, and daunting.
There was a mantra that we all used to say to ourselves - ‘consistency equals safety’, and that’s exactly it. When growing up, humans need to feel that the people caring for us are keeping us safe, and when there are mixed messages and no rules or boundaries, we feel unsafe. As adults, we have our own sense of autonomy, morality, and boundaries - all modelled to us by our caregivers. So when they’re not modelled, we have no frame of reference, and nothing catch us when we fall/deviate.
Of course, I was working with some of the most ‘misbehaved’ kids in the state. After all, the service took many of their referrals from youth detention centres ie. jail. This may seem extreme. However, I think this theory is applicable to all young people and kids growing up. This is part of the theory behind educational institutions. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that schools cater for all learning abilities or that the curriculum (the Australian one anyway) doesn’t have much to be desired, or even that it caters to our First Nations kids (I’m also a trained primary school teacher, go figure). However, what I am saying, is that the structure, routine and rules of school are there for a reason - because they work in giving young people a sense of predictability and in turn, security.
Living skills need to be taught from a young age
You will be absolutely amazed by the amount of adults who have not been taught basic living skills. I know, because I was one of them (sort of). Now, disclaimer here, I do not have lived experience in addiction and this is not a dig at my parents. I think they tried their hardest and I very wilfully ignored them.
I’m ashamed to admit that when I left home at the ripe old age of 25, I did not know how to cook (I still can’t but I’m trying?), budget, pay rent (Bpay anyone?!) I used ‘bulk billing’ but had no idea what it even meant, or how to do my tax return. And you know what, I’m sure there are a few millennials out there that could have probably said the same.
Learning living skills was absolutely essential to the young people’s recovery. In fact - the actual program was referred to as a ‘living skills’ program rather than a rehabilitation program. This empowered our young people to have the confidence to take on ‘life’ and not go back to their previous unhealthy habits. It’s the old ‘teach a man to fish’ cliche that really rings true here.
In generalising this to the rest of the young ‘non-drug addicted’ population, there is no doubt that if young people have the skills and confidence to cook a basic meal, pay a bill, write a resume, and work a washing machine, that they are more likely to thrive. You won’t be surprised to note that the research backs this up. In a study by Sherif, Zaid, Azman, Awang, Mokhtar, Mohammadzadeh, and Alimuddin on the effectiveness of life skills intervention on depression, anxiety and stress among children and adolescents, it was noted that in almost all ‘studies, the life skills intervention positively impacted mental disorders, considering the differences among males and females’.
So, the question here is - who’s responsibility is this? parents, schools?! - Again, a newsletter article for another time.
Having personal and professional boundaries is WAY more important than I realised…
Especially when working with young people who don’t have great boundaries of their own. But also, as the manager of a service that operated 24/7, sometimes I was called on outside of work hours for various reasons. Make no mistake here, that’s all part of what I signed up for. But I never imagined how much it would cause me to question my own boundaries, and how that also extended into my personal life.
When I first started working at the rehab in 2015, I considered myself a ‘people'-pleaser’ (although I’m not sure I had the language to identify that back then). So I had to learn how to set healthy boundaries with the young people, and I needed to learn fast! That meant, being consistent with the rules, not divulging too much about my personal life (I’m actually quite a private person anyway so that came more naturally to me), and saying ‘no’ a lot. These were skills that were easily transferred when I became a manager, as I now had staff I had to set boundaries with, as well as, my own managers. This looked like, resisting the urge to jump in and solve every issue that arose with the young people, coming in and leaving work at a reasonable time each day (unless there was a crisis or urgent issue), not coming in on weekends (again, unless there was an emergency), prioritising. The list could go on - but by far, the most difficult lesson I had to learn was being ok with people not liking my boundaries, or every decision I made. This was hard. Because, as a manager, I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to think I was doing a good job, that I was a great manager, that I was competent. I now know that trying to control people’s perception of you is exhausting and usually never works.
To some extent, I will always have that ‘people pleasing’ part of me, but learning to put in healthy boundaries professionally and by extension, personally, has been an absolute game-changer for me.
Photo by Jarritos Mexican Soda on Unsplash Drug and Alcohol addiction is not a choice
So, surprise, no one actively wakes up and says ‘today I’m going to become a drug addict’. People are honestly out there thinking that drug users must have some sort of moral failing or even worse, are bad people.
Drug use is demonised so much in our society and is viewed as ‘bad’, and as a result, many people deduce that everyone who is addicted to substances must be a terrible person. It’s strange because that logic doesn’t really apply to Henry the Hedge fund manager who has a few cheeky lines every evening before he leaves work. Now, I’m clearly being a little bit facetious here, and that’s because drug use is seen as a class issue and a moral issue, rather than a mental health issue and a generational trauma issue.
It’s true that many of the young people who came through our doors were classed as low socio-economic. However, we definitely had our fare share of young people who came from upper class backgrounds, and considering that we were (basically) a free service, it really makes you wonder how full the privatised rehabilitation centres are (hint: very).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who has experienced trauma or has a mental health issue is automatically addicted to drugs. We know this. We also know that everyone copes differently depending on their circumstances. We know that people raised in that same families with the same trauma can learn to cope differently, and this is because no human being experiences life exactly the same way. All of this to say that when terrible things happen to people, they cope in unhealthy ways - and drug use is one of them.
Coming from a place of ‘authority’ doesn’t work with young people
Working at the rehabilitation centre for so long, I learned that the ‘because I said so’ approach doesn’t work. As staff, we explained every single decision we made to the young people in our care. Why? Because they deserved an explanation. This doesn’t mean we argued with them or changed our minds - we still held the boundary. And the young people didn’t have to like our explanation either. We gave them explanations because we were making decisions that directly affected them. Alike when you yell at a toddler not to do something, and they look you in the face, and do it anyway - being punitive or authoritarian doesn’t deter young people, in fact, only makes them want to act out more.
This is because, young people are programmed to question things, to challenge authority, to experiment, to try new things - they are trying new personalities on, learning to navigate and make sense of the world, of their world. When a young person ‘misbehaved’, we didn’t yell or punish, or isolate them. Instead, we asked them to choose a consequence/s for that behaviour (usually one that matched the behaviour) eg. If a young person swore at someone else, they could choose to apologise and write a letter explaining why they swore and the emotion behind it, as well as, identify the need that they were trying to get met. This may sound ‘airy fairy’, ‘too gentle’ or even ‘woo woo’ but I learned that if it worked with some of the most ‘misbehaved’ young people in the state, it can work with anyone.
Well there we have it. The 5 things I learned as a manager of an adolescent rehab. I probably should have called this article the ‘TOP’ 5 things I learned being a manager of a rehab, because there was so much more that I learned and gained from managing and working in that space. It opened up my eyes in ways I never thought were possible and gave me so many skills that I still use and carry with me today.
I’ll end this by saying though, that the number one thing that lives rent-free in my mind, is the incredible young people and their resilience. These young people have so much to teach us, if we’d just let them.
