PURPOSE OF THE SELF-HELP GROUP

Culturally Specific Self Help Groups

The purpose of the self-help group is to provide a forum in which service users can support and empower each other in their recovery from addiction and related cultural/psychological issues.

They also begin to learn ways to overcome barriers that could prevent them from recovering and from creating a productive and purposeful life.

These barriers may be associated with fear, anger, lack of motivation, hopelessness, low confidence, low self esteem, guilt, anxiety, depression, isolation, lack of social skills, social pressures, internalised racism, oppression, discrimination, feeling excluded, issue’s with cultural identity, spiritual crisis, shame, cultural displacement and family conflicts and relationship problems as well as addressing cross addictions.

This environment encourages a sense of safety, inclusion and trust where service users can share and communicate their experiences at a culturally empathic level.

Cultural empathy and cultural identification can help many service users to re-connect with those cultural aspects many of them would deny, suppress or feel unsafe to talk about with their friends, with their family and in other groups or with staff in mainstream services from non African-Caribbean and South Asian backgrounds.

The key benefits of the self-help groups and BAC-IN programme are as follows:

• Cultural empathy
• Cultural identification
• Sense of belonging
• Being a part of
• Feeling included
• Acceptance
• Being heard
• Being respected as a person and not just seen as a symptom or a problem
• Out of hours community support
• Learn about life skills
• Personal, psychological and spiritual development
• Help with underlying problems
• Consistency of support
• Peer role models to inspire and to motivate
• Community of recovering BME individuals
• Effective alternative to existing recovery programmes
• Options which lead to total abstinence from mind and mood altering drugs
• Enables personal development, socially as well as psychologically
• Enables the personal/social and communication development
• Enable more BME service users to access mainstream support services
• Enable more BME service users to achieve lasting recovery and abstinence
• Enable more women and families to receive the support they need
• Share problems and share solutions