The Skills Story
ACT Peer Recovery (ACT-PR) has been developed over the last 25 years, and was included on UK national policy in 2017 by Public Health England (PHE) as a recognised form of mutual aid alongside the 12 Step fellowships. Subsequent to Covid the format has been upgraded to focus on recovery skills development, with successful results.
The skills story is based on the idea that becoming addicted to a substance is not just a physical dependency but could be seen as a set of skills in that could be likened to a career. Thus if you had been working in IT for a long time then your skills repertoire would be suited for IT, but maybe not for landscape gardening. It would be completely reasonable to think that you would need to retrain to become a landscape gardener and that this would take time. So it is useful to think of recovery in this way as indeed it is necessary to acquire a new skillset that will be up to the challenges of a difficult task.
First Things First
Functionally Informed Recovery Skills Training (FIRST) speaks to a set of skills derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is the ACT part of the organisation's name. The ACT therapy principles have been distilled into a structured course that develops through levels with each layer building on the previous. It is like learning to sail a boat rather than passing a test, and involves practice.
These skills have been identified over the last 25 years through work with thousands of recovering people within the ACT-PR meetings, and the course is delivered over 8 week by qualified peers who are in recovery themselves through using these skills. These are the foundational skills for building a solid recovery and crossing back to normal living.
