The CARNE Program

There are many modalities and programs of addiction recovery. That proposition is in many ways unfounded and without success. Yet these modalities and programs have not been fully mapped out; their existence and diversity have not been broadly communicated to service professionals in Canada let alone the general population.

The 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is the best known of such recovery frameworks due to its historical longevity, membership size, widespread accessibility, and influence on Canadian models of addiction treatment, as well as to its adaptation to address a long list of other human problems. AA’s dominance as a spiritual framework of recovery has been challenged in recent years by an ever-growing menu of both secular and explicitly religious support groups, all of which differ significantly from AA in their organizational structures, philosophies, meeting rituals, and recovery support tools.

The growing variety of recovery experience in Canada underscores the need for people concerned about alcohol and other drug problems to become serious students of these divergent recovery strategies. More specifically, it suggests the need for addiction treatment programs and allied helping institutions forge formal linkages with these new recovery support groups and for professional helpers to become intimately familiar with the operation of such groups. All recovery support groups have individuals who optimally respond, partially respond, and fail to respond to the group’s particular approach to recovery initiation and maintenance. Optimal responses could be increased through better matches between individuals and particular support groups. This would require greater professional and public knowledge of recovery support alternatives and encouragement of a philosophy of choice related to recovery pathways. Acquiring such knowledge and adopting such a philosophy have been limited in part by the sparseness of professional and lay literature on alternatives to AA. We here at the Canadian Addiction Recovery Network have this program unique for its clients and base its entirety on the basis of Empowering Your Self: The Canadian Addiction Recovery Network Approach to Addiction Recovery.

The outline of this program is one that is designed to take the broken person and to in a sense help them fix themselves and to discover the underlying issues which ail them. The concept is unique and not offered anywhere else in the addictions field. The CARN Empowerment program deals with these issues clearly and forcefully and in ways that help distinguish our program from straight 12-step programs. This program is intended to Empower the individual rather than to convert. Not everyone will at first understand Self Empowerment as a concept of Recovery but for the past several years individuals and families have used CARN programs as an effective framework to initiate and maintain long-term recovery from life-impairing addictions. Those recoveries are cause for celebration, and this program will be the next step up and further ensure a higher percentage of recoveries overall. Those seeking a solution to alcohol and other drug problems and professionals assisting people with such problems will find great value in this program.

In this program, we want to share with you an approach that will save the down in the gutter addict as well as those torn between these two lives. It is an approach that makes use of resources and powers that you already have. It will show you the power for good within yourself, not from an external or supernatural higher power. It suggests ways of connecting with other people that you will quickly be able to do.

It is an approach that will not shame you or blame you, force a label on you, or require you to declare yourself diseased. It is a wholly positive approach that makes use of the most effective psychological methods known for bringing about deep emotional and behavioral change. It can work for you regardless of your religious beliefs or lack of them. You will always be in charge of the changes you make. It will help you recover your life or find a new life of your choosing, before your situation becomes unmanageable.

Its name is The Canadian Addiction Recovery Network Empowerment(CARNE) Program.